SoVote

Context: House Hansard - 284 - Feb/16/24

Feb/16/24 12:56:53 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the Conservatives change their tone from one speech to the next. Earlier today, we were treated to an episode of Father Knows Best, where the woman stays at home and the man goes to work. There are lots of different approaches, mentalities and ways of doing things. I do not think that we should judge other people's choices. That being said, the early childhood education program has proven its worth in Quebec. It has allowed many mothers, often single mothers, to pursue their careers and professional goals. It is also a choice that deserves respect. We should consider extending the same opportunity to all women and parents outside Quebec, so that they can enjoy the same benefits as women and parents in Quebec. Would my colleague not agree that we can let people choose to have one parent stay home and care for the children while the other goes to work, but also offer everyone the option, to the extent possible, of allowing both parents to go to work while their children receive proper care from specialized educators doing an excellent job?

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Mrs. Tracy Gray

Feb/16/24 12:58:07 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, certainly it is all about what is best for families. Every family will be different, whatever its choice is going to be and whatever its situation is. I know there have been a lot of references to Quebec's system being the model. In fact Quebec has a different system than other provinces have, but I do recall hearing testimony at committee that said there are still a lot of children on wait-lists, even in Quebec. Therefore we need to work toward having the maximum amount of availability and flexibility, not only within the child care system but also for families.

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Mr. Adam van Koeverden (Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Environment and Climate Change and to the Minister of Sport and Physical Activity, Lib.)

Feb/16/24 12:58:53 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I thank my hon. colleague for her work on this file. I have a couple of questions regarding contradictions I have heard coming from the other side on the topic of child care. The Conservatives will acknowledge a worker shortage and will acknowledge the need for choice, but they will skip over, gloss over or perhaps just not acknowledge the fact that the program is directly responsible for a couple of things: It is filling the gap for a lot of sectors that were looking for workers, and it has also led to the highest-ever female participation in the economy, which is something worth celebrating because it is all about choice and affordability for families. Therefore, will the member opposite not acknowledge that our changes to the Canada child benefit have benefited families greatly from an affordability perspective, and that the early learning and child care program right across the country, which was negotiated with each province for individual differences, has led to great affordability changes for families right across this country?

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Mrs. Tracy Gray

Feb/16/24 12:59:55 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, first of all, what the member is referencing is not factually correct. Statistics Canada actually shows that female participation is down, so I am not sure what old statistics he might be looking at. We just have to look at the headlines over the last month. What we have seen is that the child care system is in crisis and that the policies the government has put together have not made a substantial difference. In many ways, when we look at the numbers, we see they are actually worse. I will also note that I just find it incredibly interesting that the spokesperson whom the government has speaking to this very important child care bill today, which basically affects families and especially women in the workforce, is someone who does not have children himself.

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Ms. Lori Idlout (Nunavut, NDP)

Feb/16/24 1:00:56 p.m.
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Uqaqtittiji, from what I understood, the member was saying that the bill would discriminate against a certain type of care. I wonder whether she could point to where in the bill it talks about this discrimination. What I understand is that the bill states there needs to be a prioritization for public over private child care, and that it would not prevent any other care from being addressed by the bill.

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Mrs. Tracy Gray

Feb/16/24 1:01:30 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, there are a lot of regions in the country, especially in rural areas, that may not have government-run or large not-for-profit centres, and in fact a lot of care providers are in smaller entrepreneurial-type situations and focus on cultural needs. Therefore there is a huge gap that this would not address.

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Mr. Dane Lloyd (Sturgeon River—Parkland, CPC)

Feb/16/24 1:02:04 p.m.
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Re: Bill C-35

