44th Parl. 1st Sess.
June 8, 2023 10:00AM
- Jun/8/23 6:59:31 p.m.
- Watch
Mr. Speaker, this bill will do nothing to create more affordable child care spaces for Albertans.
I think this is very interesting. The NDP comes from a philosophical place that says for those who have much to give, much will be asked for, and for those who do not have much, much will be given. I find it very odd that the New Democrats are not criticizing this legislation in the same way I am because of the inequality it is entrenching in our system.
It is the middle- and upper-income families that are statistically benefiting far more from this government subsidy than lower-income families. I would think that the New Democrats, in the spirit of wealth redistribution, which is something they claim to support, would at least have some criticism to suggest that maybe it is lower-income families that need more support through this legislation. We are not seeing that support for low-income families, and it is very surprising that the NDP is not standing up for the low-income families being excluded by this flawed Liberal policy.
183 words
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
- Jun/8/23 7:15:54 p.m.
- Watch
Mr. Speaker, I was much younger when I got elected and I have listened, for many years, to Conservatives attacking child care. Now I am an old, white guy and I am pretty good at identifying old, white guys, so whenever it comes to child care, Conservatives get all their old, white guys up there to say why we do not need it, why this is a failure. It has been an ongoing gong show.
The other thing the Conservatives say is it is rural against urban. I live in a rural area and it is not the 1950s. It is the same attitude they brought to the fact that we are dealing with a climate catastrophe and not a single Conservative showed up for the forest fire debate.
Why are the Conservatives putting up all their rural old, white guys, when we are dealing with what young mothers and young families need? Mothers and women have a right to access. The Conservatives have no plan. They have never had a plan and they would do everything they can to—
181 words
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
- Jun/8/23 7:46:38 p.m.
- Watch
Madam Speaker, I would like to thank all of the members who are in the House today contributing to this very important debate. I am delighted to be here, representing the people of Edmonton Strathcona.
I come to this debate from a place that I think many of us do. I am a parent. I am a mother. I know exactly what it was like to try to get child care for my children. I remember going to centre after centre trying to find a space to help our family as we tried to find child care for my two children, who are perfect in every way. It is important that I mention that. We did find child care for them. We were very happy with our child care and we were very happy with the child care providers who provided that service to us, but I also know that I came from a place of privilege. I was lucky enough to be able to pay a very high price for child care. I was lucky enough to live in an urban community where child care spaces were available. The child care spaces I was able to find were in a non-profit centre and I trusted the care that my children were receiving, but I also remember getting that call two years after my daughter started day care from one of the other centres, saying they finally had a space available, two years after she started day care. Families cannot wait that long. Women cannot wait that long for day care spaces.
We, within the NDP, have been saying for a very long time that child care is fundamental. I stand in this place on the shoulders of the champions of child care who have come before me within the New Democratic Party. Olivia Chow tried to bring forward legislation to make child care a reality. I have seen members of our caucus now work so hard on this child care file. The member for Winnipeg Centre has done more to move this child care discussion forward than I think any other member of Parliament here has done. I know the member for London—Fanshawe, in previous Parliaments, has tried very hard to make child care a reality. In fact, the previous member for London—Fanshawe also tried very hard to make sure that child care was a reality. On top of those people, colleagues within the NDP are also held up and supported by the incredible child care advocates around this country, the incredible labour leaders who have been pushing for this since the 1970s, pushing to have legislation in place, because we always knew that child care was the best thing we could do for families, for women and for children.
The other thing I wanted to highlight is that this particular bill coming forward is something that I think we can all be proud of. We can all be proud that this piece of legislation is coming forward. It is a piece of the supply and confidence agreement that the New Democratic Party of Canada has with the Liberal Party of Canada. This is another one of those pieces the New Democrats have forced the Liberals to do. We would not have this legislation if we did not have that in the supply and confidence agreement.
Today was an exciting day for us as New Democrats because, of course, today the budget implementation act was passed, despite the attempts from the Conservatives to block it. The leader of the official opposition said that he would do anything in his power to stop the bill being voted on, but then it got voted on a couple of hours later. That is a different debate for a different day, but we got dental care today. That was something that New Democrats pushed for. Dental care is something that I think we all should be very proud of, and child care is again one of those things.
There are a few things that I want to discuss about child care. Many members have stood in this place and talked about the challenges with this. I agree. There definitely are challenges with making this child care a reality for every family, for every woman across this country. There is lots of work to be done. It is not going to be enough to pass this legislation, brush our hands and be done. This legislation will require the government to continue to do that very difficult work of making sure that those child care places that are available are available to people in all communities, that they are accessible and that they are quality. That is one of the things that I think are most important.
When we look at child care, we need to ensure that these spaces are quality child care, that they are quality child care positions and that they are accessible to all families. That means we want to make sure that they are available to moms who have different work realities. We want to make sure that they are available to people in rural communities, in northern communities and in communities that have had trouble finding child care workers. We want to make sure that those places are there. That is the work that needs to go into this going forward.
We also want to make sure that we are investing federal dollars, public dollars, into a public system. This is an ideological difference between the Conservatives and the New Democrats, just as how Conservatives believe in private health care and we do not. We fundamentally think that health care is better when it is publicly delivered and universally accessible, paid for not with a credit card but using a health card. We believe that on health care. We believe that on child care.
