"A child benefit, not a child care program".

Here's a new study out by Ken Battle of the Caledon Institute in Ottawa on the boondoggle that is the Conservatives' child care proposal -- even more of a boondoggle than I thought.

The study focuses on Ontario and doesn't go quite far enough into the weeds for my taste; it's often hard to tell exactly where the numbers are coming from, and Battle reports averages rather than medians. Grumble, grumble. But it's only 7 pages long and well worth reading.

The main gist of the report is that Harper's plan is pure ReformAllianceTory. For instance:

Because the proposed Child Care Allowance would be taxable (in the hands of the lower-income parent or the single parent), the provinces and territories would enjoy some revenue gains for two reasons. First, their expenditures on income-tested refundable credits and child benefits would decline. Second, they would collect more income tax and, in the case of Ontario and Alberta, more health premiums. In effect, the proposed Child Care Allowance would amount to a no-strings-attached transfer to the provinces and territories...


Essentially, because the credit is no-strings-attached (unlike the child care deals the Libs have worked out with the provinces that require federal dollars to be spent on child care), the provinces are under no obligation not to cut back their own child care credits in response to the new federal credit, particularly for the very poor (since, as Battle points out, they can argue that parents on welfare are already fully subsidized in their child-rearing expenditures). From slightly richer families, they also get the provincial income tax charged on the credit. And because the child care deals with Ottawa are off in a Harper government, they're no longer required to spend much on child care at all. If they do, it's a unilateral provincial decision.

If the shift-revenues-to-the-provinces thing isn't shocking enough in a Conservative proposal, other surprises are that the proposal is also biased toward:

(a) the rich. At low but above-welfare levels of income, the credit, because it enters a household's balance sheet like wage income to the lowest earner (the study doesn't discuss joint filers), reduces eligibility for other credits like the GST credit and the Canada Child Tax Credit, as well as for provincial credits at the provinces' discretion (recall: no strings attached). At very high levels of income, parents are already ineligible for these credits so the Tory credit is a simple (taxable) windfall.

(b) single-earner, two-parent households. The study is less clear on why this is, but presumably it's because, in a single-earner household, the credit accrues to the non-earning spouse whose income is too low to have to pay tax on it, while in a two-earner or single working parent household, it is subject to the same income-tax and reduced-credit conditions discussed above. At any rate, the numbers, reported at the bottom of page 4 are striking enough as to where the bias lies.


So we have a "child care proposal" aimed at people who are already deemed not to need federal help meeting their child care expenses and who don't actually use paid child care. Terrific. It's only natural, I guess, since the Tory proposal takes a rather faith-based (as opposed to adequately money-based) approach to actually creating paid child care spaces through the Community Childcare Investment Program (the CBC analysis is the indispensible read here.) The Tories don't really care about spaces. What they, or at least what a chunk of their supporters and donors, really want is for women to stay at home with the kids. When you get down to it, that's what this proposal is about.

It's par for the course, really. Just another brick in the brick wall of the modern conservatism shell game. Sure Harper sounds moderate; he was downright cute tossing that football on the cover of the Globe and Mail yesterday. And he'll govern for awhile as a moderate. But the hidden agenda is still there. It's not going to go away.