44th Parl. 1st Sess.
May 31, 2023 02:00PM
Madam Speaker, I am speaking today about Bill C-35. The bill is called “an act respecting early learning and child care in Canada”. I will spend most of my time speaking about children, but I want to start with a few words about this bill.
This bill would do absolutely nothing for early learning and child care. The government has, in fact, already implemented its child care policies. Bill C-35 comes after the fact. The bill contains statements of principles and a declaration, but nothing would be changed legally or in terms of funding by putting these generic statements of opinion into legislation. Bill C-35 is a bill that simply states the government's views with respect to its own approach to child care. The bill itself would have no material impact on families and no material impact on the operations of the federal government, save for one thing. The one material change that would be brought about by this act is the establishment of a child care advisory council. This council would be paid and would consist of 10 to 18 members, with all members appointed by the government. Although the legislation says the council should reflect the diversity of Canada, it does not define what that means, and it certainly says anything about this council reflecting a diversity of opinion or experience. This council would not be elected and would thus have no democratic legitimacy. It would simply be a tool for the minister to appoint her friends, who would receive government largesse and give her advice, which would no doubt be consistent with her pre-existing opinions.
Instead of hiring and paying a council of the minister's good friends to reaffirm the things the government already believes, perhaps it should send these 10 to 18 people out to offer child care services to the many, many parents who still do not have access under its plan. That would be a much better use of resources than yet another Liberal advisory council.
On the substance of the child care issue itself, this is a subject that is deeply personal for me. I have five children, who range in age from 14 months to 10 years. Ten years ago, when Gianna was born, when I first met my daughter, I remember three overwhelming impressions. First, I have never felt the complete onset of love for another person so quickly. In most situations in life, love grows incrementally over time, but when one becomes a parent, a wall of love hits one in the face and overwhelms one completely. Second, I felt an overwhelming sense of responsibility. Bringing my daughter home, I was struck by the realization that this child had no other parents with whom we simply could drop her off when we got tired or did not know what to do. She was fully our responsibility, and for good. Third, as the weeks went on, I began to wonder what in the world I had done with all my free time before this child was born. Before having kids, I thought I was busy, but when she born, I realized I had had no understanding of what busy meant. Parenthood for me began with an overwhelming sense of love, responsibility and loss of time.
Children are expensive in terms of time and in terms of money. In a, sadly, too busy and too materialistic civilization, we count everything in terms of time and money, but these are not the things that really matter. It goes without saying that every minute and every dollar we have spent on our five beautiful children has been worth it. What, after all, could I possibly rather be doing? Children are amazing, and the measure of a good society is most fundamentally the degree to which it values and respects children, so, recognizing the immutable dignity and value of young children, the important question tonight is how a good society ought to provide for the care and education of children.
Parenthetically, it seems a lot of the government's discourse on child care starts from a different premise. When its members talk about child care, they start from what they think will be good for the economy or what they think would lead to increased workforce participation. These are fine things to talk about, but it seems to me to be starting at the wrong end. They always start by talking about what they think is good for adults instead of by asking what is good for children.
As I described, and as I think any parent will identify with, one naturally feels a deep and fierce unconditional love for one's children, which leads parents to want to sacrifice for whatever they think is best for their children. As such, I believe we should build systems of early learning and child care, and of education more generally, that always err on the side of deferring to parents and that leverage the deep, natural love parents have for their children. Do parents make mistakes? Absolutely. Parents get things wrong; I do especially, but in virtually all cases, we can count on parents to have a rectitude of intentions and a willingness to sacrifice for the sake of their children.
Many parents, myself included, choose to involve other people in the process of caring for their children. We involve grandparents, trusted friends and public and private institutions. There are very good reasons for parents to involve other people in the care of their children. Such care allows parents time to earn family income and to have necessary periods of rest, but it also exposes children to other people, experiences, ideas and role models.
I am not here to say what kind of child care or mix of approaches is best, but I would say that parents should be the ones making these decisions with sincere reference to their own consciences and with a love-driven evaluation of what is best for their children and their family. I trust parents to make these decisions. Therefore, I want to build a society and a child care model that allows parents to action the choices that they see are best for their children. If parents cannot access any external child care then we have limited the range of parental choice. If parents cannot afford to have one parent opt out of the workforce then we have also limited the range of parental choice. Right now we actually have both of these problems. We have parents feeling they need two incomes and not able to find desirable child care services.
