What will the NDP’s attractive $15-a-day childcare scheme really cost? We know that someone will need to pay for it, so it’s worth asking about it before the fact.
Other than raising two children at my own expense and helping out with the grandchildren, I’m no expert on this, but let’s look at some data on the actual costs of daycare. The website “godaycare” shows that the average daily cost for a licensed daycare “spot” in Canada runs from a high of $41.53 for an infant, $39.56 for a toddler, $38.95 for a pre-schooler, $34.10 for a kindergarten age child to $28.93 for a school age child. This averages out to $36.61 daily per childcare spot.
The NDP’s promises a cost of $15 a day for parents to use one of their planned one million childcare spots. This accounts for about 41 per cent of the actual daily cost of $36.61 for a childcare spot. This would be a huge windfall for young parents and a great carrot for them to cast their ballot for the NDP, but who pays for the remaining $21.61 per spot every day? Or approximately $4.23 billion annually, assuming each spot is used for 200 days each year? We do of course.
Mr Mulcair promises to fund this by raising corporate taxes and ending income splitting (actually a good deal for working families) for openers. Presumably tax rises, cost cutting or borrowing will be done as necessary to complete the funding.
The freewheeling NDP financial wizards may consider more than $4 billion a year as chump change, but it all adds up. Anything is possible if you raise taxes enough, but you can only squeeze so much juice out of an orange (pun intended).
We’re all for children and grandchildren, but the costs of The NDP’s vote grubbing childcare scheme will have a very damaging effect on our economy.
When the NDP promises to tax business one very predictable result is increased layoffs, which means that there will be more parents staying at home to do their own babysitting.
Surely this isn’t what the NDP really intended and it’s certainly something that no one wants to see. The existing child support supplements are a helpful boost to a young family, which is really all that we should expect them to be.
John Thompson
Kaleden
