Social Policy in Ontario

Child care — Canada’s elusive dream

Posted on March 11, 2016 in Child & Family Delivery System

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TheStar.com – Opinion/Commentary – Why affordable child care keeps falling off the national agenda.
Mar 11 2016.   By: Carol Goar, Star Columnist

Thirty-two International Women’s Days have come and gone since Canada’s working mothers were promised a national child care program. Six prime ministers have held the reins of power. Two generations of women have waited in vain.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau could have changed this record of failure. All he undertook to do was “meet with provinces, territories, and indigenous communities to beginwork on a new National Early Learning and Child Care Framework.” To all intents and purposes, women are back where they started in 1984 when former prime minister Brian Mulroney made a ground-breaking pledge to introduce a national child care plan.

Why has child care fallen off the national agenda again and again? Why do governments — Liberal and Conservative alike — fail to deliver a service that is essential to gender equality?

It would be easy to blame perfidious politicians as some feminists do; tempting to point to fiscal constraints as some economists do; natural to attribute the lack of progress to federal-provincial clashes as some constitutional scholars do; or accuse women themselves of undermining their quest for child care.

There is a grain of truth to all these explanations. But there is a deeper truth. Canadian society is fundamentally split. One segment of the population believes the best way to provide child care is to hand parents cash and let them buy whatever they want — from babysitting to a spot in a licensed public child-care centre. The other camp believes the role of the federal government is to invest in safe, affordable child care spaces so both parents can work.

It was this cleavage that scuttled Mulroney’s plan.

Three years after taking power, his Conservative government introduced a bill to create 200,000 new child spaces. Ottawa was prepared to put up $5.4 billion. Parents would get tax breaks. Businesses would get incentives to create child-care centres in their workplaces. It was rejected categorically by child care advocate Martha Friendly. Tax breaks were inequitable, she argued. Private, for-profit daycare was the wrong way to go. And giving parents money would do nothing to address the desperate shortage of public child care facilities.

Mulroney’s bill died on the order paper. The Conservatives never resurrected it.

The same schism scotched Jean Chrétien’s plan to create 150,000 new child care spaces.

He pledged in 1993 to spend $720 million over three years on a nation-wide program with one condition: the provinces had to match Ottawa’s contribution. Years of intergovernmental negotiations ensued but no agreement was ever reached. The Liberals could not close the fissure between those who wanted to expand public child care and those who wanted to give parents more bargaining power the marketplace.
Paul Martin, who succeeded Chrétien in 2003, came close to achieving a cross-Canada consensus.

By upping the ante to $5 billion over five years, his social development minister Ken Dryden was able to reach child-care agreements with all 10 provinces. Dryden completed the task on Nov. 25, 2005. Three days later, Martin’s government lost a vote of non-confidence. His government was toppled in the subsequent election.

Canada’s 22nd prime minister, Stephen Harper, made it clear from the outset he wanted nothing to do with “institutionalized child care.” He immediately cancelled all 10 federal-provincial agreements, offering parents a $100-a-month universal child care benefit for every youngster under the age of six. “Our party understands that child care decisions are best left in the hands of the real experts, mom and dad,” he said.

He repeated this message so often and buttressed it with so many tax breaks for one-earner families that child care advocates were stymied. New mothers scrambled to make any arrangement they could: signing up for coveted child-care spaces before their babies were born, extending their maternity leave, enlisting relatives, hiring foreign nannies and returning to work part-time.

Today that’s the norm. Trudeau has pledged to make his predecessor’s child-care benefit more progressive but he is not deviating from Harper’s cash-for-parents model. Political observers hold out little hope of any significant expansion of Canada’s fragmentary, underfunded preschool system.

Canadians now have a 44-year-old prime minister with three young children who proudly calls himself a feminist, yet sees no urgency for a national child care program. Trudeau affirmed his “steadfast commitment to promoting full and substantive equality for all women” this week, but left another generation of mothers waiting.

< http://www.thestar.com/opinion/commentary/2016/03/11/child-care-canadas-elusive-dream-goar.html >

Tags: budget, child care, ideology, jurisdiction, participation, standard of living

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