We should be trying to build a society in which parents can freely make child care choices across the broadest range of options that reflect their own sincere evaluations without any kind of direct or subtle economic coercion to choose one option or another. Let us remove the child care gatekeepers and make it easier for parents to make the choices that they believe are right. A choice is not an end in and of itself but, given the diversity of children in families and the love that parents have for their children, letting parents make unfettered and uncoerced decisions is the best way to provide for the optimal outcomes for children.
While Conservatives have always championed choice in child care and have advocated different kinds of policies towards that end, Liberals have long preferred the one-size-fits-all model of state-subsidized and controlled traditional day care. Their approach has been to fund out-of-home day care centres, while regulating the fees that they can charge but, importantly, the Liberals have actually underfunded their own preferred model. The money cannot keep up with the big promises, even as out-of-control deficit spending already drives up inflation. Since the money cannot keep up with the big promises, we now have a situation in which some families have seen a short-term reduction in child care costs, but many families cannot access funded spaces and also, as a result of the regulated rates, many child care operators cannot afford to do the upkeep or expansion that is required.
Effectively, the government's approach has been to promise an increase in child care as a result of public funding, but instead they have pushed existing providers to lower prices without sufficient replacement funding and are thus, in the long term, undermining the operations of child care providers and threatening even the existing child care supply. The cost pressures that private child care operators are now facing will create a ticking time bomb in terms of actual child care availability as over time they will not be able to grow to keep up with demand and some will have to close.
Notably, there is no means testing associated with this Liberal program. While some parents are better off for now because they have access and some are worse off for now because they do not have access, we do not have any way of knowing if those who have the current access are the ones who needed the access the most.
This program is very poorly designed and even families who see themselves as benefiting in the short term should know that their child care access is at risk in the long term if operators are not able to access the capital that they need. A better alternative to this system would be to empower families and emphasize choice and flexibility without economic coercion, without funding some things and without using tax dollars from other families making different choices to fund families opting for traditional day care.
I just have one additional point I want to make before I wrap up.
Canada's child care policy should reflect the emerging technological reality. When my parents were raising us, my mother faced a sharp and essentially binary choice. Given the nature of her work, she could either continue to work at or near full time, or she could become a full-time stay-at-home parent. The binary of that choice was very harsh but, fortunately, today a smaller and smaller proportion of families face that kind of sharp binary. Technology has allowed an explosion in work-from-home and flexible work arrangements. It has also allowed the dramatic growth of so-called “momtrepreneurs”. My wife runs a web-based family medicine practice, offering appointments at the same odd hours that are most likely to be convenient for the women she serves. This would obviously have been unheard of a generation ago.
Workers and employers naturally have to assess the effectiveness of these kinds of flexible arrangements, but such arrangements do provide many obvious advantages, especially from the perspective of family life. People today still need child care, but they are more likely to want it in different places, at different times and in different ways, in accordance with evolving work relationships and their own considerations of the best interests of their children.
Work and work-life balance will continue to change, I believe, as technological developments continue and are deployed in different ways. The nine to five out-of-home child care model still serves some families, but an ever-declining proportion of the whole. That is why, more than ever, we need choice and flexibility today. Instead of a one-size-fits-all approach, built for a different technological reality, let us focus on empowering parents in 2023 to make choices that are best for their children and their families.
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Madam Speaker, the most important relationship of accountability for day care providers is to parents, in terms of whether they are meeting the needs of the families they are serving. If we are able to strengthen choice and flexibility and make sure parents have the resources they need, then we will have strong mechanisms of accountability in place.
As I said in my speech, we are seeing increasing diversity of the work-family balance that people are pursuing and that they are able to pursue because of all the technology. Let us put families in the driver's seat, recognizing that parents have love for their children and that they will make choices that fit with their situation and their kids.
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Madam Speaker, that question clearly exposed the massive philosophical gulf between Conservatives and New Democrats. New Democrats think that child care decisions should be made by a 10- to 18-person council, with no democratic legitimacy, appointed by the minister. She has confidence the minister is going to choose the best experts.
I think the best experts are parents. We should let parents be their own child care advisory council for their own kids and make their own decisions. We should focus on empowering parents to make such decisions.
The member is now heckling me about the Harper plan. The Harper plan was fantastic. We gave money directly to parents, and parents had more resources—
Some hon. members: Oh, oh!
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Madam Speaker, the universal child care benefit was so popular and so successful that the Liberals renamed it, claimed it was their idea and ran on it in every election that they have been remotely successful in.
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Madam Speaker, this member is from the party that gave millions to Loblaws to buy new refrigerators; the government loves sending money to the rich and famous.