Mr. Speaker, I am proud to rise to speak on Bill C-35. I want to start by addressing some of the amendments that were put forward by the other place. In the initial part of this bill, there was no reference to official language minority communities, and it was Conservative amendments, made during the clause-by-clause review at the Standing Committee on Human Rights, that introduced these safeguards for our very important minority-language communities. We know that early child care is a crucial period for language learning and for the identity development of children. Access to French language early child care services is so necessary as a condition for the transmission of languages that have been transmitted by families over generations. Several examples demonstrate the necessity of including these provisions in the bill. In Alberta, out of the so-called 1,500 new day care spaces announced by the government, only 19 were being allocated for francophones. That constitutes only 0.013% of all spaces, despite francophones representing 2% of the population of Alberta. It is important to protect these communities and their part in Canadian heritage that helped to build this nation, whether they be francophones in Alberta or anglophones in Quebec. I want to talk about the great francophone heritage of my community. A gentleman, Ben Van De Walle, who is the son of the late, great member of Parliament from my area, Walter Van De Walle, who represented the great francophone communities of Morinville, Rivière Qui Barre and Legal. We have a very strong francophone identity in Sturgeon River—Parkland, and the Conservative amendments would go a long way to preserving our French-language heritage in our region. Now that I have addressed these amendments, I want to talk about what I see as the unravelling disaster we are seeing because of the Liberal government's failed approach to child care. The proposed legislation and the current agreements made by the government with the provinces are failing to provide universal access to affordable child care and would cost far more than the government has estimated. Small businesses are the backbone of our society, and the predominantly female entrepreneurs who are courageously trying to build businesses and build their livelihoods through providing child care are under attack by the Liberal government. The excessive red tape and regulations of the Liberal government are preventing day care entrepreneurs from opening new spaces and expanding their businesses. They cannot get the funding because the government will not fund new spaces. This is making child care less accessible, and it is all because of the Liberal government imposing a one-size-fits-all model on a very complex sector of our economy. In the words of some child care operators, the Liberal government is essentially expropriating and nationalizing their businesses. I will use the words of one operator from Fort McMurray who said that, basically, they will “have no business” under the Liberal plan. One of the government's tired talking points is its insistence that it has evidence-based policies. A more appropriate term would be evidence that is selective that corresponds with its ideological agenda. Let us go over some of the facts. As of the statistics published on February 6, just a short time ago, 77% of high-income parents have access to child care, and this compares to only 41% of low-income parents who have access to child care. It is a yawning gap. I find it somewhat comedic that a Bloc MP earlier talked about how great this program is for single mothers. The University of British Columbia did a study in that province, in which it contacted all the child care centres to find out how many low-income single mothers were benefiting from this program. Across the entire province of British Columbia, it found 17 who were benefiting. There were only 17 single mothers benefiting, in the province of British Columbia, from the Liberals' failed day care policy. Since 2019, the number of children under the age of five in child care has fallen under the Liberal government by 118,000 spaces. This is a decrease of 8.5% nationally. There was 46.4% of parents who reported difficulty in finding child care in 2023, which is up from 36.4% of parents in 2019. This is a problem that existed before the government's policy, but it is a problem that is only getting worse under the government's failed policy. In fact, I personally know people who can only get one of their two children in child care, and they have to stay home to take care of the other children. These people are nurses and other skilled workers who cannot pursue their careers because the current government has made it more difficult for them to access any child care. It does not matter if it says it is affordable. If I could get 50¢ gas at the gas station, that would be great, but if there was never any gas at the gas station, it would not matter how affordable the price was. Why is child care so expensive? We know that the key costs for child care, according to the operators, in order of magnitude, are labour costs, the cost of the facilities and the cost of food and other supplies. Child care is a labour-intensive operation. The cost to create a space that is appropriate for children and the accompanying mortgage, rental costs, insurance costs and maintenance costs are extremely significant. Finally, the cost of food and other supplies has increased dramatically under this inflationary government. What is a factor in all three of these costs? It is high inflation, which has increased the cost of labour, rent, mortgages, insurance and food at the local store. The price of food has gone up by 12%. Child care operators are not immune from these costs. They do not get some special discount at the store because they are child care operators. The fact is that the Liberal government, through its inflationary policies, is driving up the costs to care for children in Canada. At the same time that it is driving up all of these costs, it is shortchanging child care operators by only giving them a 3% annual increase in their funding. They cannot support children when food prices are going up 12%, when wage costs are going up, and when mortgage costs are doubling and tripling, and rental costs are tripling. They cannot support these children with only a 3% increase from the government. The Liberal government is expecting these predominantly female business owners to eat these costs. Consequently, it is causing them to shut down their business, to reduce spaces and restrict access to child care for Canadians. In the child care sector in Alberta, we are already seeing the consequences of this inflationary agenda. Last month, parents in my riding were unable to get child care, because of closures in protest of these Liberal policies. Operators have described these agreements as underfunded and inflexible, and say that they threaten the financial viability of operators by placing fee caps and other restrictions on facilities that are struggling with these increased costs. The owner of My Happy Place Daycare, in Stony Plain, Alberta said: Right now, we are stuck between a rock and a hard place...Just being closed for the day has a huge impact. Imagine what would happen if day care centres across the province started closing their doors because they're going bankrupt. I fear that because of these Liberals' ideological approach to child care, that is a future that we are seeing coming very quickly. The proposed solution for inflation by proponents of even more government intervention in early child care is, no surprise, more inflationary spending. The government has tried to raise the wages of child care workers, but this is putting us into a wage spiral, because other groups that are competing for child care workers, such as school boards, are also raising their wages in order to compete for these workers. In one case I spoke to a mother who worked in child care previously, before the government's policies were in place. She worked in child care because she received a significant discount for her own child's care at that facility. Once the government brought in its policies, her day care operator got rid of the discount, as it was not necessary anymore. She lost her incentive to work in child care. She has left that sector. Now there is one less child care worker. 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 are skyrocketing after eight years of the NDP-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 only charge families a fixed price, there is no way these operators can make up the difference other than by reducing other costs. What are these costs? It is food and craft supplies. Do we really want to talk about reducing the quality of the food and the quality of the programming for our children, just so these day care operators could make up the costs of skyrocketing mortgages and rents, because the Liberal government will not support them? What is actually happening now is that they are just choosing to shut down instead. They do not want to provide subpar care for children under the Liberal policies, so they are just shutting down altogether. It is terrible 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 has already promised. The first option is unfair. We cannot prevent people from accessing child care. Yet, what we are seeing is that it is predominantly middle- and high-income families that are getting access, and low-income families are being left out. This is backed up by research from the Parliamentary Budget Officer, which reported that the Liberal plan is not sufficient to meet the demand for child care. In fact, it will fall short in providing spaces for 182,000 children. I said earlier that we have lost 118,000 spaces since 2019. The Liberal government is well on its way to meeting at least one of its goals, which is the reduction of child care spaces. It has reduced this number by 118,000, and the Parliamentary Budget Officer says it is going to 182,000 under the Liberal policies. That is what we are already seeing in Alberta. Operators are struggling to stay open. They are closing down. They are reducing spaces. It is lowering accessibility for families. We cannot continue going down this road. We need a new way to move forward. We need to support all child care operators, regardless of the model that they choose. We need to provide not only affordability for families but accessibility for families, and we are not getting it under this failed NDP-Liberal policy.

