‘Not enough money for child care in budget’, advocate argues

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VANCOUVER (NEWS 1130) – Despite what the federal government would have you believe, an advocate says yesterday’s budget failed to really address the issues around gender equity.

Dr. Paul Kershaw with Generation Squeeze says the Trudeau Liberals talked a lot about child care and parental leave, but didn’t spend much money on either of them.

“For instance, some years, a few years from now, Old Age Security is going to go up in an annual spending by over $16 billion… again remember, things like child care or the parental leave changes today, they’re getting fractions of that,” he explains.

He says the $540 million going to child care annually is only five per cent of what is needed to build a high-quality national child care program.

“You know to put that in context in British Columbia, the BC government budgeted just for our province as much as the federal government is budgeting for child care across the entire country,” he explains. “Given that BC is about 13 per cent of our national population, if the federal government were to sort of keep pace with provincial government in BC it would have added more than $4 billion.”

He also criticizes the government’s budget speech, which he says makes it seem like the biggest investments are in promoting gender equality, when really its in Old Age Security, and the Canada Health Transfer.

“It’s a bit alarming when our finance minister doesn’t have an honest conversation with Canadians about where the big changes in our budgets are happenieng”

While he does applaud the government for adding the use-it-or-lose-it component to parental leave, he believes six months should be allocated for the second parents, not the five to eight weeks the government has reserved.

“Kudos to the Prime Minister for actually popularizing the idea that we should talk more about gender equality, but then he does not deliver with his gender-based analysis –which is weak, because it’s not being truthful about how poor Canada has been in terms of investing in child care.”

Morneau defends budget, says Ottawa must play both short and long game

Finance Minister Bill Morneau is defending his latest federal budget against complaints that it doesn’t do enough to shield Canada from shorter-term competitiveness threats linked to incoming U.S. tax reforms.

In a speech to the Economic Club of Canada, Morneau says Ottawa will focus on more immediate worries like NAFTA and lower U.S. corporate taxes at the same time it takes steps to address longer-term domestic risks, such as the aging workforce.

The fiscal plan tabled Tuesday in the House of Commons was packed with billions of dollars worth of new investments, including measures to increase the labour-force participation of women.

To pay for it all, the Liberal government used up roughly $20 billion of additional fiscal room over the coming years that came from economic improvements, reprofiled infrastructure commitments and lower-than-expected departmental spending.

Morneau says Canada needs to play both a long game and a short game — and that the brightening economy enables the government to do just that.

In a news conference following his speech, Morneau reiterated that his department is still doing its homework on impending U.S. tax reforms that business leaders have warned could damage to the Canadian economy.

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