Report card flunks PM for Tory child-care plan
The Daily News (Kamloops) / CanWest News Service
February 6, 2007
By: Norma Greenaway

OTTAWA -- If Prime Minister Stephen Harper can have a change of heart on climate change, can child care be far behind?

Monica Lysack, executive director of the Child Care Advocacy Association of Canada, is crossing her fingers.

"It's encouraging they have seen the error of their ways in other areas, such as the environment," she said Monday in an interview. "We are hoping they will see the error of their ways in child care, and therefore invest in a system to create and maintain child-care spaces."

Lysack was among a group of child-care advocates who gathered at an Ottawa child-care centre to slam the Conservative government's failure so far to provide details of its promise to spend $250 million a year over the next five years, beginning April 1, to create 125,000 child-care spaces.

The plan calls for providing up to $10,000 in federal tax credits to businesses or community groups for each space they create.

Critics say the proposal is deeply flawed because, among other things, it provides no operating funds.

Also, businesses have shown virtually no interest in the proposal.

The Code Blue for Child Care campaign -- which brings together child-care organizations and other groups -- unveiled a report card at the event that gave the prime minister failing grades for his government's child-care plan, the centerpiece of which is a taxable monthly allowance of $100 for each child under the age of six.

"Stephen Harper has some trouble understanding basic concepts. His major term project, the universal child-care plan, is not child care," said Rachel Besharah, an early childhood educator in Ottawa, as she announced Harper's F rating.

The campaign says thousands of children across the country are on waiting lists for licensed spaces, which cost at least $8,000 a year.

Provincial and territorial governments also want details of the Conservative plan, given Harper's announcement a year ago today that he was cancelling the former Liberal government's child-care funding deals, effective this March 31.

Killing the deals has left the provinces and territories with almost $4 billion less than they had banked on over the next three years.

Adding to the uncertainty is the still secret report of a committee the government created last summer to advise it on how to implement its plan to create child-care spaces....

Gord Mackintosh, Manitoba's minister responsible for child care, has written Solberg urging a speedy rethink of the government's plan to rely on tax credits to create spaces.

In an interview, Mackintosh said the government should -- at a minimum -- divvy up the $250 million a year among the provinces and territories so they can put the money toward proven child-care initiatives.