PM criticizes Tory premiers
Trudeau passes blame for rocky rollout, promises $1 billion for more spaces
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau blamed Conservative premiers for “slow-walking” their commitments to deliver the longpromised $10-a-day daycare spaces, saying they are taking their lead from Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre whom he accused of opposing child care.
Trudeau — who was in B.C. Thursday to announce coming budget measures to provide $1 billion in grants and loans to create more child-care spaces and train daycare workers — faced questions about the rocky rollout of the federal-provincial program.
He was asked to respond to parents who face long wait-lists and threatened withdrawals by daycare centre providers who say the federal-provincial child-care deals limit the fees they can charge, but don’t provide enough cash to cover their operating costs.
At first, Trudeau acknowledged there are “challenges” in delivery, suggesting they are unsurprising wrinkles in “a brand new program.”
Then Trudeau launched a blistering critique of Conservative premiers (whom he did not name) for either being unenthusiastic or outright opposed to child care (despite the fact all 13 provinces and territories signed child-care deals with Ottawa) because, he said, they are following Poilievre (whose party voted to pass a federal bill enshrining the program in law).
“It is unfortunate but it is true that the Conservative Party of Canada and Pierre Poilievre are opposed to child care,” said Trudeau.
“There are provincial governments unfortunately that follow the federal Conservatives lead on this, and are looking to not deliver child care, or even (to) cut childcare services.”
Trudeau borrowed Poilievre’s “common sense” slogan to promote the additional $1billion in federal money that will flow through Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. as “low cost grants and loans” directly to not-for-profit and public child-care providers to expand spaces. Trudeau called it “a common-sense approach” that will help child care be developed alongside housing.
Conservative critic on child care Michelle Ferreri posted on “X” calling Trudeau a “fake feminist” who intends to only support those who “agree with his ideology.” In a statement to the Star, Ferreri said the Liberals “promised affordable child care, but they have instead delivered chaos and disorder” as long wait-lists grow across Canada.
“Common sense Conservatives have and will continue to fight for equal access to child care. When we form government, Conservatives will ensure provinces and parents have choice and flexibility,” she said.
Under the previously negotiated deals, the $30 billion Ottawa is giving provinces over five years required them to cut fees in not-forprofit daycares by half by the end of 2022 and to deliver the $10-a-day daycare program by 2026.
However, the promise of $10-aday daycare is proving elusive to deliver, with demand outstripping supply of new spaces, and many daycare operators threatening to pull out of the program.
All Conservative-governed provinces signed onto the deals, including Doug Ford’s government in Ontario, which was the last to do so. In Ontario, it was intended to create 86,000 new child-care spaces, but demand far exceeds that number.
The federal Conservatives were critical of the Liberal government’s program in Parliament, saying it failed to offer enough guarantees that private home-based child-care providers would be included or that it failed to help shift workers whose child-care needs weren’t met by the daytime hours of daycare centres.
However, in the end, Conservative MPs voted to pass the Liberal government’s Early Learning and Child Care Act.
That bill enacts the principles laid out in federal-provincial agreements that were reached throughout 2021 and 2022. The Liberals wrote it into a federal statute to make it harder for a future government to kill the program.
The bill was amended by the Senate to protect services for officiallanguage minorities, and received royal assent 10 days ago.
On Thursday, the prime minister, flanked by Jenna Sudds, the latest federal minister responsible for the program, and her B.C. counterpart, touted $10-a-day daycare as a social safety net measure that provides quality early learning to children, and as an “affordability” measure because it helps parents save thousands on child-care costs. As his government has done for years, he also called it an economic investment because it enables greater participation of women in the workforce.
Trudeau praised B.C. as an example of a province going “full steam ahead” and expanding spaces.
Others have not moved as “enthusiastically and wholeheartedly” as the prime minister said he and their residents expected.
Trudeau said Ottawa will continue to work with all provinces, even though it recognizes that “because the federal Conservatives are consistently standing against child care, Conservative premiers are in some cases slow-walking, and in some cases not delivering to the right level, because they’re listening to their federal brethren.”