The GREEN PARTY PLATFORM

The Green Party of Canada is committed to nurturing families and communities through integrated policies that focus on the welfare of the child, starting with prenatal nutrition all the way to affordable housing and accessible post secondary education.

We believe we must stop designing our communities around the car and start designing them around families and children. There are no easy solutions. We have to address the multi-layered problems facing families through new, innovative fiscal, labour and social policies.

We support:

• a real national childcare plan
• income-splitting for families
• a Charter right to clean air and water
• support for family farms
• flex hours for working parents

Strong communities start with

• Help for married couples and families.
  • Fix the tax system. Lower income taxes and introduce full income splitting to reduce the tax burden on married couples and families.
  • Share the load. More people working fewer hours. For those who want to, make it easier to telecommute or work from home. Share jobs. Flex hours. Flexible child care with access for all. Early childhood education. More workplace child care spaces. Support for those who stay home to raise their children and support for those who need to get back to work while their kids are still young.

http://greenparty.ca/platform2011/community

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The LIBERAL PLATFORM – “Your  Family. Your Future. Your Canada.”
Page 25 and 26

“Early Childhood Learning and Care

Every child in Canada deserves the best possible start in life and a comprehensive approach to learning in Canada must begin with Early Childhood Learning.

We’ve already seen leadership from some provinces, particularly Quebec. But due to the lack of federal leadership, Canada receives failing grades from international bodies, including the OECD and UNICEF, for having no coordinated, national early childhood learning and care policy.

Working parents, amid all their other pressures, often struggle with waiting lists for the limited number of existing spaces. That wait can often last years.

A Liberal government will establish a new Early Childhood Learning and Care Fund that will begin with $500 million in the first year, rising to an annual commitment of $1 billion by the fourth year.

Administered as a new social infrastructure fund, provinces and territories will be able to apply to the Fund for cost-sharing of early childhood learning and care plans that create and operate new, affordable, high-quality early childhood learning and care spaces across Canada, with well-trained professional staff.

The long-term goal is a high-quality, affordable early childhood learning and care space for every Canadian family that wants one. But the federal government cannot do this on its own. It will require sustained collaboration among all governments. As implementation of the Fund ramps up joint investment, a Liberal government will also work with other governments on the research, policy development, and sharing of best practices for the system necessary to meet this long-term goal. This plan will support innovation and different approaches at the provincial and community level.

A Liberal government will place Canada on a path of step-by-step, year-by-year progress in improving access to inclusive early childhood learning and care. The result will be higher quality care for Canadian families, less waiting for spaces, and a country with a renewed commitment to the learning and development of our youngest citizens.”

CODE BLUE response to the Liberal election plan for early childhood learning and care

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The NDP Platform – Giving Your Family a Break: Practical First Steps.

1.3 Improving Access to Child Care and Post-Secondary Education

We will work with the provinces and territories to establish and fund a Canada-wide child care and early learning program, enshrined in law, with the following goals:

• The creation of 25,000 new child care spaces per year for the next four years;
• Improvements to community infrastructure to support the growth of child care spaces;
• The creation of integrated, community-based, child-centred early learning and education centres that provide parents with a “one-stop shop” for family services.

We will make post-secondary education more affordable by directly attacking skyrocketing tuition costs with a designated $800 million transfer to the provinces and territories to lower tuition fees, as per the NDP’s Post Secondary Education Act;

We will increase the funding in the Canada Student Grants Program by $200 million a year, targeting accessibility for Aboriginal, disabled and low-income students, in particular;

We will raise the education tax credit from $4,800 per year to $5,760 per year to help with increasing education costs.

1.8 Helping Lift Children and Families out of Poverty

As a practical first step to eliminate child poverty, we will combine existing supports like the Child Tax Benefit to create a non-taxable Child Benefit and increase the support steadily by up to $700 per child over the next four years. This will be in addition to the current Universal Child Care Benefit;

We will table legislation that will set goals and targets for poverty reduction in consultation with the provincial, territorial, municipal and Aboriginal governments and with non-governmental organizations.

We need a child-care plan that covers the real costs
canada.com
April 15, 2011
By Kelly Connor, City Mom, a blog that follows her adventures raising a daughter in the heart of downtown London, Ont.

Pregnancy should be a blissful time when a mamma-to-be should be resting, eating right and picking out baby names. Not a time for worry and stress. But almost immediately after the good news is shared, it’s on to reserving a spot on your daycare-of-choice waiting list.

Even though this unknown child will not actually attend the chosen centre for another year and nine months, it’s the first thing expectant parents are worrying about, next to a healthy pregnancy.

To what do we owe this worry and need? Is it a lack of daycare space, a deficit of funds, a shortage of professional caregivers, or all the above?

Canada is one of only a few developed nations without a national child-care plan. There is a $100-a-child monthly Universal Child Care Benefit that was put in place to offset the Tories’ elimination of the Liberals’ short-lived $5-billion child-care funding program. However, the problem with this benefit is that it’s taxable and doesn’t come close to covering the real monthly costs of child care.

With more and more women entering the workforce, quality child-care spaces are more important than ever. Only an estimated 20 per cent of children under the age of 6 have access to licensed child-care services, which leaves a whopping 80 per cent without care.

With parents in a frenzy to find stable child-care, unlicensed home daycares are becoming more popular. Unlicensed means unregulated, and studies show that these types of informal child-care options often don’t meet children’s developmental needs, and some even say they can be harmful…

Can we count on our government to protect our children? They are the future of our society and our most valuable resource.

