Excerpts
For some Canadian parents of young children, there’s only one issue that matters this election: the future of the Canada-wide Early Learning and Child Care (CWELCC) plan, a policy that reduces daycare fees in some provinces to as little as $10 a day.
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If this thirty-year series of events sounds like a repeating pattern, it’s because it is—one that Martha Friendly, executive director of the Childcare Resource and Research Unit, has witnessed almost since she began studying child care policy in the 1970s. Several times, a national child care plan came close to implementation by governments of various political stripes, only to be scrapped after an election. Then, Friendly says, Stephen Harper’s Conservatives shifted toward a more socially conservative view of the care of the child. The underlying idea was, “we shouldn’t be using child care, young children should mostly be home with the mother,” she says. Their child care policy was framed as giving parents a choice in child care.
How this manifests in policy is a focus on offsetting costs to families through credits and benefits over funding specific child care systems: it was true in the ’80s, and in the 2000s, when Stephen Harper implemented the Universal Child Care Benefit, which paid parents $100 per month for every child under six. The money could be spent however parents saw fit. These direct payments did little to offset the costs of child care as fees have risen over the years due to inflation, rising rents, and high staff turnover.
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