Saturday, February 05, 2011

"Forced'?

Human Resources Minister Diane Finley has accused the Liberals of wanting to revive a national child-care program so that parents don’t have to raise their own children.

“It’s the Liberals who wanted to ensure that parents are forced to have other people raise their children. We do not believe in that,” Finley said in the Commons Thursday, the same day that Liberals were promising to revive the national program scrapped by the Conservatives five years ago this week.


This has been all over the blogosphere already, but I haven't seen anyone focusing on what I think is the key word in Minister Finley's statement: forced.

When a government program is available, people can make use of it or not make use of it as they choose. They are by no means required to make use of it, and certainly aren't expected to modify their life choices to make use of it! For example, the Employment Insurance system provides maternity and parental leave benefits of 55% of your average insured earnings up to a maximum of $468 per week. People with new babies can apply for this program, or they can just not apply. However, the existence of this program does not in any way mean we are forced to have babies.

The fact that a government minister landed on the word "forced" in reference to the hypothetical availability of a program makes me inclined to take a step back and look at the other programs this government is providing. What are they trying to force us to do?

But aside from this, you know what is actually, in real life, forcing parents to return to the workforce and send their kids to childcare? Labour conditions! As I've blogged about before, if I had a child, staying home with the kid wouldn't be an option, because I'm the one whose job provides dental benefits. I would be forced to go back to work as soon as parental leave runs out because the current economic context doesn't make it possible for my partner to have a job with benefits.

Even if both partners have jobs with benefits, it still isn't necessarily safe to just leave one's job. I blogged before about my grandmother's co-workers, who voted not to have a pension because their spouses had pensions. Doesn't that sound ideal? A world in which your spouse's pension is enough to support both of you in retirement, so you don't have to worry about accumulating pensionability and can work or not depending on what best meets your family's needs? Well, it turns out many of those spouses worked for Stelco. And this is what happened to their pensions. In a context like this, it would be outright irresponsible to walk away from an opportunity to accumulate pensionability - or even to accumulate CPP eligibility! Even if one pension looks perfectly good now, who knows what will happen in the future? We will spend far more time being seniors than children spend being children, so we can't just put our ability to support ourselves in the last couple of decades of our lives at risk.

Of course, if improving employment conditions is beyond the scope of the government's influence, they could also reduce the likelihood that new parents will be forced to return to work earlier than they'd like by improving the social safety net. My issue of being the only one with dental insurance would be moot if OHIP covered dental care. Concerns about maintaining one's pensionability would be lessened if the CPP provided more than an absolute maximum of $960 a month. If OHIP covered everything we might conceivably need in terms of elder care, we wouldn't have to worry so much about being able to support ourselves in the last decades of our lives.

If this government is really concerned about new parents being forced to return to work sooner than they'd prefer, they need to create a combination of labour conditions and social safety net that makes it possible to stay home, in terms of both meeting the family's immediate needs and long-term consequences.

And, in the meantime, we need to start thinking about what would lead a government minister to conclude that the existence of a program forces Canadians to change their life choices.

2 comments:

Lorraine said...

Ever since the 'unite the right' (or 'purge the progs') moment in Canadian Conservative history, the overall tone of the message has been 'yes, Virginia, we do mean conservative in the USian sense.' Public sector=force. Riiiiight. People who live in the real world know force when they feel it. I would say 'force' is another word for 'constraint.' Being of somewhat Machiavellian persuasion, I regard the distinction between (economic) constraints and (political) restraints to be what they call a 'formality.'

laura k said...

Que brava!! Excellent post.