BURDEN BUDDIES
B.C. NDP doubles down on $10-a-day child care, blames Greens for lack of progress
`No one trusts (Horgan's) answers anymore, and every time he comes up with one of his allegations about the Green party they immediately tell him he's making it up.' — Andrew Wilkinson
`(Horgan) should stop trying to rewrite history.' — Sonia Furstenau
VICTORIA — B.C.'s child care affordability has once again become a major provincial election issue, with NDP Leader John Horgan on Thursday blaming his lack of progress on a marquee, $10-aday child care promise on his former allies, the B.C. Greens, while his opponents accused him of spinning falsehoods to cover up his own failings.
Horgan used the battleground ridings of Maple Ridge, where his party picked up two seats over the B.C. Liberals in 2017, to promise a renewed emphasis on the $10-a-day plan should he win a majority Oct. 24.
He cited the Greens, with whom his minority government had a power-sharing deal, as the reason for not delivering $10 child care.
After the 2017 election, once in government, the NDP said $10-a-day child care would take 10 years to implement. So far, the province has only created 53 pilot projects, all of which are funded by Ottawa.
“We wanted to advance $10-a-day child care as quickly as possible,” said Horgan. “The B.C. Greens did not support that. So we amended our plan. We focused on creating more spaces. We focused on reducing fees for people, up to $350 a month for many, many, families, and we put in place a pilot project, right around British Columbia where the $10-a-day plan was to be implemented.
“People rushed to those spaces, there's not enough for the demand. We're going to, with a new government, we're going to focus on increasing the number of seats available for $10-a-day and it's a 10-year plan. Over the course of the next decade it will be implemented here in B.C.”
Former Green leader Andrew Weaver disagreed publicly with Horgan on the $10-a-day plan in 2017, forcing the NDP to move to a universal child-care model, with income-based subsidies and other supports.
However, current B.C. Green Leader Sonia Furstenau rejected the characterization that the Greens had held up progress on the plan.
Furstenau said that while Horgan and Weaver were sparring over $10-a-day, she and Horgan's minister of state for child care, Katrina Chen, co-operatively crafted the NDP's current child care affordability plan that achieves the same goals.
She produced numerous tweets in which Chen praised Furstenau for progress on the issue.
“He should stop trying to rewrite history,” Furstenau said of Horgan.
The Green leader this week has said voters can no longer trust Horgan due to several falsehoods he's stated about the NDP-Green relationship.
B.C. Liberal Leader Andrew Wilkinson said he would continue the previous Liberal government's child-care strategy, which he said created 39,000 spaces. However, the Liberal plan wasn't as popular with voters as the NDP's $10-a-day promise in the 2017 election, especially in Metro Vancouver.
Wilkinson said Horgan's continued strategy of blaming the Greens — first as his rationale for a snap election, then Tuesday as blame on the addictions crisis and now on child care — raises the issue of his character.