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Choice in child care is what Prime Minister Stephen Harper promised in the last election with the Conservatives' Universal Child Care Benefit, a taxable, $100-a-month payment to families for each child under age 6. The money, Harper said, would give all parents the ability to choose the child-care option that best suited their family needs. Since July 2006, some $5 billion has been spent on the initiative.
In addition to cash for parents, the Conservatives pledged $250 million per year in tax credits to help businesses and community groups create 125,000 new child-care spaces over five years. But employers weren't keen to get into the child-care business, so the Tories folded the money into Ottawa's annual social transfer to provinces.
It's unclear how many spaces that money has created, because Ottawa hasn't kept track. But a review of provincial daycare programs by the Toronto-based Child Care Resource and Research Unit shows growth in licensed daycare spots across the country is slowing. In 2006, just 26,600 new spaces opened in Canada, a drop from 32,600 in each of the previous two years and about half of the 51,000 a year that opened between 2001 and 2004.
The centre's research shows that the percentage of Canadian children who have access to regulated child care has grown by just 10 per cent, to 17 per cent, in the past 15 years. And the bulk of those new spaces have been in Quebec.
At this rate, it would take another 60 years to reach universal supply, says the research unit's Martha Friendly, who has been tracking child care in Canada for the past 30 years.
The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has singled out Canada on several occasions for its poor record on child care. A 2004 report blasted the country's chronically underfunded patchwork of often mediocre programs run by underpaid and poorly trained staff. A 2006 report by the agency ranked Canada last among 14 Western nations in spending on early-learning, child-care and kindergarten programs &em; either through tax breaks, cash or services &em; putting us behind nearly every country in Europe and even the United States.
In Canada, fewer than one in five children under age 13 have access to licensed child care. Meanwhile, 71 per cent of mothers in two-parent families &em; and 83 per cent of single moms &em; are in the workforce.
"Monthly cheques (to parents) have been sent out since July 2006, but there has been no attempt to account for the dollars," says Friendly. "What is it spent on? Does it deliver choice in child care? Does it help Canadians balance work and family? Is it a good use of $2.4 billion a year? We just don't know.
"What we do know is that finding and affording high-quality early-childhood education and care continues to be an ongoing crisis for families. Indeed, since the Conservatives came to power in 2006, child-care space expansion dropped to its lowest level in some years."
But the popularity of the Tory child-care benefit means no other party has risked proposing to scrap the cash and plough the money into more daycare spaces in this campaign.
The Conservative child-care benefit replaced the previous Liberal government's five-year, $5-billion national child-care plan, aimed at creating 250,000 new high-quality, affordable and accessible spaces.
Under the ill-fated scheme, Ontario would have created 25,000 new affordable spaces by now, with more than 5,000 of them in Toronto. Instead, the province has been able to add just 15,000 new spaces, and Toronto has been able to create barely 2,000 new spots with the federal money.
Although the Liberals howled when Harper axed their child-care plan in favour of cash payments to parents, leader Stéphane Dion says if he's elected he'll keep the Tory benefit and add a new, $350 refundable child-tax credit to all families with children under age 18. But Dion says he's committed to reviving the Liberals' vision of a national child-care system and has promised to pump $1.25 billion into the creation of 165,000 new regulated spots within four years.
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On the same day at Toronto's East End Children's Centre, NDP leader Jack Layton reminded voters of the Liberals' spotty record on child care, noting that promises in the 1993 Liberal Red Book to invest in daycare were never realized. The Liberals' 2005 plan was so tenuous that Harper was easily able to erase it, Layton said.
An NDP government in Ottawa would elevate child care to the same status as medicare by introducing legislation, similar to the Canada Health Act, that would make federal spending on high-quality, affordable and accessible child care the law of the land, Layton said. The NDP would also keep the Harper "baby bonus" but invest $1.45 billion in the first year of a mandate to create 150,000 new spaces, growing to 220,000 spots annually as federal finances allowed.
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- reprinted from the Toronto Star