Last week, Leader of the Opposition Thomas Mulcair announced a proposal to launch a nationwide childcare program that would seek to provide affordable and quality childcare services to families across Canada. Mulcair’s announcement looked to set up what will be the NDP’s key platform issue come election time next year.
While the promise of affordable and universal childcare is an obvious boon to the Canadian economy and serves to only further gender equality, the true accessibility of this plan remains unclear.
The issue of childcare is, at its heart, a gender equality issue. Too often, families are unable to either find or pay for daycare, and too often, women are expected to assume the responsibilities of primary caretakers due to patriarchal cultural norms; thus, the government’s inaction to provide such care disproportionately burdens women.
This is of particular concern considering the staggeringly high number of women pursuing post-secondary education and poised to take on leadership roles in all industries in Canada. However, the realization of gender equality will be stagnant until systemic barriers to employment and career advancement for women can be negated by an effective childcare system.
Most importantly an effective childcare policy would be self-sustaining. The surplus of women who would be able to enter the workforce would not only significantly grow the economy, but their income would also provide crucial tax revenue for the government.
The blind nature of such a policy will not help the most vulnerable people in our society.
In Quebec a similar childcare policy has been in place for quite some time and the outcomes have been encouraging. Economist Pierre Fortin argues that “[the] ripple effect of [women’s] employment pumped an additional $5.2 billion into the Quebec economy, boosting the province’s Gross Domestic Product by 1.7 per cent” which easily pays for the “$1.6 billion annual child-care costs” the province incurs to pay for such a plan.
One thing remains abundantly clear; the current status quo of childcare in the form of the Universal Child Care Benefit makes no economic sense. One hundred dollars per month is not nearly enough to cover the exorbitant price of childcare (which on average can surpass $1,000 per month).
The NDP’s policy will cost $5 billion dollars a year by 2023. This policy not only subsidizes the cost of daycare to $15 a day, but also involves providing a million additional care spaces for just double that amount.
However rosy universal childcare may seem, I remain concerned that the NDP policy will, like the troubling majority of social policies, only be enjoyed by the most privileged groups in our society. The policy seems to invoke a universal language but I am doubtful that such language is appropriate given the starkly different economic realities that Canadians face.
An OECD study found that in Canada “low-income, single-parent families[. . .]pay, on average, 48 per cent of their net income” on childcare services. What has the NDP said as to how these families are to benefit under this new plan? Nothing. The waiting lists for these care spaces will give no preference to families who need such subsidized services in order to subsist.
The blind nature of such a policy will not necessarily help to ameliorate the conditions of the most vulnerable and impoverished people in our society, which is what a truly socially minded social policy ought to do. If it fails to do so, it takes its place as just another empty political gesture and we have plenty of those in Ottawa, Mr. Mulcair.
