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EXCERPTS
The federal election campaign took on a family focus Wednesday, with the NDP and Liberals pledging billions for childcare....
At a campaign stop in Kitchener, Ont., Liberal Leader Stéphane Dion said if elected, his party would scale up spending on child care spaces to reach $1.25 billion in four years time, money that he said would fund 165,000 new spaces. There were no immediate details about how much they would spend on child care in the three years before that.
It's not, however, an all-out pledge to immediately re-establish the daycare plan the Liberals had just launched when they were kicked out of government in January, 2006 &em; a concession to tougher times, and the political price they would probably pay if they cancelled the Conservative program that pays parents of young children $100 a month.
Mr. Dion's Liberals committed to keeping the $100-a-month child cheques that Mr. Harper instituted &em; doing otherwise would be a political risk &em; and Mr. Dion said the public coffers do not have enough funds to bring the Liberal child care plan back right away.
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Earlier in the day, NDP Leader Jack Layton made a similar promise, vowing to create 150,000 spaces across the country within the first year of a mandate at a cost of $1.4-billion.
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Mr. Layton would not reveal what his final price tag would be. Party officials later said the annual funding would reach $2.2-billion by Year 4. But that would only pay for 220,000 spaces, making a truly universal program still a work in progress.
Mr. Layton also said he'd pass a law to ensure the program's survival, similar to the way the Canada Health Act governs medicare. The law would require provinces to follow standards of care and show where federal dollars would be spent.
The idea of a national day-care program has been kicked around for years. Advocates say a nationally subsidized child-care program would help working parents make ends meet and ensure that kids are in a high-quality learning environment.
But detractors say the idea is too expensive and unworkable.
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- reprinted from the Globe and Mail