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Mr. Mark Gerretsen (deputy House leader of the government, Lib.)

Feb/16/24 1:12:21 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I noticed that the member brought up grocery prices. I am curious as to how surprised he was when he found out that a paid lobbyist regularly attends his caucus meetings in order to provide strategy to the Leader of the Opposition, somebody who is directly profiting from the crisis that people are faced with, the inflation as it relates to groceries. If he would rather not answer that question, then I would just encourage him to pivot to something else.

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Mr. Dane Lloyd

Feb/16/24 1:12:54 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I am not afraid to answer that question, because, after eight years of this Liberal-NDP government, I am surprised that Loblaws even needs lobbyists, considering how much this government has given them: free refrigerators paid for by taxpayers and skyrocketing increases to grocery prices. This government has been in the pocket of big grocery stores. As I said in my speech, it is the children who are suffering. The child care operators cannot afford to provide quality food for our children under the Liberals' failed policies.

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Ms. Marie-Hélène Gaudreau (Laurentides—Labelle, BQ)

Feb/16/24 1:13:43 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, my question is very simple. Did I understand correctly? Will the Conservatives vote against the bill on the pretext that a program like this is not perfect? They will not bother to enshrine in law something that has worked for Quebec for 25 years and that could be good for others. Is that correct?

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Mr. Dane Lloyd

Feb/16/24 1:14:12 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, let me be clear. Conservatives are not against the principle of affordable and accessible child care for children. There is no issue with that. The question is, how do we provide affordable and accessible child care? There needs to be a balance. Clearly, under this government's policy of so-called $10-a-day child care, which nobody can access, particularly low-income families, accessibility has become a real problem that it is not dealing with. We know from the province of Quebec that there are hundreds of thousands of children who are not able to access subsidized child care. It is a real problem in the province of Quebec. It is a problem across the country, and we need to deal with this accessibility problem. Without accessibility, affordability does not matter.

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Mrs. Cathay Wagantall (Yorkton—Melville, CPC)

Feb/16/24 1:15:03 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, my colleague spoke to the issues that still surround this day care program from the perspective of the people who are trying to use it. I know that in my riding we have one community, as an example, that is rural, with a lot of people who work shift work. There are three businesses there, run by women, that do not have the opportunity to get the provisions that other organizations do. Can he explain, possibly, to the House why it is that the Liberal government is against day cares in which women have the opportunity not only to care for children, which we are innately good at overall, but also to run a very profitable and successful business doing that?

