On making do

After going out of his way to alienate the rest of the country earlier today, Dalton McGuinty seems tempted to try to alienate a good chunk of Ontario voters as well by exacerbating the anti-poor bias of the Cons' "child-care plan":

Ontario's poorest families might never receive a monthly child-care allowance proposed by the new federal government because the province might claw it back, poverty advocates warn...

(T)he Ontario government has refused to rule out the possibility that it might deduct the federal funding from social assistance funds for the poor or disabled.

Wilkey (a lawyer with the Income Security Advocacy Centre) pointed out that the province already deducts the National Child Benefit Supplement from social assistance and disability cheques, even though Premier Dalton McGuinty's Liberals promised to stop the clawback during the last election campaign.

It should be fairly obvious that the last thing poor Ontarians need is to see their federal pittance taken away along with the child-care spaces that were on the verge of being created. But the idea of having the provinces claw back the Cons' handouts does give rise to another possibility.

After all, does anything stop the provinces from simply raising their income tax levels by the same amount as the Con reduction, and applying that amount to the planned child-care programs? The effect would be a double gain until next March while both programs are in effect, then roughly the same amount of money as the provinces expected to receive under the deals after that (though the distribution might change somewhat).

The result might well be preferred by the provinces as compared to the Libs' deal, since it wouldn't come with federal strings attached. The Cons wouldn't get their "child-care plan", but they would manage to offload some tax capacity onto the provinces. And parents who want to see child-care spaces created rather than receive a minor stipend would get their wish as well. The end result would be the type of patchwork system that federal involvement is designed to avoid - but better a patchwork than nothing at all.

Would it actually happen? I'm not sure how many premiers would be willing to bear the stigma of raising taxes. But by keeping up a public expectation for child-care spaces, at least a few may be able to sell such a policy as the lesser of the evils. And that may be the best we can hope for until next time the Cons and Bloc don't hold more than half of Parliament between them.