Harper's Conservatives got national child care all wrong
The Daily News (Kamloops)
05 Sep 2006
Opinion -- By: David Charbonneau, owner of Trio Technical.

The Conservative's child-care plan is a failure. It fails to deliver child care and it fails to deliver maximum benefits to families who need it most: the working poor.

Canadians reasonably expect that if program is called a Universal Child Care Plan that it would be a plan to care for children. But the federal Conservative's plan isn't.

Here's their plan: give money to parents with kids under the age of six.

Perhaps Conservatives don't understand the concept. A child care plan would nurture children and develop their intellectual growth and social skills. Their plan does none of that.

It's more of a child rebate program than a child care plan. A rebate plan works by mailing in a coupon that you received with the purchase of an article and receiving a cheque in the mail.

Under the Conservative child rebate plan, you notify the government that you have children under the age of six years and you receive a $100 cheque in the mail every month.

The Conservatives have spent hundreds of thousands of government money on newspaper ads that try to convince us otherwise. The ads say that "Canada's Universal Child Care Plan," creates "Choice, support, spaces." Pictures of cute kids suggest that it's a child care plan.

The plan has nothing to do with child care and everything to do with giving more money to families, something most Canadians support.

With Canada's birth rate below the level required to sustain economic growth and meet industry's need for workers, families need all the help that they can get in raising children.

The child rebate plan would be a good idea if it didn't already exist but we already have one. It's called the Canada Child Tax Benefit. I'll call it the baby bonus for simplicity. In fact, if you are eligible for the baby bonus you are eligible for the child rebate.

Low income working families need help the most but under the Conservative plan, they receive the least. First, they no longer get $249 annually that they received under the former plan. Then, they have to pay taxes on the child rebate.

For example, a working poor family in Ontario ends up with a net $64 per month. On the other hand, a rich family will get $81 according to the Caledon Institute.

So why not simply increase the baby bonus by $100 a month? The baby bonus is untaxed and therefore more money stays in the pockets of families. What's more, low income families would receive the former amount of $249 annually.

The simple reason is politics. In the last election, the Liberal's Day Care Plan was very popular with urban Canadians. In an attempt to win city votes, the Conservatives cooked up this child rebate plan.

Their plan was also a political failure. Not one Conservative member was elected from Canada's largest three metropolitan areas.

There is some hope that the child rebate plan will become a real child care plan through the creation of child care spaces starting in 2007. The government has set aside $250 million for that. I suspect that new plan will be released in time for the next election when this minority government falls and they try again to win over urban voters.

The Conservative plan did appeal to constituents who are suspicious of government-operated day care centres and would probably not use them if they did exist because of what they would likely teach; that gays and lesbians are born that way; that being religious is not required to be good; that science and faith are separate fields of study.

If the Conservatives were really interested in providing the opportunity for parents to stay home and care for their kids, they would increase worker's wages.

The greatest barrier to home care is that both parents have to work. Conservative policies of former Liberal and Conservative governments have made stay-at-home parents almost impossible. Stagnant wages relative to inflation have made it necessary that both parents work.

It will take much more than $100 a month to reverse the decline of family income. If the Conservatives are serious about one parent staying home they would increase wages of the working parent by strengthening unions and increasing the minimum wage.

But I have as much hope that will happen as I have in promises of a Conservative child-care program.