44th Parl. 1st Sess.
June 6, 2023 10:00AM
Madam Speaker, it is a pleasure to rise for my second speech tonight. It is democracy in action.
When I think about child care, I think of many stressful evenings with my wife trying to figure out where our kids are going to go and how we are going to pay for it. Child care has personally cost me a lot of money
In fact, when my son was born January 4, my eldest son Declyn, I remember joking with my wife at the time that it was going to cost an extra $15,000 in child care costs, and it did.
I was much happier when my second child Nicholas was born. He was born in November. I said it was great so I could make up some of those savings with my second child. Unfortunately, my third was born in January as well, so I will be at a loss once again.
I live in an area of Canada with one of the highest costs of living. We not only have a housing shortage, but we have a day care shortage as well. I am privileged to stand in this House. I can admit I am in the regulated system in British Columbia.
The day care facility I use, Koala Montessori in Abbotsford where my kids go, is now a regulated centre under the agreement signed with the Government of Canada. My fees went from approximately $950 for my second child down to $450.
That said, like all of us in this chamber, I am a high income-earning Canadian and I know there are monumental wait-lists to get into the facility where my second son goes. In fact, I was lucky. It was like winning the lottery, getting a spot in this wonderful day care facility.
There are so many early learning childhood educators who have had a positive impact on my children's lives. In fact, the other day, my son Declyn, who also went to Koala, and I were picking up his younger brother Nicholas. He said, “Dad, can I come in and see Ms. Elsie?” For my son to want to go in, see his old teacher and give her a great big hug is something that warms my heart; how could it not?
I am lucky that my children have access to wonderful early learning educators who have had an amazing impact on their lives. I think of some of the constituents in my riding who work there, like Ms. Krishmali and Ms. Maria. When my son Nicholas was a year old, they took him into their arms and loved him like their own child.
How could someone not love these women who devote their time and energy to these kids? They are away from their own children in many cases to do these jobs and help our young children grow into wonderful children so they are ready to go to school.
I want to say something about Koala Montessori. Sometimes I feel like my house is chaotic. I have three kids and two of them are boys. My two boys are running around and our place is a mess.
My middle child Nicholas is going to be bigger. He is going to be more than 250 pounds when he is older. He is definitely going to be over six-foot-five. When he goes down the hallway, he is smashing every door he finds. He is hitting all the walls. He is made to play football, rugby or basketball. It is just ingrained in him.
At the same time, he will go to his bedroom, he will take his T-shirt and he will fold it so nicely together. He will want to do the dishes with mom and dad. He works so carefully to clean a cup, or pour his own cup of milk or water when he is at the dinner table. That is the impact of the early learning educators who have had such a positive role in my children's lives.
My riding is a big one. It is 220,000 square kilometres of awesomeness, but not every family has what I have. There are 31 different bands in multiple indigenous nations in British Columbia.
Boston Bar First Nation, that is part of the Nlaka’pamux First Nations. I know for some of the St'át'imc bands in the Lillooet region, the positive impact that early learning educators have had on my children is not available to them.
I think about the community of Ashcroft, in my riding, which has seen a major expansion of the inland port where the CN and CP, now CPKC, rail lines meet. There are great jobs coming into the community. Canadian Tire is investing a lot of money in building a warehouse in this small community. There is a huge demand for housing. There is more need to build homes in this community than ever before. The workers there, though, do not have access to a day care facility or early learning educators, let alone nurses and a functioning hospital.
I see the positive intent in this bill and I have seen the positive impact it has had on a select number of Canadians in British Columbia, I being among them. Although I am one of those people who has benefited from this agreement, I worry about my constituents who have not. I worry about the parents in the Facebook community group Mission B.C. and Neighbours. It is a group for Mission, the second-largest community I represent. There are parents seeking a place for their kids to go. The parents are not able to go to work because they cannot have access to child care or are now kind of put into a horrible situation where they see that perhaps a relative or a neighbour got into a subsidized facility, yet they still have to pay the market rate with a private provider.
The private providers, many of whom are now public providers, were private providers before this deal. I know that many of the private providers not covered under this deal have that same commitment to quality education and nurturing care for our children that I receive at my now publicly funded facility. They do not have access to this program. A provider might be operating out of her home. She might be a new immigrant who is finding a way to support her children by running a day care facility inside her home to provide extra income, with the high cost of living we face in communities like Mission. Therefore, although I respect the intent of this bill, I am just wondering why some providers were not provided with the same access to participate that others were.
The second point I will raise is that, while the government was quick to make arrangements with existing facilities, none of the hard work in indigenous communities was done. I reference indigenous communities because, disproportionately, there are more children being born into indigenous communities. It is one of the fastest-growing demographics we have in Canada. That is a good thing, but those resources under this framework are not available at the same level that I can access in downtown Abbotsford.
I heard tonight that over 60% of my province is a day care desert; 60% of families do not have access to the quality of care that I have. That needs to change. We have to think in innovative ways to get over that hump. Recently, a group of plumbers and business owners came to Parliament to talk about the skills and labour shortage. These people are hard-working. They are small business owners and they are faced with an incredible labour shortage right now, one like we have never seen before. They cannot keep people and they cannot hire enough, no matter what they do. In fact, there is one company in Pitt Meadows. I think it is called Pitt Meadows Plumbing, and the owner of the business came to me. In fact, his company alone trains more people than the public trade schools in British Columbia combined. He has a massive impact on the number of skilled trade workers in British Columbia. He asked me why we do not incentivize private corporations to build facilities at their offices, and why there is not more effort put into working with the private sector and building those facilities at their headquarters.
Can we imagine a young woman today who wants to be a plumber being able to go on her lunch break at a manufacturing facility in Pitt Meadows or in Mission and being able to have lunch with her children? We can think innovatively about addressing the child care needs we have in British Columbia and, indeed, across Canada, if we think outside the box a little more and maybe work with more small business owners who want to hire those workers and who want to have an environment where those workers can be close to their children and maybe share lunch together once in a while.
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Madam Speaker, Teddy is an example of where somebody is tapping into the program. If they have access to it, if they already have a space, they are able and they are eligible for it, but for every one Teddy, there are probably two or three more, right in Milton, who are not able to go into that program, who are not realizing those savings, who are not seeing those spaces, who are not seeing that increase.
Again, what the member, the Liberals and NDP fail to realize is that for every Teddy, there are multiple other Teddys who are not able to tap into this program. Their child care fees are not being reduced, and instead their taxes are going up, their financial situation, if it is their house price, their mortgage, their rent or trying to save for a down payment on a home, that has all doubled. There are many families being left behind.
It is nowhere near as universal as the Liberals and NDP claim and want us to believe.
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