Federal NDP leader Tom Mulcair unveiled his party's proposal for an eight-year national child-care program on Tuesday in Ottawa, saying the plan would cost $15 a day per child and would "create or maintain a million" child-care spaces "over the next decade".
"The NDP plan will make spaces available to parents and kids who need them," Mulcair said today in Ottawa.
"Quality, affordable child care not only pays for itself by increasing participation in the workforce, it also contributes $1.75 in government revenue for every dollar invested."
Over the first four years of the plan, the government would spend $1.9 billion to fund 370,000 new child-care spaces. After eight years, or two terms, funding for child care in Canada would have increased by $5 billion, says the NDP.
"We want to work with the provinces and territories," Mulcair said. "We're not going to wait 13 years. We're not going to wait 13 months. It's something that we'll get going on from day one when we form a government in the fall of 2015.
"The Liberals talked about it for 13 years but didn't create a single space, and that's the reality."
Via an advertised message on the promotional website MulcairsNDP.ca, the Conservative Party shared the following response to the New Democrats' child-care plan:
"Thomas Mulcair announced that he would ignore evidence of skyrocketing costs for similar schemes, and spend $5 billion creating a massive new bureaucracy for child care."
On the website, the response continues: "The NDP is ready to spend billions on this, but, as usual, has no plan to pay for it. An NDP government would be disastrous for the Canadian economy – and Canadian families."
Files/Video from The Canadian Press