Like the Virginia Slims cigarette ad slogan \u201cYou’ve come a long way baby,\u201d that successfully tapped into a feminist desire for women’s freedom in the late 1960s\u2014 even as it enslaved them to tobacco\u2014 the Conservative government’s $10.9-billion child care platform in the January 2006 federal election campaign initially appeared friendly to women, even to feminists.<\/p>\n
Primarily, it promised to give women \u201cchoice\u201d\u2014 a word closely associated with the feminist pro-choice movement\u2014 in child care options; and, secondly, it promised to recognize the contribution of stay-at-home mums by paying them, a long-sought-after goal of the women’s rights movement.<\/p>\n
For a party that consistently polled lower with women than with men, it seemed a smart sales strategy: The Conservatives were not only apparently listening to women and responding to their needs\u2014 they appreciated their work!<\/p>\n
But did the promise live up to the reality? And, more important, did journalists provide critical reporting and analysis of the platform? Not by a long shot\u2014 until the ballots were cast and the Conservatives rose to power on a marquee platform that even their analysts would later deem a failure.<\/p>\n
Here’s how it happened: On December 5, 2005, the Conservatives promised $10.9 billion over five years for child care, including \u201c$1.4 billion to honour the Liberal government’s agreements with the provinces until the end of the 2006-07 fiscal year and $1.25 billion in grants or tax credits to encourage businesses and community groups to create 125,000 new daycare spots over five years,\u201d the Globe and Mail<\/em> reported. But the heart of the plan was a pledge to give parents $1,200 a year for every preschool child to spend on daycare\u2014 however they wanted to. The plan would benefit about 2 million children under six, \u201cbut because some is taxed back, [it] would cost about $1.6 billion a year, or $8.25 billion over five years,\u201d the Globe<\/em> said.<\/p>\n That plan was to double the $5 billion over five years that the Liberals had earlier announced to create 625,000 new child-care spaces, and the Liberals responded that day, announcing a new, richer plan that would provide $11 billion\u2014 over 10 years. Upping the ante still further, on January 11, the NDP announced its largest \u201csingle spending proposal is $16 billion over four years to boost the Child Tax Benefit by $1,000 per child, finance 200,000 more child-care spaces and create a children’s commissioner,\u201d the Globe reported.<\/p>\n The Conservative Party seemed to have designed an entire election campaign around an issue traditionally more of concern to women than to men\u2014 and the other parties followed suit.<\/p>\n But despite the enormous money being committed and the amount of newspaper ink devoted to covering the options, child care advocates such as Martha Friendly, coordinator of the Childcare Resource and Research Unit at the University of Toronto, and Don Giesbrecht, president of the Winnipegbased Canadian Child Care Federation, claim the media coverage of the program was shallow and lacking in critical analysis of whether it could actually deliver what it promised: choice, child care spaces and money.<\/p>\n \u201cWe were quick to respond to draw attention to what was at stake here,\u201d says Giesbrecht, who realized the Liberal plan\u2014 which had already negotiated five years of financing with the provinces to create a national early childhood education and child care program\u2014 would be dismantled if the Conservatives were elected. \u201cBut [our press releases] were like tumbleweeds going across the valley, because there was so little uptake on it. We were waiting for the controversy to begin, for [reporters] to let us tell them our side,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n It never happened.<\/p>\n Friendly was similarly frustrated. Why, she wondered, were reporters failing to \u201caudit\u201d the platform’s ability to deliver? Further, her efforts to garner attention for the shortcomings and misinformation about the plan, as well as the importance of a national early childhood education program, were broadly ignored. Similarly, Giesbrecht says letters written by his organization were never published in western papers.<\/p>\n As daycare advocate NDP MP Denise Savoie says, coverage of the Conservative program was further hampered by a media obsession with a 30second sound bite from Scott Reid, communications director to Prime Minister Paul Martin, who\u2014 referring to the Conservative promise to pay parents $100 a month for every child under six\u2014 said: \u201cDon’t give people 25 bucks a week to blow on beer and popcorn. Give them child care spaces that work.\u201d<\/p>\n So were the critics right? Yes.<\/p>\n Analysis of articles in Canada’s two English-language national newspapers, the Globe and Mail<\/em> and National Post<\/em>, taken between the day the Tory program was announced and election day, January 23, 2006, indicates the Conservative Party got an easy ride from the media on its socalled \u201cpro-choice\u201d child care plan. Primarily this was because of differences between the ways the media cover \u201chard\u201d news issues, such as crime, wars and the economy, and how they cover \u201csoft\u201d news issues, such as child care, historically of more interest to women because they are more affected by them; but another factor was the complexities of reporting from the campaign trail.