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Here we go again. Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff announces he'll revive the national child-care program that former prime minister Paul Martin's government advocated, and all those opposed conjure up visions of Soviet day-care centres with rows of glassy-eyed toddlers sitting on their potties under the glare of a bare light bulb.
Columnist Kelly McParland, writing in the National Post this week, and accusing Ignatieff of "imposing a sweeping national program that gets children away from their parents at the earliest opportunity, loving or otherwise" typifies this view. Or as someone summed it up in an online comment, "Turn over our children to be raised by the government." A Herald letter writer today suggests that those with the correct view that parents should stay home with their kids, should vote Conservative.
This kind of nonsense only polarizes the issue. Nobody will be taking children away from their parents -- the parents will enrol their kids in day care because they have to go to work. Nor are the day cares run by the government. The program, as envisioned by Martin's government, and as explained to me by then-Alberta Children's Services minister Iris Evans, meant that the federal government would provide money to each province which would use it to fund child-care spaces in the way it sees fit.
Just where is the Soviet bogeyman in that?
And those who think the Liberals are the socialist devil incarnate with their program should recall that in 1984, Brian Mulroney vowed that "Canada shall, under a Progressive Conservative government, have an effective national system of child care." It was Jean Chretien who put the kibosh on such a program in 1998 because of Canada's debt load.
Once those who bristle with outrage at the thought of a national child-care program -- even though they haven't a clue what it is -- have had their say, then the warring factions of mothers on each side will inevitably weigh in.
I can hardly wait. The stay-at-home moms argue that every working mother is neglectful, self-indulgent pond scum, and the working moms argue that every stay-at-home mother is repressed, brain-dead pond scum. Utterly unable to live and let live, they will fire salvos at each other for a while, each side fiercely insisting that the children raised under their own ideological bent are the best-adjusted, highest-achieving, in the world.
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Meanwhile, the children pay the price. Indeed, a whole generation of kids has grown up without their elders acknowledging that what they are arguing is irrelevant. The adults need to get over themselves, and focus on the children's best interests, rather than telling other people how they should be raising their kids.
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Families with two working parents, as well as single-parent families, are a reality, and children need quality care when their parents are at work. According to childcarecanada.org,"national data show that nearly 80 per cent of preschool-age children with employed or studying mothers are regularly in some form of non-parental child care or early childhood program..."
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Although the federal Tories claim they created upwards of 60,000 childcare spaces two years ago, the Childcare Resource and Research Unit found that just under 27,000 spaces were created, a figure that the Child Care Advocacy Association of Canada later said in a release "can be attributed to the provinces using their own investment dollars."
Working mothers and fathers are here to stay. Their children need care, and making them ideological pawns in a battle to lay guilt trips and impose ultraconservative values on others, is not the way they're going to get that care. In putting forward their national program, the Liberals are acknowledging that reality and placing children's best interests first.
- reprinted from the Calgary Herald