(OTTAWA) Despite their substantive disagreement over the Liberal government’s national child care program, the Conservatives voted Wednesday to send the bill to committee.
The Conservatives supported the Liberal, New Democrat and Bloc MPs in the House by agreeing to send Bill C-35 for study by a parliamentary committee, after several hours of debate.
Earlier Wednesday, Pierre Poilievre had announced that his MPs would support sending the bill to committee, but the Conservative leader had refrained from endorsing the Liberal government’s national child care program.
“Our view is that there should be affordable child care spaces and there should be financial support for parents regardless of the choices they make,” Ms. Poilievre ahead of the weekly Conservative caucus meeting.
Families Minister Karina Gould tabled the bill in December, which aims to enshrine the national child care program in law.
As part of this national program, Ottawa has signed bilateral agreements with the provinces and territories. The goal is to reduce child care costs nationwide to an average of $10 per day by 2026.
The federal government maintains that some families are already taking advantage of the benefits offered by the agreements, seeing their childcare costs begin to drop last fall.
Enshrining the program in legislation would then require any federal government to maintain long-term funding, making it more difficult for a future government to dismantle it.
Pressed on Wednesday morning about what a Poilievre government would do with existing agreements, the Conservative leader said that once the bill reaches parliamentary committee, MPs sitting there will be able to examine the concrete results achieved so far.
“We will study this proposal and we will have a very clear policy before the next elections,” he promised.
During the last election campaign, in 2021, Justin Trudeau notably criticized the Conservatives’ lack of support for the Liberals’ national child care program.
Then-Conservative leader Erin O’Toole campaigned to tear up deals with the provinces to replace the national program with a tax credit, which he said would better help low-income families.
Conservative MP Michelle Ferreri, who debated the Liberal bill in the House this week, criticized the program which ‘subsidizes the rich’ but does nothing to reduce waiting lists and labor shortages in child care.
Since Quebec had already set up its own network of reduced-contribution educational childcare services in the 1990s, it did not join the federal program, but received full financial compensation from Ottawa.