Read online

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Debt by 1,000 tax cuts: An election special
Rabble
By Ellen Russell, research associate with the Canadian Centre of Policy Alternatives
April 15, 2011

Stephen Harper knows he can’t come right out and reveal his radical agenda to downsize government. But if he gets his majority, expect Harper to slash and burn on the pretext that the federal debt and deficit requires massive evisceration of government.

Since he welcomes a future fiscal squeeze to justify his small-government agenda ….

Harper is accelerating Canada’s federal debt with his tax-cut vote buying. And that is just fine with him. It will give him all the more reason to cut deeply later. We are going to pay very dearly for these tax cuts if a majority Conservative government guts popular programs on the pretence of a sudden post-election alarm about the federal finances.

Read online

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The Appearance Of Choice: Income splitting just a tax break for high income earners, covered by a crafty political ploy
News & Views
April 7, 2011
By Angela Brunschot

Let’s play alternative history… when Tommy Douglas was fighting to bring in national health care, he buckled under the pressure and instead decided to offer Canadian families a lump sum each month as well as a tax deduction to pay for health care.

Where would that leave you and your family in the present day? Well, if you are in the upper echelons of Canadian income earners, you might be OK. In that case, you’d be taxed enough to get some money back and make enough to save ahead for medical emergencies.

For the vast majority of us on the other side though, our quality of life and overall health would suffer. …

The rhetoric of choice, the idea that one parent should have the option of staying home rather than paying into a national child-care system is deceptively attractive, says Armine Yalnizyan, an economist with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives….

If Harper really wanted to help “working families” who wanted to have one parent at home, then he would also be talking about living wages. Only when a family can truly live on one wage will parents have a real choice about child care….

So let’s play alternative history again. What if the Conservatives put the money from income splitting, which cost about $2.2 billion in 2007 when it was first studied, into  subsidized child care instead? Where would that leave you and your family?….

But for the vast majority of parents who do work, a child care system, with the government monitoring and increased capacity that entails, that would make a huge difference in the everyday lives of parents and children…..

Those are the benefits of a social program rather than a tax cut. Let’s hope Canadians can see that come May 2.

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The foundation is finally ready to build national child care
Ottawa Citizen
April 7, 2011
By Elizabeth Payne

… Do governments have a role to play in supporting good quality child care? If you believe governments have a role in providing anything beside police, prisons, defence, roads and clean water -and I do -then child care should be high on the list. Without a coherent child care system, families whose children have the greatest need of high quality early childhood education and care are the least likely to get it. Enrichment in the early years, according to experts, is what separates those children who will go on to lead productive lives from those who will struggle. It is good for individuals and good for the economy….

It is time Canadian politics turned the page on this false choice: Canadian parents do not choose whether to work or to raise their children. The vast majority of them do both and would like some help making sure their children can get high quality child care while they are on the job.

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We need a Canada that works for all generations: Investing an additional $22 billion in the standard of living of Canadians is fiscally smart when the payback is huge
Vancouver Sun
April 5, 2011
By Paul Kershaw

There is a silent generational crisis occurring in homes across the country, one we neglect because Canadians are stuck in stale political debates.

The crisis is clear when we consider a simple “Then and Now” story. Picture it: the mid-1970s in Canada. Boomers were moving beyond their sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll phase to start the more serious business of building families, communities and enterprises. The average household income for a young couple in their prime child-rearing years back then was $65,160 a year, after adjusting for inflation and expressing it in current dollars. In the mid-70s, just 54 per cent of young women contributed to household income.

Flash forward to the present, where the corresponding figure is 82 per cent of women, while young men’s employment rate has remained stable. Despite all this extra adult time in the labour market, the average annual household income for a young couple today is $68,300, just slightly higher than it was 35 years earlier.

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Poverty, child care should top political agenda
By Christopher Smith, assistant executive director and Jeff Bisanz, director of the Muttart Foundation, a private charitable foundation in Edmonton whose interests include a focus on early childhood education and care.
Edmonton Journal
March 30, 2011

… As we head to the polls for the fourth time in seven years there are important matters to consider and critical questions to ask of our politicians. At the top of the agenda should be two issues the major political parties have all failed to address despite much rhetoric and promised action: first, the continued tragedy of child and family poverty; and second, the failure to introduce a national child-care strategy….

Child and family poverty has a high price that we all pay. Children who grow up in low income families tend to do worse in school, earn lower incomes as adults and require higher levels of social, health and justice services. The evidence is clear. Child and family poverty hurts us all.

Almost as disconcerting as our collective national failure to address child and family poverty is our persistent fumbling with respect to a national strategy for early childhood education and care. For more than a quarter of a century politicians have made promises on a national child care strategy. Brian Mulroney’s Conservative government first introduced such a notion in the mid-1980s, followed by subsequent Liberal promises and belated actions in the 1990s and early 2000s. In 2006, the minority Conservative government finally pulled the plug on a national child-care strategy when it cancelled the bilateral agreements with the provinces to support early learning and care.

Given that the vast majority of young children now spend much of their early years in some form of non-parental care, the absence of national leadership in this area remains mystifying. While almost all of the other developed nations have national funding and delivery strategies in place, Canada, outside of Quebec, remains in an early learning and care limbo. International studies from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and UNICEF reveal Canada’s shameful position at close to the bottom of early childhood education and care rankings with other nations leaving us trailing in their wakes. There are regulated child-care spaces for only one in five children under five, and licensed child care remains unaffordable for many middle-and low-income families….