Unfortunately, the feds are choosing the latter with their new child care program.
The federal 2021 budget allocated $30 billion over the next five years towards a national child care program in an attempt to bring costs down for parents. This will be added on top of the $27 billion in direct payments parents already receive every year.
The budget says âit is time for the rest of Canada to learn from Quebecâs example.â
We should indeed learn from Canadaâs experience with government-run child care. And the first lesson is that these program costs tend to balloon quickly.
Since Quebec introduced its government child-care scheme, costs have gone up from $300 million in 1997 to over $2.7 billion this year. Even after accounting for inflation, thatâs a six-fold increase.
Laying It Out: A million reasons for childcare, but one is enough - Medicine Hat NewsMedicine Hat News medicinehatnews.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from medicinehatnews.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
iPolitics By iPolitics. Published on Apr 23, 2021 1:00am Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland, pictured speaking to reporters in September 2020, delivered her budget this week. (Andrew Meade/iPolitics)
Rebel Media, she may not have been prepared for site co-founder
Ezra Levant to declare it the “worst budget in Canadian history,” and “a laundry list of socialist dreams that are stowing away in this crisis.”
After going through all 724 pages of the “monstrous budget document” which, he says, he doesn’t think Freeland has even read, and definitely didn’t write, as “that’s what lobbyists are for, right?” he concludes that it’s not actually a budget at all.
Corbella: Reckless federal budget burdens kids it claims to help lfpress.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from lfpress.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
2021 Budget: Deficit Spending Likely to Inflate an Already-Expanding Public Service
Continued deficit spending in this week’s federal budget, the first in two years because of the pandemic, is likely to inflate an already-expanding public service that has grown 11.5 percent, or by more than 39,000 full-time equivalent employees, in the five years between 2015–16 and 2019–20.
“There was a huge downsizing under Chretien, and then Harper held the line. And what’s happened is basically all those layoffs or downsizing it’s all been reversed, plus-plus,” Carleton University business professor Ian Lee said in an interview.
“Trudeau’s clearly grown the size of the [bureaucracy] in spending terms more than any other prime minister since the Second World War. And this started pre-COVID.”