Child care, real or phony?
Goldstream News
OPINION: By G.E.Mortimore, a Langford-based writer (Langford is suburb of Victoria).

THINK ABOUT IT
Dec 06 2006

Here is a practical day-dream: National child care at a low price. Not just baby-sitting. Parent-substitute early education that comforts and teaches kids, sustains their health, and prepares them to manage their lives. Early in 2006, that ideal seemed to be within reach.

The Martin minority government, running scared, urged on by the NDP, eager to please, signed a child-care bargain with Quebec, Ontario and Manitoba. It promised similar deals to all provinces and territories, at a cost of $11 billion over 10 years.

A generation of toddlers had grown up to produce children of their own in the 22 years since Conservative Prime Minister Brian Mulroney declared that the child care idea was ripe for action.

Successive Liberal-brand prime ministers had proclaimed the imminent launch of affordable child care. They all reneged.

Now the floating vision seemed about to come down to earth. Many young parents, locked into a meagre life because they were unable to find trustworthy care-providers at a manageable price, dared to hope that they might now be able to go to work or school and climb out of poverty.

Then Stephen Harper won power, and the hope melted into the clouds again. Voters had been warned, but they couldn't pick up the alarm through the noise and smoke.

Harper presented his message in a crafty way, like a pair of glass earrings packed in a plush diamond-earring box. He wouldn't let Ottawa force wasteful programs on people.

He would endow parents with money in their own right, $1,200 per year per child, to spend on the kindercare that suited them.

John Gray of the CBC's reality check team told the story, 11 days before election day.

"As Stephen Harper explains it, the Conservative Party's policy on child care is basic common sense: We certainly don't want the federal government to tell us how to raise our children," said Gray.

Who could quarrel with that? Think about it. Would you want some pointy-headed bureaucrat in Ottawa telling you what to feed your child, what clothes he or she should wear, what toys to play with or books to read? But of course that was not what Harper was saying. His real message was that under a Conservative government, there will be no national child care program. None. When the shouting and posturing calmed down, three facts transpired:

First, reality-checker Gray was right; Harper repudiated national child care. He sees Canada as a collection of self-determining provinces, and government as an alien monster in need of taming, rather than an instrument of the people's will.

Second, child care is a more important and thought-provoking issue than campaign speeches portrayed it. Care and education in early years are associated with lifelong higher levels of health and well-being.

Economists Michael Krashinsky and Gordon Cleveland found $2 of benefits for every $1 invested to enhance child care. Half the benefit came from greater numbers of mothers joining the work force.

Third, there is a link between child care and Quebec's position within Canada. Quebec's low-fee child care and early-education program was to be the model for the Canada-wide system.

You can't buy much child care for Harper's $100 a month. In B.C., the median cost of care ranges from $419 for school-agers to $708 for infants. Quebec's fee is $7 a day, about $170 a month.

Why should taxpayers subsidize child-care centres? For the same reasons that inspire us to pay for public schools. They reduce the waste of human capital.

There are waiting lists for Quebec child care, but the number of regulated spaces in Quebec has greatly increased, and they are more numerous than anywhere else in Canada.

The Quebec plan isn't perfect. The Charest Liberals reversed some of the founding PQ government's principles. They raised fees, encouraged for-profit centres, hung tough on staff pay, triggered strikes.

But the Quebec model can be tuned to make it increasingly efficient and sensitive.

There is a strange irony about Harper's fragmented non-plan. He used a "nation" slogan to win Quebec hearts, and counter the Bloc's sovereignty push, while he ignored a chance to create a Canada-wide consensus in which Quebec was the child-care leader.

Formal constitutional change is an explosive process. Avoiding it through tricks of pretended change may be a winning ploy on a temporary scale. Pretence gives all players a sense of achievement without the substance. "Nation" echoes the vague "distinct society" slogan, which was designed to be read by Quebecois as a signal of part-independence, and by non-Quebecers as a mere rhetorical flourish.

The technique of speaking with a forked tongue may convey the illusion of problem-solving, but it lacks change-making power.There is a more promising strategy for updating the constitution: Shortcut the formal process, mobilize consensus across provincial boundaries, limit the empty sloganeering, and build national programs.

Child care is one such program. Quebec has done the best job of it, and will give Canada a road map, if we can get Harper out of the way.