44th Parl. 1st Sess.
January 31, 2023 10:00AM
- Jan/31/23 3:07:12 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, violent crime is rising because of the actions of this Liberal government. Under eight years of the Prime Minister, Canada has become a more dangerous place. Police are putting the blame on Liberal Bill C-75 that mandated judges to grant bail to dangerous repeat offenders with minimal conditions. The consequences of this have been fatal.
When will the Prime Minister finally take responsibility for his failure to protect Canadians and apologize to the victims of his reckless legislation?
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Mr. Speaker, that is not good enough. We have police officers dying on the front lines every day in this country. Now police are demanding that the Prime Minister take action to keep dangerous repeat offenders off our streets, but instead he has decided to punish law-abiding firearms owners by taking away their hunting rifles.
After eight years of failure, the Prime Minister is desperate to distract Canadians with his divisive and flawed hunting gun ban. When will he stop attacking law-abiding firearms owners and start protecting Canadians from dangerous repeat offenders?
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Mr. Speaker, today we are debating Bill C-35, an act respecting early learning and child care in Canada. The purpose of this legislation is to try to solve the issue of high child care costs in Canada.
This legislation does not address the serious economic challenges of implementing a Canada-wide early learning and child care agreement. I believe that this proposed legislation and the current agreements made by the Liberal government with the provinces will fail to provide universal access to affordable child care and will cost far more than what the government has estimated. In fact, I found it quite shocking that the Liberal speaker who came just before me admitted that this is not a universal program. He is right and he admitted the truth: It is going to be a two-tiered program where families who are lucky enough to get a child care space will benefit immensely while an estimated 182,000 families, according to the PBO, will be excluded and not have access to an affordable child care space.
Child care in Canada is provided by several mechanisms, including for-profit and non-profit models, parental care and care by other relatives. For the past several decades, the wages of average working families have not increased significantly while the demands on family finances through taxes, housing, food and child care have increased substantially. In the last few years alone, the costs for families have significantly outstripped wage growth.
The cost to provide child care varies based on age but is a minimum of $1,000 per child. Lower-income families have traditionally had access to subsidies, but these benefits vary across the provinces. Having one parent stay at home with a child is becoming unaffordable for many families and is far easier for families with higher incomes. Access to day care is already limited in Canada, with wait-lists. According to reports out of Quebec, there are an estimated 50,000 children waiting for access to an affordable care space. The price of child care in Canada is too high for most families, and access to affordable care is limited.
Why is child care so expensive? The key costs for child care according to operators, in order of magnitude, are labour, the cost of the facilities and the cost of food and supplies. Child care is a labour-intensive operation and wages vary. The cost to create a space that is child appropriate and the accompanying rental, mortgage, insurance and maintenance costs are significant. Finally, the cost of food and other supplies has increased dramatically.
What is the common factor of all three of these costs? They have all been severely impacted by high inflation. Inflation has increased the cost of labour and the cost of rent and mortgages dramatically, and as everyone can see at their local grocery store, the price of food has gone up by 12%. Child care operators are not immune from these costs. The fact is that the Liberal government, through its inflationary policies, is driving up the cost of child care in Canada.
The government's solution to this problem, a problem that it created, has been to sign agreements with the provinces to subsidize the cost of child care and to implement cost controls on wages, facilities and food in order to regulate a price for families that will eventually reach $10 a day. Unfortunately, this is unsustainable because since it is government spending that caused the inflation in the first place, more spending will only increase inflation further. The result will be an inflationary spiral that will further increase the costs of child care and the costs to maintain this program. Given our current deficit, the government will either have to raise taxes on Canadians or take on more debt to sustain this program.
What are some examples of this inflationary spiral? Speaking to child care operators in Alberta, I have already heard a number of significant challenges that the government has failed to address. Child care workers in Alberta can be paid up to around $23 an hour, but due to regulations under these agreements, operators cannot raise their costs by more than 3% annually. According to Statistics Canada, private sector wages rose by over 5% last year. Government regulations prevent child care operators from paying their staff even enough to keep up with the rate of inflation.
There is also intense competition for child care workers. School districts can often afford to pay $30 an hour with benefits. I have been told that schools are even poaching staff from day cares because they are in desperate need of these workers as well. Under the government's agreements, day cares have been put at an economic disadvantage in attracting workers, which will lead to a significant loss in day care capacity, meaning less access to child care.
The proposed solution for this inflation by proponents of even more government intervention in early child care is, no surprise, more inflationary spending. By raising wages even further for child care workers, school boards and others will also try to compete by raising their wages even further. This will result in an inflationary cycle where taxpayers will need to pay much higher taxes as schools and early childhood care centres compete for limited workers.
I have spoken with child care operators who have had to pay increased rents and mortgages on their facilities. As everyone knows, mortgages and rental rates have skyrocketed under eight years of the Liberal government, particularly in the last year. Under agreements the government has signed, child care operators are limited in the costs they can bill the government toward their rent and mortgage. Since they are mandated to charge families a fixed price for child care, there is no way for these operators to make up the difference other than by reducing other costs, such as food for children; shutting down their capacity by letting go of workers; or shutting down altogether, which we have started to see.
