Day-care advocates renew calls for public system
Norma Greenaway
CanWest News Service
October 31, 2007

OTTAWA - …"There's a policy vacuum," NDP MP Olivia Chow told a news conference as she berated the federal Conservative government for "washing its hands" of the child-care file.

"Parents across the country are desperate. In Ottawa alone, there are 7,000 working families waiting for child care," the Toronto MP said. "And when there is not child care, you see what is happening - the festering of these illegally run child-care centres."

…. Shellie Bird, spokeswoman for the advocacy group Code Blue for Child Care, said Ranger's operation illustrates the need for a not-for-profit system that has clear licensing standards at the national and provincial levels.

Bird and other critics warned the gap between the supply of spaces and the demand for them has left Canada ripe for infiltration by foreign-owned, profit-hungry conglomerates seeking to acquire child-care centres.

Chow said for-profit day care is a mistake because the quest to show a profit will suck up public funding, increase costs to parents and decrease the dollars available for the children and the workers who look after them…..

Liberal, Bloc and NDP MPs are backing a private member's bill, introduced by Chow, that would force the federal Conservatives to finance a not-for-profit national early-learning and child-care system. The bill is expected to get third and final approval in the Commons early next year.

"When you travel across the country, and you talk to families and you talk to parents, they are literally at their wit's end because they are not able to find the proper facilities to ensure their children get the very best," Dhalla said.

She said the taxable $100-a-month allowance is no substitute for a child-care program.

"They need the government to act with a strategy, not to act as an ATM machine," she said. "They must stop playing mailbox politics with the children of Canada."