First off, it’s obvious anyone who supports this plan will be portrayed as a “social conservative” in the coming months.
Consider the Globe’s front-page, World War III headline last week: “Social conservatives to sell Tory daycare plan.”
See? Anyone organizing to support Harper’s plan to give parents $1,200 per year (taxable) per child up to the age of 6 to help defray child care costs, must be up to no good.
They must be scary “social conservatives” with a hidden agenda to keep women barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen by denying them a state-funded national daycare plan — the one the Liberals promised in four elections over 11 years and never delivered, before signing a series of last-minute funding deals with the provinces just before they were defeated.
By contrast, when members of the daycare lobby, who have a direct interest in promoting state-funded daycare, organize themselves in support of the so-called Liberal plan — say, public sector trade unions who would thus have more workers to unionize — no one in the liberal media ever refers to them pejoratively as “left-wing special interest groups.”
The Sun recently ran a brief wire story on the child care controversy on Page 62, headlined “Daycare lefties find a new foe, Christian educator vows to battle ‘well-oiled lobby.’” The liberal media, while labelling those favouring Harper’s plan as “social conservatives,” would never call those on the other side “lefties” or “left-wing.” Can you say “double standard”?
When the YWCA recently put out a report supporting state-funded daycare, the media didn’t mention that it is one of Canada’s largest providers of non-profit daycare and thus not an objective observer on this issue, but a special interest group.
Nowhere, to my knowledge, was the YWCA described as a “left-wing women’s group” by the media, even though that’s what it is, especially if you’re calling the other side “social conservatives.”
When a recent StatsCan report found 54% of Canadian children are now in child care, a 12-point hike over eight years, the liberal media and the daycare lobby used the figure to imply Harper was out of touch with parents on this issue.
But here are the other findings they ignored or downplayed:
The largest single group of young children in Canada by far, 46%, continues to be cared for by a parent in the home.
Of the remaining 54% in child care, fewer than one in three (just 28% of the 54%) are in institutional daycare, the only type of care that would benefit under the defeated Liberal government’s five-year, $5-billion daycare promise.
Daycare remains the least popular of the three major child care options chosen by parents. More than twice as many children in child care (60% of the 54%) are cared for by a relative or non-relative. Parents choosing these types of child care, and stay-at-home-parents, are ignored by the Liberal plan.
In a major poll released last year, the Vanier Institute of the Family found 90% of Canadians believe that in two-parent families, one parent should, ideally, stay at home to raise the children. Daycare centres ranked a distant fifth when people were asked who should care for pre-school children, behind parents, grandparents, other relatives and home daycare.
As the Institute put it: “If, as many researchers claim, high-quality ‘professional’ child care has the potential to contribute more to children’s well-being than parents seem to realize, a much better job needs to be done showing mothers and fathers why that’s the case.” Indeed.
Or maybe the daycare lobby is just out of touch with the thinking of most people on this issue — people who want daycare to be one option available for parents, but certainly not the only one promoted (and funded) by the state. No matter how much the daycare lobby tries to pretend otherwise