- Member of Parliament
- Member of Parliament
- Conservative
- Cypress Hills—Grasslands
- Saskatchewan
- Voting Attendance: 67%
- Expenses Last Quarter: $112,746.42
- Government Page
Madam Speaker, the member is absolutely right. If we look at a lot of the day care spaces that are the beneficiaries of this program, they are largely in urban centres. Because the majority of private facilities are in rural communities, quite often it is the small-town co-operative that is left out. People are relying on grandma and relying on their aunts and uncles or friends down the road to take care of their kids for them, and this bill does not recognize that.
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Madam Speaker, obviously I support livable wages. I also support an economy where people can afford to live without having to be massively topped up and subsidized by the government. People should be able to have paycheques that actually reward them for the work they are doing.
I also said in my speech, though, that mothers or stay-at-home fathers, and it does not matter which one, are working 24-7 parenting. Whether it is the mother or the father, it is a 24-7 job. I know that my kids, when they wake up with a fever or something like that, are not calling for dad; they are calling for mom. Moms are on call 24-7. It is the hardest but most rewarding job there can be on this earth, and the government fails to recognize that.
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Madam Speaker, I think it is clause 7 of the bill that talks about funding, but it only talks about the not-for-profit care providers. There is no provision for moms who decide to stay at home and raise their kids. That is the problem.
What actions are the Liberals taking? I have listened to their speeches. I have not for a single speech, ever since second reading, seen one of them get up and talk about the value and importance of a parent being at home with their kids. It could be a father. It could be that the mother is the primary earner, and that is fine; no one is begrudging that. The point is that if somebody decides to stay at home with their kids, there is zero commitment from the government to make sure those people can actually afford to do that, even though a huge percentage of the population would like to do that but cannot because of the predicament the government has put them in.
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Madam Speaker, it is an honour to once again be able to rise in the House on behalf of the great people of southwest Saskatchewan.
As I kick off my speech tonight, there is a core principle I really want to get at, and that is about trust. When I speak in this House, I like to ask how much trust the government has built with Canadians and whether Canadians can actually trust what the government is doing.
Before I get into the meat of it, I would really like to talk about the actual cost. We hear a lot from the Liberals about how this is $10-a-day day care. I recognize there is a benefit to people who are currently in the system, who will be paying less up front because of the program. I am not going to deny that and I am not going to say it is not a benefit to people who are in the program and are already benefiting from it. That is great for those people.
However, a lot of people email my office and routinely ask how much this program is actually going to cost. What we do know is that over five years the Liberals have set aside $30 billion to implement this program, so that is the cost we are aware of. We heard others, through many speeches tonight in this place, about the additional costs that are starting to already creep into the system. This is the cost of meals on top of the fees people are going to be paying up front. We are already hearing of extra costs that will be burdened onto the system.
That does not even get into the fact this system we are talking about here tonight is not going to build much in the way of new spaces. It is not going to provide new access to people, which, being from Saskatchewan, and particularly being from rural Saskatchewan, to me is the crux of the debate when we talk about day care.
We know day care is a universal need. It does not matter if one is from urban or rural Canada, from Saskatchewan or Ontario, from Toronto, Swift Current, Frontier, Leader or Maple Creek, one needs access to day care. There are many different ways people realize this. There are a lot of different programs out there. Some of them are private, some of them are run through co-operatives and some of them are just in-home systems. There might be a person who has chosen to be a stay-at-home parent, and other people looking for child care might bring their child to that person and have that person provide the service to them.
A lot of what we are finding out is that this bill would not do anything for those people who are in those situations. In fact, in Saskatchewan, only 10% of kids from the age of zero to 12, whether they are full-time or part-time, currently have access to day care. From zero to six, which is what the agreement signed between the Province of Saskatchewan and the federal government covers, right now that access number I believe is a bit under 18%.
Saskatchewan is a bit of a unique case. I would be willing to say we are the most rural province in this country. I think that is a fair thing for me to say. We have so many small towns. We are a very spread out province, so the needs of people are vastly different in rural versus urban. The access to spaces is different as is access to workers. One of the fundamental issues we have is the access to workers to be able to fill these positions. That is one of the key points we have.
