National daycare’s fate in voters hands

OTTAWA — Canadians will face a stark choice on how to tackle a childcare crisis when they go to the polls on Sept. 20, with the ruling Liberals vowing to push ahead with a subsidized daycare system and the rival Conservatives offering tax credits to parents.

The dire need for affordable, reliable childcare in Canada was laid bare by the coronavirus pandemic, as daycare and school closures forced many parents, mostly women, to cut back work hours or leave jobs to care for children, hurting productivity.

More than 48 per cent of Canadian parents have struggled to find affordable childcare, a recent Statistics Canada study found, prompting 27 per cent of them to delay a return to work and 41 per cent to change work schedules.

Public support for a national childcare program is high, with more than 70 per cent of Canadians in favour, according to an Angus Reid poll. Support is strongest among women and left-leaning Canadians, key voting blocs for the center-left Liberals who are in a neck-andneck race with the Conservatives.

“What the pandemic served to do was it really just made the challenges of trying to balance childcare with paid work so glaring,” said Morna Ballantyne, executive director of Child Care Now, which advocates for publicly funded childcare. “Women were dropping out of the paid labor force.”

Mothers of young children saw a huge jump in unemployment during the pandemic, and continue to lag their male counterparts in recovering those losses. The labour participation rates for women with children are also far lower than for male parents. Getting those women working is key to Canada’s economic growth, economists say.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberals say their $30-billion plan to vastly lower daycare fees by ensuring an average cost of $10 a day and creating 250,000 new childcare spots over five years will help do that. The Liberal plan is being implemented in seven of the 10 provinces and one of the three Canadian territories.

The Conservatives, out of power since losing a 2015 election, have said that if they win this month’s vote, they will cancel those deals and instead offer payments of up to $6,000 a year, based on income, to help parents pay for their daycare of choice.

The two main parties’ divergent approaches could make childcare a deciding factor in key electoral ridings, particularly in Vancouver and Toronto, where center-based daycare spots are notoriously hard to find and childcare can cost families thousands of dollars each month.

Kerry Liu, a Toronto-area father whose youngest child will be starting kindergarten this year, said daycare was a huge expense for his family and the Liberals’ plan is definitely a key consideration for him in the election.

“For two kids it’s almost $3,000 (a month). So I believe $10 a day will benefit a lot of parents,” he said. “That’s going to be a big game-changer.”