Justin Trudeau and Erin O’Toole clash over child care as the federal election campaign gets underway

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This article was published 15/08/2021 (1229 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

OTTAWA—Battle lines and sharp contrasts for voters were quickly drawn on day two of the federal election campaign as the major parties hit the airwaves and the highways and the Conservatives unveiled a platform book with a punch.

Conservative Leader Erin O’Toole styled himself as “the man with the plan,” dressed as a working jock in a T-shirt on the cover of a 160-page policy book.

In it, O’Toole vowed to cancel the Liberals’ $10-a-day child-care program that seven provinces (including three that are Conservative-led) and one territory have already signed onto.

O’Toole said he would replace that $30-billion program with a Conservative plan aimed at making child care more affordable by putting money directly in the pockets of parents who make under $150,000.

But experts say it will do little to help low-income families like those in vote-rich Ontario — where Canada’s child-care fees are highest — and nothing to supply more quality regulated spaces. And in many provinces like Quebec, that’s the big problem: the lack of access to quality not-for-profit spaces.

O’Toole didn’t directly answer those questions at a morning news conference broadcast from an Ottawa studio, but he insisted he would “empower families to make their decisions.”

“Parents know what’s best, particularly with the flexibility needed for families coming out of the pandemic, and with shift work and other things,” he said. “We’re going to help all families, and lower-income families will have 75 per cent of the cost covered.”

The Conservative plan would replace the current child-care expense tax deduction with a refundable tax credit that would cover up to 75 per cent of child-care expenses up to a maximum of $6,000 for families earning less than $150,000.

“A top-down, one-size fits-all approach isn’t the answer,” the document says.

In one sense, it hearkens back to the Conservative preference in the Stephen Harper years for leaving “choice” in the hands of parents by sending money directly to households, but with one big difference: this campaign will see the Conservatives frame their plan as an effort to help women and working families. In doing so, their platform adopts a feminist tone: “Allowing women to reach true equality in the workforce is impossible without child care,” it says.

In Longueil, Que., a riding on the south shore of the St. Lawrence River, Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau scoffed when he was asked about the Conservative pledge.

“That’s in their platform just released?” he said. “Well, there you go. They’re showing their true colours,” he said in French.

“It’s the approach of Stephen Harper, it’s the approach of Conservatives to cut programs and to not to be there for women and families.”

Trudeau said the Liberal program was inspired by Quebec’s, and noted that it has been endorsed by Conservative provincial governments in P.E.I., Manitoba and Saskatchewan, all of which signed deals to expand quality child-care spaces and reduce fees by half. They “have understood that to invest in child care in spaces is a good investment not just to emerge from pandemic but to build back better and help to counter the impact on families and women,” the Liberal leader said.

Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe declined direct comment on the Conservative plan.

“The government of Saskatchewan looks forward to working with the government that the people of Canada choose to elect,” said Moe’s press secretary Julie Leggott in an email to the Star. “We welcome the recent focus from various federal parties on early learning and child care, including the conversations around flexibility for parental choice.”

Economist Armine Yalnizyan, a fellow at the Atkinson Foundation studying the future of workers, said a refundable tax credit is not a solution for parents facing fees of up to $20,000 a year for infant care in Toronto, or for those wanting more quality regulated spaces in Quebec.

“It’s just cash for care,” Yalnizyan said. “And the problem with cash for care is it reduces the cost, so it increases the demand for the care but there’s no plan for expanding demand — there’s not one more space created.”

She said even if “you know what’s best for you, and you can’t buy it in the market because it does not exist, because the market is not providing high quality regulated care, you don’t really have a lot of choice. You’re just going to scramble the way we’ve been scrambling for the last 50 years.”

Gordon Cleveland, a professor emeritus of economics at the University of Toronto, said that in Quebec, where a refundable tax credit has been available for more than a decade, the province has recognized the impact was not what it hoped because it drove the expansion of for-profit child care.

“It did provide affordability and extra spaces for families who were desperate to get it, and they did use a tax credit,” Cleveland said. “But it’s crystal clear that the tax credits brought in much poorer quality child care.” That is why Quebec intends to use federal money provided under the Liberal program to expand its regulated not-for-profit spaces, he said.

Yalnizyan said that in Quebec, where regulated spaces cost $8.50 a day, parents “won’t get much out of the Conservatives’ proposed tax credit because you don’t pay much in the first place.” And she said Ontario parents in vote-rich swaths of the GTA will soon realize that they would get more child-care spaces and more help to pay for care under the Liberal plan.

The Quebec premier’s office declined to comment Monday.

Ontario’s Progressive Conservative government has not signed onto the federal child-care program.

The question of child care will be a huge differentiator between the Liberals and the Conservatives in the campaign once again, after not playing a big role in the 2019 campaign but having been a big point of debate a decade ago.

On the campaign trail, the New Democratic Party sought Monday to contrast itself with the Liberals, with NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh pledging in Toronto to make the “ultra rich” pay more in taxes — a long-standing promise by the party. Heckled throughout his news conference, Singh said New Democrats were responsible for increases to the emergency benefits and wage subsidies the Liberals extended in the pandemic that helped ordinary Canadians.

In response, Trudeau dismissed the party that stands to his Liberals’ left. “It’s nice to see that the NDP is finally catching up to where the Liberal party has been for a long time,” he said. “The very first thing we did when we formed government was raise taxes on the wealthiest one per cent so we could lower them for the middle class.”

But on COVID-19 vaccinations, the NDP and the Liberals differed little — with Singh saying that he’d move faster to make vaccination mandatory for federal workers, and for air and rail travellers to require it by Labour Day. The Liberals have proposed to impose the requirement by the end of October.

O’Toole scrambled to dampen early controversy over his refusal to make vaccinations mandatory, even for his candidates, saying that as an alternative, he would require COVID-19 rapid tests of travellers and federal public service workers. He said nothing about broader regulation of federally regulated sectors like banking and telecommunications.

All party leaders agreed on the need to help evacuate Afghans who’d helped Canadian Forces and aid workers, but Trudeau said little could be done immediately given the fluid and “extremely dangerous” security conditions at the Kabul airport.

Tonda MacCharles is an Ottawa-based reporter covering federal politics for the Star. Follow her on Twitter: @tondamacc