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Mr. Dane Lloyd

Feb/16/24 1:15:51 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, dealing with the challenges in rural communities and raising children in rural communities is very important. I think it has been left out by the government. I want to be clear. It is predominantly small and medium-sized enterprises that are suffering under the Liberals' day care policies. The big box day cares, the Starbucks of day cares, are not suffering. In fact, they are actually benefiting, because when the small and medium-sized players are going bankrupt under these government policies, it is the bigger businesses with the deeper pockets that are able to make the biggest gains. What we see is that, in rural communities, these big box day cares do not want to set up. We are not only seeing an accessibility problem in the cities, where people cannot access care; we are seeing a complete child care desert in our rural areas. That is clearly not acceptable in a country that values its rural regions.

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Mr. Matthew Green (Hamilton Centre, NDP)

Feb/16/24 1:16:58 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I have heard the arguments from our Conservative counterparts, always talking about the state of women-owned businesses. What they seem to fail to recognize is that this sector of the care economy also depends on many female workers, yet this member of the Conservative Party talked about a wage spiral, as though inflating wages, increasing the wages of workers, is somehow a bad thing. Is it his economic theory that this sector depends on the exploitation of women workers in order to provide affordable child care?

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Mr. Dane Lloyd

Feb/16/24 1:17:25 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I think some of the member's outrage is somewhat misplaced. I am not against people getting the best possible wage they can negotiate to do the job they want to do, but we have to recognize that we are in an economy where there is high demand for care workers. We have demand for early childhood educators in the school sector and in the day care sector, and when wages go up in one sector, they need to go up in the other sector. What we are doing is creating a spiral, but we are not addressing—

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The Acting Speaker (Mr. Gabriel Ste-Marie)

Feb/16/24 1:17:56 p.m.
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I am sorry to interrupt the hon. member. We are way over time. The hon. parliamentary secretary on a point of order.

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Mr. Adam van Koeverden

Feb/16/24 1:18:05 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, in response to the member for Kelowna—Lake Country's suggestion that since I do not have children I am a bad advocate or spokesperson for early learning and child care, I would like to ask for unanimous consent to table evidence of Canada's record labour force participation rate for women. Some hon. members: No.

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Mr. Philip Lawrence (Northumberland—Peterborough South, CPC)

Feb/16/24 1:19:02 p.m.
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Re: Bill C-35

Mr. Speaker, we are rising today to talk about amendments to Bill C-35. All 338 of us value child care and the tremendous work of moms, dads, grandparents and other individuals who love and take care of children from coast to coast to coast. Before I even commence my speech, I would just like to thank all the parents and child care providers from coast to coast, whether they are a grandma at the end of the street, a dad staying home to make sure their kid gets the love they want or a provider at a licensed child care centre working an extra half-hour or 45 minutes to wait for parents who are held up at work. Really, there is no more critical work than helping our children develop and become that next great generation. I want to talk a bit about statistics, because they were mentioned earlier in the debate. When it comes to child care, the current stats from the Fraser Institute's report published on February 6 are that 77% of high-income parents report that they have access to child care, whereas 41% of low-income families have access to child care. It really strikes me that this legislation does not have any particular dedicated support for those who are most vulnerable. Those children are not only fighting the challenges that all children are fighting, whether that is bullying or the challenges of growing up; they are also fighting poverty, and this legislation has no support for those children who are having to brave those incredibly difficult challenges that poverty brings with it. While we are giving 77% of high-income parents access to child care, we are only giving it to 41%, which is less than half, of those children who are fighting through all the additional struggles in addition to the challenges of poverty. Also mentioned before was the labour participation of women. According to the same report, in September 2023, it was at 61.5%. Compare that to 2015 under Prime Minister Harper and the Conservatives, it was at 61.7%, so the participation of women in the labour market has declined. Those are the numbers on that, so hopefully that ends the debate right there. On top of that, according to another Fraser Institute study published on February 6, the employment rate of female youth is on a strong downward trend since February 2023. The cumulative decline of 4.2% over the period is a huge number. That is hundreds and thousands of young women who are not getting into the labour force. This is the lowest it has been since May 2000, excluding the pandemic, according to the labour force survey of January 2024. This program is, of course, predicated on the fact that it would enable parents, both men and women, but if we call a spade a spade it is predominantly women, get back into the workforce, if they so choose, and the numbers just do not bear that out. Some more numbers for members are 47% of infants younger than one year and not in child care were on a wait list, increasing from 38% in 2022—

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The Assistant Deputy Speaker (Mrs. Carol Hughes)

Feb/16/24 1:23:06 p.m.
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The hon. parliamentary secretary is rising on a point of order.

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Mr. Adam van Koeverden

Feb/16/24 1:23:08 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I just asked to table record labour force participation rates, and I was denied by the Conservatives, so I would ask that, if the member opposite—

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