Roundup: Moving on child care (again)

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The fiscal update and its feminist lens, as well was talk of the “she-cession” has given some people to look a bit more closely at the national early learning and child care proposal that the government is putting forward. And immediately you get those on the left chirping that the Liberals have been promising this for decades but never delivering (which is false – Paul Martin did deliver it, and had agreements signed with every province and money flowing, which Stephen Harper immediately killed thanks to the NDP helping him to bring down Martin’s government), and the Conservatives have resumed their 2004-2006 mantra that taxpayer dollars to child care spaces somehow robs stay-at-home mothers of their choice (also a verifiably bogus argument). Oh, and the Conservatives are also talking about refundable tax credits, which didn’t build a single child care space the last time they tried tax credits, nor will it build any should they form government again. Why? Because there is a supply-side problem, which is going to require federal and provincial investment. The first step of this is in the fiscal update – the immediate creation of a federal secretariat, which will do the work of developing policies for a national universal programme, as well as assisting with the federal-provincial negotiations, because child care is provincial jurisdiction, and the federal government can’t create these spaces without the provinces.

With this in mind, here is Lindsay Tedds and Jennifer Robson about the what is needed to make this a reality.

https://twitter.com/LindsayTedds/status/1333814949617881088

Good reads:

  • Justin Trudeau says the premiers are trying to come up with a consensus on vaccine prioritisation so there are similar plans across the country.
  • David Lametti is defending conversion therapy-ban bill, saying it already protects private conversations and that carving out “exceptions” is bad legal practice.
  • A fourth vaccine candidate, this time from Johnson & Johnson, has now begun the Health Canada regulatory process.
  • Here’s a dive into the planned new radar systems for the next generation of Canadian frigates, and why they have some controversy attached to them.
  • The Deputy Minister of Finance has indicated he’s going to retire, which is leaving a lot of questions as to why and why now.
  • The Conservatives are determined to talk out the clock on the assisted dying bill (which will jam the Senate into simply rubber-stamping it before deadline – again).
  • The Conservatives are also trying to push their CanSino conspiracy theory at the industry committee by demanding an emergency investigation.
  • Kady O’Malley’s Process Nerd column updates the possible calculations for an early election and how it might be triggered.
  • Heather Scoffield ponders the reported figures on increased savings during the pandemic, and what it could mean around pent-up demand for the recovery.
  • My column weights Samara’s latest bright idea, which is to weld “citizen assemblies” into the Senate (and you can just about imagine what I think of that).

Odds and ends:

Maclean’s has a vaccine tracker, that gives us what we know about each of the potential candidates and how many doses Canada has signed up for.

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2 thoughts on “Roundup: Moving on child care (again)”

  1. Canadians by now have come to know that you can’t expect anything from the conservatives if it is outside of their dogma box. That is why when push comes to shove there is little attention given to the ruminations of Tories and a realization that cons are only concerned with power not the needs of the country, unless of course their base, big business , religion {christian} and the “proper place for women as vassals of men.” Gotta keep control of things boys!

  2. The jealous fauxgressive whiners of the No Damn Principles party acting as useful idiots for the Conspiracy Party of Canada seem determined to gang up on the Liberals again and repeat history. P.J. Fournier of 338 Canada said last night on Twitter that the last time an election stretched out over the Christmas break, Paul Martin lost to Harper. We’ve already seen for months their breathless desperation to try and tank the Liberals with phony “scandals” (neither WE-Ghazi nor any of the other conspiracy theories like Frank Baylis, Rob Silver or now “VaxScam” are Sponsorgate by any sense of the word). The only redeeming thing, I think, is that Trudeau isn’t Martin, Singh is damn sure no Layton, and O’Toole is Harper’s stooge but isn’t a Machiavellian thinker like his boss. So barring some lightning-out-of-the-blue fluke, it’d probably backfire on the opposition clowns, and deservedly so. The question remains, however, will they try for such a craven 2006-era move yet again — in the middle of a pandemic? Who knows if Groundhog Day comes early or we get six more weeks of Poilievre yelling at Soros-sponsored shadows…

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