Once again the spectre of a national daycare plan is making headlines.
According to a Toronto Star report this week, Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff insists the program will arrive as soon as his Liberal’s have a majority.
Further inside that same Newspaper, the Star’s Chantal Hebert reminds readers that a childcare plan first became national News back in Brian Mulroney’s time. For 25 years the idea of a national plan has been a mainstream talking point. Mulroney’s Progressive Conservative government and successive Liberal governments failed to accomplish the task of creating a national program. The flexibility and generosity of Quebec’s provincial program is offered as an envied example of government-run daycare.
The simple fact is, national daycare would cost a fortune and through all those grand years of budget surpluses and good times the government failed to put it together, recognizing that once started it would be hard, if not impossible, to stop. For a local example of this mentality consider Social Services chairman Gord Tosh’s recent comments that many programs become “orphaned” because provincial and federal funds have dried up. Since local politicians do not want to make tough choices on such programs, those programs generally continue to get funded through some other means. Around here, it would be courtesy of Guelph and Wellington taxpayers.
The notion that quality daycare is needed is not lost on us. Families should not have to choose between poor care and good care. Far too often, parents make a choice out of necessity.
Two working parents has become the norm, as a result of lifestyle choices and simple economics. Housing costs, the absence of public transit in and between communities, rising food costs and a tendency to believe families have the right to live independently of themselves are part of it. Combine those forced levels of consumption with the idea that real wages have not kept pace with inflation in the past decade and it is easy to see why subsidized daycare is offered as a solution to the problem of not enough money to go around.
For us, we need to get back the basics. Families need to look out for themselves and forge that bond of dependence that ensures its longevity. A truly national daycare program would only serve to mask the larger problems that successive governments have chosen to ignore.
