O’toole promises increased childcare support

Conservative leadership hopeful also promising commission on pandemic response

OTTAWA — To help Canada recover from the COVID-19 pandemic, Conservative leadership candidate Erin O’toole is promising to boost childcare benefits as part of a package of economic measures announced Thursday.

O’toole also says he would convene a Royal Commission on Canada’s pandemic response within 100 days of becoming Prime Minister to “ensure that all lessons learned from the crisis are publicly aired and learnings can immediately be adopted,” including specifically for long-term care homes.

Both frontrunners in the race to be the next Conservative leader, O’toole and Peter Mackay, have now released their plans for leading Canada out of the economic crisis caused by the pandemic.

Mackay’s, announced Wednesday, included the idea of temporarily reducing or eliminating the GST for hardhit sectors such as restaurants and the tourism industry.

There is some overlap between the two plans, including measures to reduce barriers to internal trade, expand highspeed internet access in rural areas, reject Huawei’s participation in the 5G network, and repeal Bills C-69 and C-48 (Liberal legislation on environmental reviews and tanker bans). O’toole and Mackay are both promising to eventually balance the budget, but do not have a time frame to do so. Neither plan includes cost estimates for most of the proposed measures.

But one big difference between the plans is O’toole’s promise of increased childcare benefits.