Details on daycare
Critics call it overselling
The federal minister in charge of crafting a national child care plan says that if the Liberals are going to take gender equity seriously, then they must do the same when it comes to the soaring cost of child care.
The federal Liberals are putting on a political press to sell their child-care budget pledge, calling it ambitious in the face of questions about whether the funding is too modest to make a significant difference for families.
The Liberals have promised to spend $7.5 billion over a decade on child care, starting with $500 million in the new fiscal year that starts this weekend and increasing to $870 million annually by 2026 to fund spaces in provinces and territories, as well as indigenous child care on and off-reserve.
For advocates who have waited years for the federal government to kick in cash to help expand and subsidize childcare services, the money is seen as a start, but far from enough to cover the whole country. The annual funding is below what the Paul Martin Liberals offered provinces in 2005 and below what federal officials last year told the minister in charge of the file would be needed to make a measurable effect on the number of child-care spaces countrywide.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said his government’s pledge would have a “huge” impact on low- and modest-income families, calling it a “historic investment.”
“These are the kinds of things that we need to do to ensure that every family has the opportunity to make the choices that are right for them,” Trudeau said at a Winnipeg daycare.
The actual provincial and territorial allocations will be unveiled once funding agreements are signed, but first, the Liberals have to get provinces and territories to agree on the final text of a multilateral agreement that would lay out the key policy goals of the child-care money. The money could potentially create 40,000 subsidized spaces for low and modest-income families over the next three years, about 13,000 spaces a year or about 2.4 per cent of the roughly 543,000 regulated child care spaces in Canada for children five and under.
The Liberals calculated the impact based on an annual federal subsidy of $7,000 per space.
NDP families critic Brigitte Sansoucy said the promised future spending on child care is totally inadequate to meet the needs of parents and below what her party had proposed in a plan the Liberals attacked for being too slow.
“The Liberals should be supporting child-care programs, such as the one in Quebec,” she said. “This budget fails to do that.”