EXCERPTS
The Liberal party's new leader, Stephane Dion, believes "We need child-care facilities to provide ... parents with real choice." As Mr. Dion sees it, his party's top-down $5-billion childcare plan is a matter of both "social justice" and "sound economics." It is one of the ways the new Liberal leader is seeking to distinguish himself from Stephen Harper, who Mr. Dion said on Friday "thinks child care is delivered through the mailbox."
Yet polls consistently show that Canadian families do not want what Mr. Dion and his party are promising. The Institute of Marriage and Family Canada commissioned one such poll in spring 2005. The results were overwhelming: 80% of Canadians prefer a parent stay home with the children.
These results echo an earlier survey conducted by the Vanier Institute in 2003, which showed that parents' first choice for child care is a spouse, then parents, then extended family, then home-based child care and only then, institutional child care.
Why the Liberal push, then, for a national plan? Internationally, the impetus comes from the Paris-based Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), which bemoans the lack of "regulated" care in Canada. A 2004 report, written in part by Toronto-based childcare advocate Martha Friendly, ranked Canada's child care access as "low" and made the call for "significant energies and funding ... to be invested in the field to create a universal system." The same report states: "In several countries, a majority of under-threes are in unregulated family daycare for at least part of the day."
By "unregulated family daycare," the report's authors are referring to what others quaintly call "family members." This choice of terminology reflects the unconscious bias of those seeking to force state-run daycare down our throats: They see the state as being better at raising children than a child's own flesh and blood.
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When Canada's Conservatives made the child care allowance one of their five main policy planks, its success came as a surprise. The Conservative idea of giving parents money for them to spend themselves may not be perfect. But Dion and his Liberal party have chosen a plan that is undoubtedly much worse. It's hard for anyone, no matter their political stripe, to see state-run daycare as a form of "social justice," "sound economics" or, most importantly, being in the best interests of children
- reprinted from the National Post