The laws of supply and demand mean that the government must either restrict the capacity of day cares or dramatically increase funding beyond what it promised. The first option is unfair, as it is going to leave many families out, and the second option is financially unsustainable. This argument is backed up by research from the parliamentary budget office, which reported in February of last year that the Liberals' plan is not sufficient to meet the demand for child care. In fact, it estimates that it will fall short in providing spaces for 182,000 children. That is 182,000 children who are being left behind by the Liberal government, with no plan in this legislation to provide their families with an affordable child care space.
What we are talking about here is essentially a more focused application of the wage and price controls implemented under the Anti-Inflation Act passed by former prime minister Pierre Trudeau in 1975. In seeking to combat high inflation at the time, the government passed legislation to control increases in prices and wages. The results were economically disastrous and the policy was rescinded shortly thereafter.
Today, the Liberals are trying to implement wage and price controls through their early learning and child care agreements. Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman put it better than I ever could by comparing this kind of policy to putting a kettle full of water on a hot stove. When the boiling water begins to push off the kettle lid, the appropriate thing to do is take the lid off and turn down the heat. Well, what the government is doing is putting a brick on top of the lid and letting the kettle explode. The result is that the pot will explode and this policy will collapse on itself. It is true for this child care policy.
The Liberals claim that this policy will reduce the effects of inflation on families, but the reality is that it is only meant to cover up, to mask, to hide the symptoms of inflation while doing nothing to solve the underlying issue of inflation. It is not a cure for inflation, because as the government continues to spend more, it will drive up inflation, and the cost of this program will continue to rise dramatically in order to maintain the fixed price of $10 a day. Demand from families will build up and eventually the program will collapse on itself.
Universal access to affordable child care is the stated goal of this legislation and the early learning and child care agreements, but the current plan fails to meet objectives. I believe that this plan will lead to a further loss in child care capacity as operators close down from unsustainable cost increases and the inability to find labour to fill their positions. The result will be a two-tiered day care system where those who are lucky enough to get their child into a regulated, affordable child care space will reap the benefits and save tens of thousands of dollars a year, while many families will continue to have to use expensive, unregulated child care or make arrangements with family.
The families that will benefit the most from this system are those with the highest incomes. Research from the OECD indicates that the vast majority of children in regulated child care come from those with the highest incomes. Children from low-income families are disproportionally under-represented in child care spaces. In its efforts to implement an absolute, across-the-board, no matter what one's income is price of $10 a day for all families, the government has failed to take into account the need to provide equity for low-income families. Consequently, the benefits of this Liberal program will disproportionately benefit those with higher incomes, who often already have and can afford a regulated child care space.
Ironically, it was the Liberals who ran attacks against Conservatives claiming that our universal child care benefit gave benefits to millionaires. The fact is that the Liberal plan benefits those with the highest incomes, including millionaires, far more than it does low-income families.
In conclusion, making child care more affordable is an important economic and political goal, but the current plan by the Liberals will fail to do that. It is unacceptable to leave 182,000 children out of the system, and it is unacceptable to put this debt burden on Canadians.
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Mr. Speaker, the program is flawed. I have demonstrated how clearly it is flawed.
It is my job as a parliamentarian and as a member of the opposition to call out the government on the flaws in its legislation. That is the purpose of our Westminster system of Parliament. Opposition parties hold the government accountable in order to get better outcomes for Canadians.
I look forward to seeing this bill at committee. I look forward to hearing from witnesses. I look forward to seeing concrete proposals come forward to make child care more affordable for families. However, the current plan put forward by the Liberals has tremendous risk and tremendous challenges, and the Liberals are not being honest with Canadians about those challenges.
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Mr. Speaker, I want to thank my colleague for her advocacy on this issue.
We need to look at the free market and how free market mechanisms can be complemented by limited government intervention to provide more supply when there is a need and demand. There is a huge demand for child care in this country, even before $10-a-day day care is brought in and even before government subsidies are brought in.
How do we create that supply? We need to look at regulations that are preventing people from starting a new child care operation. We need to look at getting more access to workers, whether that is through visas for people working abroad or getting people's education upgraded here in Canada so that we can increase the pool of available workers who can provide child care. We also need to look at the inflationary spending of the government, how it is driving up the cost of food, rents, mortgages and the cost of labour and how that is impacting child care operations across Canada.
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Mr. Speaker, as I outlined in my speech, one of my greatest concerns with this legislation is that the government cannot give us a full estimation of what the program is going to cost. If the government is going to provide child care for the 182,000 families the PBO has estimated would be left out of the program, how many billions of dollars more would need to be added to the program to maintain it? How has the government projected the cost of inflation from the increased government spending and increased government debt? Has the government projected what taxes would have to be increased to maintain this program?
I am very concerned. We have not been given a straightforward, clear fiscal plan from the government on how it is going to maintain the program. Frankly, it is shame, because it is going to be a two-tiered system where low-income families are left out in the cold and high-income families, disproportionately, are going to get the benefits.
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