Election 2015 - Families

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Published on Thursday, September 17, 2015

Banner Staff

The Neepawa Banner

Until the federal election on October 19th, the Neepawa Banner will be talking to the candidates about the issues that matter to local voters. This week we begin with the candidate profiles. Check back as we ask the candidates for their views on a new topic each week.

What programs would you like to see help Canadian families?

Name: Laverne Lewycky

Party: NDP

Home: Dauphin

Tom Mulcair and the NDP have provided a multi-faceted, comprehensive approach in the programs proposed to assist Canadian families, which I support. These include the hallmark $15 a day plan to create or maintain one million affordable childcare spaces across Canada. Canadian families cannot afford to wait. Our children are a national treasure. Parents across Canada work hard and sacrifice to ensure their children get the best start in life. They are looking for a Prime Minister who understands that. After a decade of Stephen Harper, childcare costs are breaking household budgets.Too many mothers are sacrificing career goals because they can’t find affordable care. Too many indigenous people struggle in a childcare vacuum, 78 per cent of children in First Nations communities are without regulated childcare. Tom Mulcair has a plan to ensure there’s a space for every child – and parents won’t pay more than $15 a day. This plan will save young families money and enable greater participation in the workforce – especially for women.

In the family health care area, the NDP will help five million Canadians access family doctors. They plan to help build 200 clinics and hire thousands more doctors, nurses and health care professionals to move health care forward and reverse the Liberal and Conservative damage done by years of neglect. An NDP government will provide long-term, stable funding, working with provinces and territories to ensure more Canadians can access a family doctor and primary care teams. They will especially target communities facing doctor shortages. They will expand home care to support 41,000 more seniors, thus freeing up hospital beds and reducing overcrowding in emergency rooms. Mulcair will launch a national Alzheimer’s and dementia strategy by investing in screening, diagnosis, support and research.

The NDP family programs will create opportunities for 40,000 youth through jobs, paid internships and coop placements over four years and invest in sports for disadvantaged youth. By partnering with provinces, municipalities and Indigenous governments to hire apprentices for infrastructure projects the NDP will enlist federally regulated airports or port authorities and crown corporations to establish firm apprenticeship ratios. 

On the financial front, the NDP is committed to families by ensuring that young people will have the Canada Pension Plan for their future while providing adequate pensions for seniors’ retirement. An NDP government would convene a First Ministers’ meeting on Retirement Security, protect pension-income splitting for seniors and Registered Retirement Income Fund enhancements, lower the Old Age Security eligibility age from 67 to 65 and help lift 200,000 seniors out of poverty with new funding for the Guaranteed Income Supplement.

Name: Inky Mark

Party: Independent

Home: Dauphin

The family is the core building block of society. Families need to be supported in every facet, from education to basic income. Poverty creates more poverty which in the end, creates social problems in society. 

We need an annual guaranteed income plan for all families. This would replace our welfare system.  The system has to encourage people to work to improve their livelihood, not penalize them as does the current system. 

Families need good health care which should include dental care for school age children. Families need a pharma-care plan as well. A national child care program will certainly help those couples who both work out of the home. 

I’ve always been an advocate for education, having been an educator most of my life. Education should be free right up to the university and community college level, certainly for the undergraduate years.

Name: Kate Storey

Party: Green Party of Canada

Home: Grandview

That’s where we get back to the guaranteed income supplement [Previously referenced in the Sept. 11 issue of the Neepawa Banner, during the discussion of seniors]. The Green Party believes that it is a viable option that can augment a family’s earnings. The principle behind the idea, which the Green Party has been advocating for for years, is to establish an income floor below which no Canadian could fall, but with incentives for recipients to continue working and to earn more. It’s not a large amount, perhaps up to $6,000 a year per person type of amounts. You can’t live on $6,000, but it is a cushion. It takes some of the pressure off of families. Guaranteed living income programs have been tried before. Something like it was tried in Dauphin, in our own riding and it was successful. It’s something [The Green Party] really wants to look at. It’s timely. Everybody is talking about it, but the Green Party is the only party that has actually put it in their platform. I believe, that’s a big step.”

Name: Robert Sopuck

Party: Conservative Party of Canada

Home:  Sandy Lake

Of course, [the Conservative government] has reduced taxes a number of times.  When we reduced the GST from 7 per cent, to 6 per cent, to 5 per cent, that was an immediate help to Canadian families. As well, recently, we’ve introduced the Universal Child Care Benefit. Where children up to age 6 receive $160 a month, which has gone up from $100 a month. And there’s now a new $60 child care benefit for children age six to 17. That’s a brand new system of support for families. They can use that funding to pay down expenses, for childhood education, child care, that kind of thing.  I think those are very significant family benefits that will pay off. I should make the point that the Universal Child Care Benefit will assist some 4 million families in Canada There have also been fitness tax credits for sports equipment and so on. 

I should also make the point that we’ve recently introduced income splitting for families. We’ve addressed that inequity. [Before] a two earner family earning, let’s say, $60,000 a year was actually paying less tax than a one earner family earning $60,000 a year.  So we have fixed that inequality, allowing income splitting.

Name: Ray Piché

Party: Liberal Party of Canada

Home:  Onanole

Liberals believe that access to affordable, high-quality child care improves life outcomes for children and increases the supply of workers and worker productivity.

Too many middle class Canadians are struggling to find affordable early childhood education and care. The Conservatives have failed in their leadership, leaving middle-class Canadians to fend for themselves amid a shortage of child care spaces, prohibitive costs, and wait lists. Every Canadian child deserves a real and fair chance at success and a comprehensive approach to learning in Canada begins with early childhood learning and care.

The Liberal Party of Canada believes that access to affordable, high-quality child care improves life outcomes for children and allows parents to concentrate on improving their family’s prospects. Unlike others whose plans convert existing spaces—with the majority not converted for eight years—our party considered not just affordability for parents, but also the other real issues we know parents face: the insufficient number of available child care spaces, particularly for babies under 18 months, and the quality of those spaces to Canadian families.

First, a Liberal government will create the Canada Child Benefit (CCB): one bigger, fair, tax-free, automatic monthly child benefit that puts more money back in the pockets of Canadian families who need it most. This benefit will deliver up to $533 per child per month and will give more to nine out of 10 families. We will also introduce two new options so that parental benefits are more flexible for family and work circumstances. This will provide more flexibility and security to parents in the first 18 months following the birth of a child—the most crucial time for children and often the most challenging time for new parents. A Liberal government will also boost investment in social infrastructure by nearly $6 billion over the next four years and almost $20 billion over 10 years. As part of this investment, we will fund the creation of thousands of new child care spaces, enhance their quality and ensure that affordable child care spaces are available to more families who need them.

We recognize that childcare needs are different across the country and we will not impose costs on other orders of government, but will instead work with each of them on agreements that create and operate affordable, high quality, early learning and child care spaces across Canada. As noted above, we will also work in partnership with other governments on research, policy development and best practices in the delivery of early learning and childcare.