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The federal government needs a system for assessing the availability of child-care spaces in Canada as a basis for future policies on the problem, says a report commissioned by the Tories.
That recommendation, and a series of others from the ministerial advisory committee in January, did not make their way into the federal budget last month.
Still, the government seems to have agreed with the report's conclusion that Canadian businesses aren't keen on opening day-care spaces themselves. It recently abandoned a $250-million plan to give funding to firms with on-site centres.
"To compete globally, Canada needs to reduce barriers to labour market entry including increasing the supply and quality of child care," said the report by a blue-ribbon panel of eight independent experts in business and in child care.
"Consultations as well as the committee's own experience has shown, however, that employers are concerned about getting directly involved in building, operating or directly providing child care and would rather work with existing child-care providers."
The private-sector initiative was replaced in the budget with a $250-million transfer payment to the provinces for child care.
The advisory committee had been asked to study how the private sector could be encouraged to get involved in child care through the old plan. Despite their conclusion that most employers didn't want to run day-care centres, they had other proposals. Among them:
- Establish a fund, managed by an arm's-length agency, that would give money to eligible applicants to open high-quality child-care spaces.
- Allow employers who open child-care spaces to claim the full cost of their capital expenditures in the year they were incurred.
- Increase the child-care expense deduction for income taxes.
- Increase the length of employment-insurance child-care benefits, and extend the benefit to grandparents.
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- reprinted from the Halifax Chronicle Herald