http://www.straightgoods.ca/ViewFeature6.cfm?REF=105
Stephen Harper has no mandate to destroy child care in Canada
Canada may need another election sooner rather than later.
Dateline: Sunday, February 12, 2006
by Ish Theilheimer
Back in the 1980s, people smoked in offices, homosexuality was widely
disapproved of, and a majority of Canadians thought of "day care" as a
luxury for lazy or self-serving parents who didn't want to take care of
their own kids.
Twenty years later, much has changed. You can hardly smoke anywhere in
public unless it's pot. Glamourous TV shows depict the lives of gays and
lesbians. And most Canadians have come to accept that high-quality child
care or early childhood education (ECE) is both a social benefit and an
absolute necessity for multi-job families struggling to get by and raise
kids properly. The main hold-outs to the acceptance of the need for
publicly-funded, universal child care are the minority of parliamentarians
belonging to the Conservative Party.
Most Canadians now recognize that children have a better chance in
school if they get decent daycare.
It has been a long, hard struggle to elevate the sector and profession from
what had been formerly thought of as paid baby-sitting. Over time, feminist
and family researchers, with support of child development experts, built
the case. It has become widely recognized that doing well in school is
essential to success in life and that children, especially low-income ones,
have a much better chance in school if they get decent daycare that
prepares them for the school experience and teaches them basics they might
not get in front of a neighbour's TV.
Slow too has been the gradual recognition of early childhood educators as
professionals rather than baby-sitters. Their jobs require a great deal of
knowledge of child development and behaviour coupled with enormous energy
and patience. It is now recognized that the education of children in their
earliest years is the most important they get.
Gradually, pay levels have increased in ECE but they still lag shamefully
behind what teachers of older children are paid. ECE wage rates top out at
less than half what elementary teachers can make. That people doing the
most important work should get paid so much less than others in education
is clearly wrong and is something that has been gradually addressed — until
the present moment.
Stephen Harper, Canada's newly-unelected (36 percent support with 67
percent voter turnout — 24 percent of voters) Prime Minister, is making it
clear he wants to end the national child care program the Liberals signed.
The Liberals' program wasn't everything child care advocates had sought,
and it may have been signed as an act of political inoculation or
manipulation, but it was a very positive step in the right direction.
Harper's move to end federal support for child care and replace it with a
$1200 per year per child handout to families will halt the progress in ECE
that almost all Canadians agree is necessary — and millions of families
lives will be thrown into chaos.
Do the math please: Most adults, especially young parents, work full-time,
250 days a year, not because they want to but because they have to in order
to make ends meet. Harper proposes to undermine and jeopardize all the
quality child care programs in Canada and give parents, instead, less than
five dollars a day ($1200/250). It hardly needs or deserves comment.
Stephen Harper does not have a mandate to destroy child care in Canada.
Neither the Bloc Quebecois nor the NDP nor the Liberals believe it should
be destroyed. This illustrates the problem with the current minority
parliament. No opposition party can stomach what the Conservatives stand
for. "Working with" and "getting as much as possible from" the
Conservatives will quickly become impossibilities.
In a couple of months' time, the opposition will be asked to vote on a
budget that could quite possibly destroy twenty years' progress in ECE. And
that is just one of many critical policy areas over which the Conservatives
are likely to table legislation the other three parties will or should find
abhorrent.
It may be that another federal election should come soon. If the ideologues
at 24 Sussex are going to destroy this country, then they should be forced
to put their cards on the table and get a majority. And the opposition
should force them sooner rather than later to deal with Emerson and Fortier
and the new revelations about their godfather Mulroney and all the
self-serving twaddle about ethics from a group of proven hypocrites. The
Liberals cannot and will not do this. The Bloc has no interest. Will the
NDP be able to work with this new, unelected government, which is so
clearly opposed to mainstream much less progressive values, and at what
price?
Ish Theilheimer is Publisher of this leading, independent Canadian online
magazine, and he founded Straight Goods in January 2000. Ish lives in the
Ottawa Valley, in Golden Lake, Ontario.
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