Fundamentally, we know that child care is better when it is publicly delivered, when it is delivered within the public good. It is like long-term care. During COVID-19, we all saw that it was the private long-term care centres that had the highest mortality, that had the highest pain for seniors and that had the highest level of indignity that seniors went through during the terrible time of COVID.
It is the same idea. One cannot make profit off of child care without cutting corners. It is just not possible. That is how one makes profit on child care. One pays the staff less. One cuts corners and quality of care. For our young people, that is not what we are looking for.
That brings me to my next point. I want to talk about child care workers. We have a very big concern that there is a shortage of child care workers. How do we address that? We make sure that child care workers are paid adequately. We make sure that child care workers are able to access and pay for the training that they need, that they are able to support their families and that the job they have is a family-sustaining job. That is how we get more people to be involved in child care work.
In my province, we have an unbelievable group of folks who are working on the child care file. I have met with them many times, the advocates who have been doing some of this work for such a long time. Susan Cake is one of those advocates. She is the chair of Child Care Now Alberta. She says that “while it could be great that we will have 20,000 more spaces for children in Alberta, we need a concrete plan to staff these spaces. We need a plan to educate more Early Childhood Educators and we need a wage grid, inclusive of pensions and benefits, to ensure fair compensation across the province.”
I think that is fair. We cannot look at this program without looking at the idea of making sure that child care workers and child care educators are provided with the resources they need.
We need this in legislation for one really fundamental reason, which is to protect child care from Conservative governments. I have to say it. In Alberta, we have a premier right now who said, in 2021, that signing the $10-a-day child care program was a terrible decision, that it should not have happened and that they should never have done it. She, of course, campaigned on this $10-a-day child care and claimed it as her own, but this is something that is deeply worrying. We have a Conservative Party here whose leader has actually said that he does not believe in this child care program and that he would scrap the spending that is going into it.
I have some serious concerns about what we have to put into legislation. It is not just because child care is the right thing to do. It is not just because child care is vitally important for women, for families and for children. It is not just so that we can ensure that workers are paid an adequate wage, so that quality, accessible child care is available in every place in this country. Rather, it is also to ensure that, no matter what, Conservatives cannot take child care away from families and give money to their friends instead.
1571 words
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
- Jun/8/23 7:57:16 p.m.
- Watch
Madam Speaker, I wanted to point out during my speech that, when Rachel Notley was elected as the premier of Alberta in 2015, she put in a pilot project for $25-a-day child care. That contributed to cutting child poverty in half in the province of Alberta during the time she was the premier. It was a pilot, and I think $10 a day is a much more reasonable cost.
We heard from chambers of commerce and the Royal Bank. Even after COVID, we heard that the best thing we could do for economic recovery in this country was provide child care to families. For Edmonton Strathcona, for Alberta and for places across this country, it is fundamental in how it will change people's lives.
127 words
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
- Jun/8/23 7:58:07 p.m.
- Watch
Madam Speaker, this is the puzzling thing. I have a question for the NDP. It is supposed to be for the working people. It does not matter if they are male or female. When I think of the NDP, working families is its history, but it seems to have forgotten about that.
My speech was all about the holes. It was all about the things we tried to bring forward as Conservatives that were not addressed by the NDP or the Liberals. I do not understand that.
Right now, there is a system where a doctor or a nurse making six figures will get the subsidy as long as they have a day care spot. However, the parents working out there on the farms or in the trucking industry do not get it at all. How can the NDP square that off?
142 words
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
- Jun/8/23 8:10:53 p.m.
- Watch
Madam Speaker, I have heard many speeches tonight, especially from the Conservative members, that this plan is not universal because there are those who would not like to use a day care centre or those who perhaps cannot use a day care centre. What I am curious about is in the last several platforms of the Conservative Party of Canada, I did not see any solutions as to how they would spend money to try to help families care for their children. We do have a Canada child benefit, which is very generous and goes to many families, many rural families, to help them with child care needs. That is still going to go on.
I would like to know from the member what his plan would be. I would like to see what the proposal would be in their next platform and how the Conservatives would provide child care spaces in rural Canada.
154 words
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
- Jun/8/23 8:15:17 p.m.
- Watch
Madam Speaker, the way to be able to afford that and to pay those day care and child care workers to be in the homes is to have young families being able to take home stronger paycheques and more of their paycheques than the current government is allowing them to take home. The government is taxing them more and more, making it less affordable. We have seen the inflation, the high cost of groceries and the high cost of home heating, so they cannot afford to pay the bills and they cannot afford to pay—
96 words
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
Mr. Speaker, first of all, I want to say in reference to the individuals who lost their lives that my heart certainly goes out to their families. I cannot imagine what the families have been through.
What we are talking about here today is this piece of legislation and there are a lot of misses by this legislation. We are talking about Bill C-33. Certainly, in my intervention I mentioned a few times that this legislation should have been about safety and economic stability. Instead, this legislation is about corporate governance and control by the government to insert itself at the board table of port authorities. That is really one of the biggest focuses of this piece of legislation.
There is a real miss here with where this legislation could have gone and that is really unfortunate.
138 words
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
- menumenu
- notificationsnotifications
- home
- mailmail
- searchsearch
