Wednesday, January 04, 2006

National Child Care "Plan" short on details

I've been trying to find details on the Liberals' National Child Care Plan and found that there are none. The "plan" is to give the provinces $11 billlion over the next 9 years. The Liberals say this will provide accessable, affordable day care for all. I would like to know the cost per day for the users of this child care and what the structure of the program would be like. A plan consists of more than just setting aside some money.

The Liberals seem to love the Quebec system. They are going to commit $11 billion over 9 years which translates into $1.2 billion per year. However, In Quebec alone, the daycare system costs the government $1.2 billion per year. So basically, each province will get an average of $120 million per year, and end up paying 90% of the cost themselves. Sounds like more "premiums" will be needed in Ontario to pay for all this, since the feds took away so much of the transfer payments to the provinces to create their surpluses. Oh, wait, Ontario won't have to create new premiums to invest more money in the system. In fact, they won't even be forced to use the Liberals' money for child care. Since there will be no legislation involved in this "plan", the provinces could just spend this money on beer and popcorn instead.

Moving on...Let's say that the Liberal idea of "affordable" child care isn't $7/day or $35/week like it is in Quebec. Then let's see how much the plan would save parents. The Liberals say that the $11 billion will create 62500 new day care spaces (and subsidized the cost of using those spaces, apparently). If the money were to go purely to subsidizing the cost of daycare for those 625000 new space, there would be about $1955 per year per space. This makes a discount of about $38 per week to send a kid to daycare. However, that same $11 billion must create the new spaces first, aswell as subsidize current non-profit daycare spaces. So we could be looking at closer to $1 billion per year to subsidize 1 million day care spaces. That means $1000 per space per year, making it about $19.25 cheaper per week to send a kid to day care. Haven't the Liberals been arguing that the Conservatives' $25/week doesn't make day care affordable for Canadians? Seems to me that the National Day Car Program will make about the same difference in the cost to parents.

Either the Liberals don't really have a plan for national day care (beyond giving away money) or they know that the money they are setting aside isn't enough to create truly afordable child care, and they're hiding that fact from voters.

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