Peggy Nash for Parkdale-High park NDP

Childcare

NDP offers positive action on Childcare instead of 11 years of broken promises by Liberals

June 22 - The Liberals latest announcement on child care has little credibility given their eleven-year record of broken promises on the issue, says child care activist and Parkdale-High Park NDP candidate Peggy Nash.

"Why should anyone believe the Liberals’ new promises on child care, when they have never made good on their 1993 Red Book promise to create 50,000 new spaces," says Nash. "The reality is that the Liberals have created no new licensed child care spaces since they took power 11 years ago. This new promise is the act of a desperate government trying to shore up votes that are going to the NDP."

Nash says the NDP has pledged to:

provide stable, long-term federal funds to create an additional 200,000 high quality, publicly funded, affordable child care spaces within four years;
increase the Child Tax Benefit to $4,900 per child and alter the program to permit Canada’s poorest families, who don’t pay tax, to qualify;
Encourage job-sharing programs to give families more time to spend together.

"I personally spoke to Paul Martin several years ago to press for a national child care program when he was finance minister, but he just wasn’t interested," says Nash, who has been an outspoken advocate on the issue. Peggy is recognized in the child care community for negotiating some of the most innovative childcare solutions in the auto sector, including funding that created child care centres in two Ontario cities and subsidized places for CAW members in community centres.

Nash says that many parents in Parkdale-High Park have been hit hard by the lack of affordable, licensed child care spaces, which have declined across the province in recent years.

The mother of three sons herself, NDP federal candidate Peggy Nash is a member of the Board of Directors for the Ontario Coalition for Better Childcare. She has served as a chief negotiator for the Canadian Auto Workers as well as a director of the Metropolitan Action Committee on Violence Against Women and Children.

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