EXCERPTS:
Re: Cost of subsidized daycare to rise to $9 a day by 2015.
Who is "responsible" for daycare costs?
Finance Minister Nicolas Marceau's framing of "parental responsibility" for daycare costs is annoyingly misleading. The parental share is not 14 per cent, nor was it in the past 20 per cent, with the government implicitly situated as a "benevolent benefactor" who picks up the remainder of the tab. Parents who have their children in subsidized daycare provide an additional 14 per cent of the total costs; however, we all pay taxes, and those taxes are then reallocated by our government for these services. Parents, thus, pay far more than $7 for such a service.
Let's not get confused - there is nothing benevolently given here by the government. Moreover, the majority of us will parent at some point, and all of us, child-free or not, benefit, economically, in the long run from this early investment we collectively make in future workers.
As the prospect of a new election looms, let us not get befuddled by political smoke and mirrors about who does what. "Responsible" citizens pay the taxes, which are entrusted to supposedly "responsible" governing official and bodies to redistribute in support of such social provisions.
Elaine Weiner, St-Henri
-reprinted from the Montreal Gazette