The Conservative government introduced a universal child care benefit that was taxable, which meant that those who had higher incomes had to pay higher levels of tax on the money they got. We can quibble about the amounts or the proportions—
Some hon. members: Oh, oh!
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Madam Speaker, I must say that I am immensely enjoying this. I wonder if there is unanimous consent to extend my questions and comments for another five minutes.
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Madam Speaker, the members opposite may want to quibble about the proportions, but the point is that in 2015, when the Liberals formed government, their policy was to rename and adjust the proportions on a universal direct-to-parents subsidy. They took our policy because it was so popular.
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- Jun/1/23 12:01:49 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, I rise tonight to speak about the Trudeau Foundation. It is timely that this question has come up because Canada has been rocked by this foreign interference scandal. The Trudeau Foundation has been at the centre of it, and the public accounts committee, of which I am a member, has been trying to get to the bottom of what happened, but has been repeatedly stonewalled by the Liberals and their friends at the foundation.
To set the stage a little bit, as Canada has been rocked by this foreign interference scandal, a foreign government interfering repeatedly in Canadian democratic elections, Liberals have repeatedly tried to cover this up by turning to so-called independent people to investigate this, such as people from the Trudeau Foundation, not just once but twice. The government asked people from the Trudeau Foundation to investigate the problem of foreign interference, even though the Trudeau Foundation itself had been subject to foreign interference.
The Trudeau Foundation received a massive donation from a CCP-affiliated individual, who we know about, and it said that it had returned the money, even when they had not returned the money. Conservatives on the public accounts committee said that we needed to get to the bottom of what happened to the Trudeau Foundation, the foreign interference that it had been subject to, even while the government asked people from the Trudeau Foundation to investigate.
The call for an investigation from the public accounts committee responded to particular problems created by the structure of the Trudeau Foundation, which is a Frankenstein hybrid between public and private. It is a public institution in many respects. It is tied in with the Trudeau family. The Prime Minister remains a member of the foundation. At the same time, it is organized in a sense as a private organization. It is both public and private, and this creates big problems for holding it accountable. The Auditor General has said that she cannot study private donations that go to the Trudeau Foundation, as it is not part of her mandate. The CRA was asked to investigate, but it cannot talk about any of this.
Liberals opposed our motion initially in the public accounts committee to investigate it. Eventually, they agreed to allow two meetings on this, but the public accounts committee continues to be stonewalled. We have had virtually no witnesses agree to testify. Conservatives have tried to summon witnesses who will not appear, and that includes David Johnston, but Liberals have tried to block that. We have tried to request additional documents from the CRA that would allow us to do our work, but Liberals have been, for an extended period of time, filibustering our request for documents.
At the core of this is the fact that David Johnston will not testify. David Johnston, the Prime Minister's good friend and ski buddy, has been named the so-called special rapporteur for foreign interference and is affiliated with the Trudeau Foundation. He has written a report on foreign interference that, surprise, surprise, makes no mention of the Trudeau Foundation. Supposedly, he is looking into foreign interference, but there is no mention of the Trudeau Foundation, of which David Johnston was a part. He should testify, and he should explain that.
We have a situation today where David Johnston, the Prime Minister's special rapporteur, who refused a request by a majority of the House of Commons to resign, is refusing to appear before the public accounts committee. The reality is that David Johnston has shown a dangerous disdain for our institution. When Parliament asks a person to resign from a public position, the least they could do is show up to testify about what their activities have been. The Trudeau Foundation has been involved in foreign interference, and it has been subject to foreign interference, but it is not mentioned in his report.
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- Jun/1/23 12:08:25 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, that was the kind of unmitigated nonsense the House has come to expect in this situation, unfortunately.
I would submit to the member he should read the annual report of the Trudeau Foundation, which notes the membership of the foundation and which notes that the Prime Minister remains a member of the foundation. It is in the last annual report. There are fewer than 30 members. A substantial number of those members are appointed by either the Trudeau family or the Minister of Industry, and this foundation received $125 million from the government.
I do not dispute the foundation aspires to provide scholarships to students, but the member should not dispute the fact there was a massive injection of foreign donations to the foundation when the government took office, and that there was a close ongoing relationship between the government, the Trudeau family and this foundation.
The core point I raised in my original question and will raise again is the following. If all this is great work, then why the secrecy? Why will the people from the Trudeau Foundation not show up? Why are Liberals filibustering our motion to try to get documents? If it is all above board, why the secrecy?
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- Jun/1/23 12:09:31 a.m.
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You are filibustering on public accounts.
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