Dear Editor:
Thank you for your editorial discussing the situation of low-income single mothers, like ourselves. (Our View, The Record, Nov. 26)
For us it is painfully obvious that others appropriate our voices in order to advance their own agendas. In particular our families are used to push for more funding for daycare.
RBC vice-president Charles Coffey made this clear in his speech to a World Bank meeting promoting daycare, quoting economist JK Galbraith: "The views of one articulate and affluent banker, businessman, lawyer, or acolyte economist are the equal of several thousand welfare mothers in the corridors of political power." Coffey noted the important contribution of parents as "employees and consumers."
Instead of funding families directly, billions of dollars supposedly intended to help our families go to "spaces," bureaucracies, employers and anybody-but-the-parent.
An October Statistics Canada report found that "parents belonging to a higher income household were more likely to have used some form of non-parental care. More precisely, about two-thirds (65 per cent) of parents with an annual household income of at least $100,000 used child care for their preschooler. This was nearly double the rate recorded for households with an income below $40,000 (34 per cent)."
This has gone on since the "welfare reform" of the 1990s. Remember the urban legends of welfare queens in Cadillacs defrauding the citizens? The "reforms" took billions from low-income families and transferred the cash to daycare for kids paired with "workfare" for mums. This also allowed higher income families' daycare costs to be heavily subsidized.
This two-pronged scheme gives taxpayers' money to employers to subsidize low wages - an egregious form of corporate welfare - and to institutional child care. In B.C. the "Child Care Act," which specifically excludes parental care, was brought in in 2001 supported by NDP and Liberal MLAs alike calling for single mothers to be "productive."
Your editorial may give the impression that most low-income families are on welfare. This is inaccurate, but understandably so. It is a virtually unreported fact that these neo-liberal "reforms" of the 1990s not only reduced the amount of welfare but also reduced eligibility for welfare. Following the changes, in B.C. a single parent became ineligible once the youngest child reached age 12. This was reduced to seven, and is now age three. In other provinces this is as low as six months. So very few families are eligible for welfare.
Statistics Canada reported on what it bloodlessly called "administrative changes" to welfare, noting that "single mothers had the most dramatic change" when total welfare expenditures decreased by nearly $4 billion. Provinces' daycare spending more than tripled to over $2.6 billion by 2005. In Ontario, it was argued "that single parents wouldn't be disadvantaged because Harris would spend $400 million extra for daycare to offset the added demand on that service."
The way was paved with the Self-Sufficiency Project. Its report calls this a "social experiment" the federal government began in 1994 on over five thousand mothers and children in BC and New Brunswick. The purpose was to see if "children suffer because increased employment reduces the time they spend with their parents and increases their parents' stress." Selected welfare mothers were offered a "generous" incentive to take full-time jobs. The study found that older children had more school problems, drug use and petty crime. But the daycare+workfare agenda was a forgone conclusion advanced not by low-income mothers but by a toxic combo of left and right.
The pioneer of this American scheme, Lawrence Mead, wrote that there is no saving to the public purse from the massive transfer of wealth from the poor. Reducing taxes was not the goal.
Funding daycare preferentially creates poverty by diverting money for children away from families and to the direct and indirect beneficiaries of the daycare industry. Daycare centre care costs far more than the fees charged and is heavily subsidized even for high-income families. Sweden spends $27,000/year per child.
Adding up the subsidies including the tax deductions, operating and other grants, free rent, capital costs, monitoring and bureaucratic infrastructure shows that B.C. welfare families receive less financial support than high-income families using daycare centres full time.
Funding families directly respects parents' and children's rights, accommodates diverse family situations, is efficient, and fair.
Helen Ward, C. Grey, Tamara Jones, Burnaby
