Choosing one's advice

The CP reports on what appears to have caused the Cons' partial turnaround on child care, as even an advisory group hand-picked by the Cons to push child care further into the private sector concluded that the party's tax-credit plan was doomed to fail:

The federal government needs a system for assessing the availability of child-care spaces in Canada as a basis for future policies on the problem, says a report commissioned by the Tories.

That recommendation, and a series of others from the ministerial advisory committee in January, did not make their way into the federal budget last month.

Still, the government seems to have agreed with the report's conclusion that Canadian businesses aren't keen on opening day-care spaces themselves. It recently abandoned a $250-million plan to give funding to firms with on-site centres...

The advisory committee, meanwhile, underlined that the demand for spaces outstrips supply in Canada.

"Parental demand for child care is increasing but demand is also increasing from employers who are struggling to fill jobs that are vacant due to the increasing competition for skilled labour and the growing labour shortage."...

The committee's report was released this week following access to information requests by the NDP and media outlets.

New Democrat MP Olivia Chow said the report supports her party's view that the government needs an early learning and child care act to enshrine certain principles about quality and accessibility into law.

"It said that there needs to be evaluation and accountability, the number of spaces needs to be measured," Chow said in an interview. "You can't do that unless there's a legislative framework."

Based on the committee's terms of reference, its conclusions were bound to be biased toward the Cons' intended solutions. And indeed the article cites a list of the report's suggestions to try to accomplish something based on the Cons' original framework.

Yet even from that starting point, the committee managed to come up with ideas far more sensible than those the Cons have shown any willingness to support. And it can only be to the Cons' discredit that such concepts as "gathering baseline data" and "measuring outcomes" would make for a radical change to how they currently operate.

Of course, the even bigger issue is the report's correct conclusion that the way forward for the federal government should involve a real expansion in child-care availability - not merely a fraction of the funding which was already producing little progress under the Libs. But unfortunately (if not surprisingly), the Cons are apparently content to ignore their own advisory committee when it reports on the need for that kind of action. And that can only signal how little commitment the Cons have to increasing - or even preserving - access to child care and other services in the future.