Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to speak to this important subject this morning and to put a few thoughts on the record.
I spent a lot of time in the last Parliament working on this agenda, travelling the country, listening to parents, communities and advocates and hearing their very sincere requests for a national child care program.
I have to say at the outset that I am very concerned about the agenda of the government. I became even more concerned on Tuesday when I looked up in the gallery and saw Mr. Harris, the former premier of Ontario, listening to the budget being read. It was a bit of déjà vu all over again.
I was in Queen's Park in 1995 when the provincial Conservatives delivered their first budget and I must say that the damage is still reverberating in that province. It was the beginning of the dismantling and the consequent difficulties in our public education system, our post-secondary education system, our health care system and the list goes on. When all of these very valuable programs were put into place and substantial public money invested, they were challenged in the same way as the Conservatives and their supporters attack a new national child care program today.
However, I do want to address the inadequacy of the Liberal effort. The Liberals had over 13 years to build, thoughtfully and confidently, the best early learning and child care program in the world and to fund it generously with the surpluses they had generated year over year. Instead, they waited until the last hour, pushed by New Democrats in a minority government, to introduce a very half-hearted, lukewarm effort that was easy for the Conservative government to walk away from.
I tried and my caucus tried to get the Liberals to take some leadership with the provinces, in an accountable, transparent, full court press, and enshrine a national child care program in legislation, rooted in the principles put forward by communities, advocates and parents, a program based on quality, universality, accessibility, developmental and available to people challenged with disabilities, and a program delivered through a not for profit network across the country.
I met with the previous minister on many occasions and spoke to him precisely about this and asked him to consider our contribution. I think he was very sincere in listening to me and trying to factor that in but, alas, it seems there were forces afoot in the Liberal government of that day that would not allow him to go the distance. If it had been adequately funded, this would have provided real choice to families everywhere, in cities, towns, rural, northern and remote Canada.
I travelled the country last year meeting with and listening to parents, communities, advocates and experts. The experts we listened to were parents who had become frustrated with the lack of opportunity and choice for them in terms of child care and became active and involved. Some of them became involved in child care for their own children and now are grandparents fighting for child care for their grandchildren. They spoke overwhelmingly in support of a national child care program. They did not say that parents were not the primary care givers and ultimately responsible, or that parents were not good teachers and nurturers, but that many parents wanted more and needed help because of the changing nature of our society and our economy. Two parents working with no extended family close by and not sure who their neighbours were wanted assurances of quality, safety, consistency and learning.
People know the value of early learning, people like Charles Coffey, David Dodge and others from the financial world who speak about this. They talk about the value of early learning in later life as children become adults and participate in the economy and the way that they can contribute if they get that early start. They know the nature of work and that the workplace is changing, which calls for creativity and flexibility.
I was in Saskatchewan where I heard from farm families who asked me to make sure that they were not left out. Farming can often be dangerous. With both parents working, oftentimes off the farm, they want a safe, secure place to have their children nurtured and involved in early learning activities.
The offer in the budget by the government is totally inadequate. To emphasize and expand on the remarks by one parent of the argument made, “This will not provide more choice. It will reduce the potential in fact for greater choice”. Look at the response of a couple of families in my town of Sault Ste. Marie after the budget came out the other day.
One mother said, “I am a mother of three. I have a three year old, a two year old and a newborn baby of nine weeks. I am currently in subsidized housing and on maternity leave from my job. My husband has made the choice to stay home and raise our family. I am what you call a typical low income family here in Sault Ste. Marie. This is all well and good to say, but Mr. Harper is not helping low income Canadian families with his $1,200 per year per child subsidy. Even if I wanted a tax break, even if I wanted to put my children into day care, I could not afford it, because unsubsidized day care costs on the average $25 a day or more and only if the space is available”.
Here is another situation, and I dare say all members have the same situation in their ridings of people who have children but they are over six years of age. This is from a family in my community, “As you know, the province is using the last year of federal funding to fund the next four years and therefore, the cost per space has decreased significantly”. This is from a person working in child care, “In Sault Ste. Marie this is having a negative over all aspects of child care, including the elimination of summer programming for school age children”.
A woman with two kids over six wrote to say that she gets no allowance from the government and now hears that the programs for the summer have been scrapped because of the funding cuts. She does not know what she will do.
People in other communities are saying the same thing. A woman in Sudbury said, “It will take a lot more than a 1% reduction in the GST or a $100 a month child care allowance to endear greater Sudbury voters to the fiscal agenda of the Stephen Harper government”.
“A hundred dollars a month does not even come close to paying for a month of child care”, said Chris Kattle, a father of three children, “Creating more spaces is a better way to go. The way things are now, we have to give up our spaces every June and find new ones in September. There is no continuity or consistency for our girls”.
In the April 12, 2006 issue of The London Free Press, a letter to the editor stated:
While the Liberal program, like most of their promises, was too little, too late and too long between promise and delivery, it did move the affordable day-care challenge forward. The Tory program shuts down those gains and turns back the clock.
Their proposal, while allowing people to keep a bit more money in their own hands (the rich more so than others), does nothing to create the spaces needed, to ensure the spaces are licensed and to make them more affordable.
The City of London's research supports the position put forward by NDP MP Irene Mathyssen that more people can benefit from the same dollars by expanding the current program rather than shutting it down. Stephen Harper's Tories ignored ideology to appoint--
