- Member of Parliament
- Member of the Joint Interparliamentary Council
Whip of the New Democratic Party
Member of the panel of chairs for the legislative committees
- NDP
- Edmonton Strathcona
- Alberta
- Voting Attendance: 67%
- Expenses Last Quarter: $141,604.97
- Government Page
- Jun/8/23 7:46:38 p.m.
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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.
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Mr. Speaker, it is always a great pleasure to stand in this place to represent the constituents of Edmonton Strathcona. It is my first time standing this session, so I want to wish everyone a late happy new and welcome them back to the House of Commons.
I am quite delighted that I get an opportunity to stand today to contribute to this debate. It is one of the most fundamental pieces of legislation that we could be looking at. Providing affordable, accessible, high-quality child care for families across this country is so very important. Many people here have talked about their own personal experiences. I am a mother. I have two children, Maclean and Keltie, and they are perfect, as all our children are. They are 15 and 17 now, so they no longer need child care. I will have even more to say when the debate is on post-secondary tuition.
I remember the challenges of trying to find child care, and trying to ensure the child care we had found was adequate. We were so lucky that we found spots for our children at Fulton Child Care Centre in Edmonton Strathcona. It has fabulous staff, and they worked incredibly hard to provide a learning environment for my children. We were very lucky. However, well before I was involved in politics, I recognized the challenges that faced families, and disproportionately faced women, as they looked for child care spaces.
There was one child care centre I had applied to for my children when they were young, and I got a phone message when one was eight years old to tell me that there was a space available. That is how long the waiting list had been for that child care centre. Of course, we need to make sure that child care is accessible. This is such an important piece of work for this Parliament to do.
We have to look back over the 52 years since the 1970 Royal Commission on the Status of Women to see how long people have been fighting for child care in this country. We need to take time today to acknowledge those advocates who worked tirelessly to ensure that this became a reality. We have to look at the labour movement, the champions like those in the CLC, the Canadian Union of Public Employees, and the Alberta Federation of Labour. So many of our labour movements have been calling for child care for a very long time.
I also want to thank the leaders within the New Democratic Party because we, as New Democrats, have also been calling for child care for decades. Ed Broadbent was one of the very first members of Parliament to bring this forward. Jack Layton spoke extensively on the need for child care and how it would fundamentally change the lives of families, particularly women, across this country. More recently, the member for London—Fanshawe and Olivia Chow both brought forward legislation, in the 41st Parliament and the 40th Parliament respectively, to bring forward child care. This legislation is built on the extraordinary and hard work that has been done by advocates within the NDP and throughout the country.
This was a recommendation in the 1970 Royal Commission on the Status of Women. It should never have taken so long to make this law. It should not have taken a pandemic. It should not have taken the corporate sector to say that there would be no recovery from COVID without child care. We should have been able to hear why this was so important for gender equality much sooner than this.
I want to talk about the Alberta context as well. Some of the information is coming from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives on child care costs. Before $10-a-day child care, in Edmonton the median monthly child care fee for preschool-aged children was $925, while the median monthly fee for infants was $1,050 a month and $950 for toddlers.
This is important to keep in mind, because in my riding of Edmonton Strathcona, parents were paying, on average, over $1,000 a month. Then the UCP in our province decided to cut what Rachel Notley had put in place, which was a program that had reduced child poverty in half: the $25 child care. That pilot program was cut.
In Alberta, we have a desperate need for child care. We have a desperate need for investment in child care. In fact, I will read a very important quote from Bradley Lafortune from Public Interest Alberta. He said, “This is a once-in-a-generation chance to make a massive difference in the lives of so many of Alberta's citizens. We need to work together to ensure that this agreement is a step towards a universal system of child care that truly works for everyone.”
I do not have quite enough time to tell members all of the ways that I think this would impact women and families across this country, but I will say that we will work within committee. Our party is very interested in improving the reporting and accountability, improving the working conditions for workers and making sure that there is a workforce strategy to make sure that we do have enough people who can take that spot.
There is a lot of work we can do, and I do not think this is legislation is perfect, but I am so happy that it has come forward. I am so happy that we are going to have a universal child care program in this country. It is vitally important, and it is very overdue.
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