I did a town hall probably about a year and a half ago or maybe two years ago in the town of Maple Creek. A lot of the business owners came together and arranged this. They wanted to have me out to talk to them about what is affecting their businesses. Part of it had to do with the pandemic at the time with the programs and different things, but we also talked about things that were outside of the pandemic.
One of those issues was day care. Multiple business owners have told me they cannot hire the workers they need. In fact, there are many people who came to Maple Creek, interviewed for the job and really wanted to move to Maple Creek, but because there was actually no day care available to them, these people passed on that job and passed on moving to Maple Creek.
To me, Maple Creek is one of the greatest towns in this country. It is a phenomenal place. It does economic development really well. On the cost of living, one can get affordable housing there. There is a great school there and it is close to Cypress Hills. It is close to some of the bigger centres both in Alberta and Saskatchewan. It is not terribly far away, so it is a great location and a great place to raise kids, but there are people who have a young family who are choosing to not move to Maple Creek simply because they cannot find day care.
When I talk about trust, repeatedly we do not see the government working to build trust with rural Canadians. To me, that is a problem and is again where this bill misses the mark.
I talked earlier about the agreement between Saskatchewan and the federal government. Part of the agreement that they signed only provides the subsidy for kids aged zero to six. I have a had a mother reach out, talking about both her and her husband and the hours they work. They need day care before and after school, and the agreement actually does not cover people in that situation. Therefore, those people are being left out of the picture here, yet in a community like Swift Current, that is actually a big chunk of people who are trying to utilize day care spots.
I also want to talk a bit about my own story. My wife and I have three kids, and they are fantastic. They are 12, 10 and eight years old. When my wife and I had our first child, we had a great conversation, talking about what our goals as parents were. One of our goals was something that we even talked about when we were first married; it was that my wife wanted to be a stay-at-home mom. This meant that we had to plan out a few things. We had to figure out how we were going to make that work and what that was going to look like. We had to make some big decisions, such as where we were going to live, where we could afford to live and what kind of vehicle we were going to drive.
We had to make a lot of sacrifices. For example, a lot of our friends would go on these big, elaborate trips, and we never did that. For us, a trip was driving from Swift Current to Saskatoon. That was our summer vacation, but that was because it was all we could afford with the goal of having my wife be a stay-at-home mom raising our kids. That just meant that disposable income was not necessarily there. Those were some of the sacrifices we had to make. However, the bill before us would not have any provisions for people who are choosing to stay at home and raise their own kids.
As we added more kids to the mix, it definitely changed that dynamic. My wife was a stay-at-home mom from 2011 all the way up until about 2019. Then, she was first able to go back to work, because our kids were old enough. All three of them were in school at that point in time, and she was able to find some part-time work where she could work during the school day but be home when school was over, so she could be there for the kids when they got home.
I recognize that this reality is not available for everybody, but there is a lot of sacrifice that is required to do that. Therefore, I think it is really important that we talk about the government respecting families that have made that decision. I have listened to Liberal speeches at report stage here and also at second reading, and to paraphrase them, what I heard repeatedly from that side and from some of the other opposition parties was that women are only of value if they are working; they are not of value if they are staying at home. I think that is completely bonkers. That is absolutely ridiculous.
Being a mother is a 24-hour, seven-day-a-week job. There is no break from it. As husbands, we come in and try to do what we can, but there is no replacing a mom in the house. My wife and many other moms we have talked to talk about the commitment it takes, how much work and effort go into it, and how it is more tiring and more gruelling being a stay-at-home mother and being with the kids compared with going to work. However, it is also more rewarding.
I recognize that some people are dedicated to their profession, and they have chosen that professional life, which is awesome. It is fantastic that they are doing that, and we want them to be able to do that. They should have that choice and the ability to do that, but the signalling we are getting the government is that a woman who decides to stay at home has no inherent value, because she is not working. That is the vibe we get from the government. That is the message it is signalling, and that is wrong. The value a stay-at-home parent has, even if the father does stay at home with the kids, is extremely valuable. Society, the kids we raise and the system generally, at large, all benefit from that.
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