<\/p>\n Much has been written by news analysts, such as Kay Mills, Laura Flanders, Michele Mattelart and Cory L. Armstrong, on how women and women’s issues are sidelined by the media, how issues pushed by female reporters are given less weight in papers than those by male reporters and how news judgments are made overwhelmingly by male editors on how much space or how many stories\u2014 if any\u2014 will be devoted to issues perceived as women’s interests, and all of these theories appear to apply to the reporting on the child care platform.<\/p>\n According to the Toronto Star’<\/em>s Laurie Monsebraaten, who reports on child care issues, female reporters are afraid to push for \u201cwomen’s issues\u201d stories because of concerns that it will sideline their career and that\u2014 \u201cbecause most newspapers are run by men\u201d\u2014 their efforts will be wasted. \u201cUnless an editor thinks your story is exciting it’s not going to get play,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n But child care was big news in the 2006 election. There was something else at play in the lack of critical reporting on the platform: who was quoted, and who was reporting.<\/p>\n Though poll results indicated women were more concerned about child care than men, and that they were more nervous about a Conservative government than men, not only were men\u2014 who Statistics Canada reports are less likely to be responsible for child care\u2014 the prominent sources in the child care stories, but male columnists were the primary analysts. So why did reporters choose them to tell the story? Armstrong’s analysis suggests reporters often quote sources because of their prominent position, rather than their knowledge\u2014 something that favours male voices.<\/p>\n The fact the Tory child care platform was introduced during an election campaign might also explain the lack of analysis and congruity in reporting on it. Election campaigns are covered not only by journalists who report off and on from the campaign trail\u2014 as they are replaced by colleagues\u2014 but by reporters back in the newsroom who are picking up on announcements made across the country, making it difficult for any one reporter to build expertise on any one platform.<\/p>\n And there’s another factor analysts point to: editorial agendas.<\/p>\n University of New Brunswick professor Luc Theriault examined coverage of daycare issues in the National Post<\/em> in the lead-up to the election. He argues that fully a year before the election, the paper framed the Liberal daycare policy as a \u201cbureaucratic social program\u201d or a \u201cmassive top-down government-run program\u201d that served the middle class, rather than those who need it, in a series of articles which culminated on December 11, 2004, with an editorial titled: \u201cSay No to the Nanny State.\u201d<\/p>\n So did the Post series act as a preemptive strike against the Liberals child care program? Monsebraaten of the Star,<\/em> admittedly a paper whose own views are on the left, agrees the Post influences other media. \u201cIt’s really pushed the media to the right.\u201d<\/p>\n And there’s another factor: Mattelart argues that in times of crisis, so-called family issues are emphasized in politics aimed at increasing the birth rate, discouraging abortion and penalizing households where both parents are breadwinners.<\/p>\n Canada is not in crisis and there is currently a shortage, not an excess, of manpower. Nonetheless, the Conservative child care platform, which rewarded one-income families over twoincome ones\u2014 seemed aimed at penalizing homes where both parents work. Was it to encourage higher \u00a0fertility rates, currently below replacement rates, or simply to promote conservative values?<\/p>\n Or was it an attack against higher salaries for daycare workers? While the platform appeared aimed at paying for child care, a much stronger concern voiced in the Conservative side of the debate was the notion that the establishment of government-subsidized quality daycare in Quebec had resulted in unionization of child care workers and a demand for improved wages. In fact, not only was child care not going to be free, or worth the Tory offer of $100 a month, but the cost might increase if the rest of the country followed Quebec’s lead.<\/p>\n In short, Mum is cheaper.<\/p>\n Here’s how the two papers reported on the Tory plan.<\/p>\n Globe and Mail<\/em>: The day after the Harper child care policy was announced, the Globe’s editorial warned that the $100-a-month tax credit for every child \u201cwill do little to assist anyone’s choice,\u201d \u201cthat many parents need to go out to work and require affordable daycare,\u201d that \u201cgovernment has an obligation to make women’s equality concrete by supporting child care in various ways,\u201d including \u201coffering financial support to help facilitate the choice to work,\u201d that the current tax system \u201cpenalizes\u201d the choice of stay-at-home parents and makes it unaffordable for some, while $113 million of the $545-million federal tax subsidy of $7,000 for each child \u201cwent to individuals earning more than $100,000 a year\u201d and much of it went to those earning more than $200,000. The Globe<\/em> advised Harper to target support at those who need it, or use the $2.5 billion to lower taxes across the board\u2014 and, importantly, reported that \u201cchoice\u201d was about appearance, not about reality: \u201cWhile his child-care policy, with its element of choice, looks superior to that of his opponents, it would help those in need far more if it were actually targeted at them.\u201d<\/p>\n But from that point on, that message\u2014 which turned out to be correct\u2014 was lost. Even articles printed the same day\u2014 including an analysis piece\u2014 did not critique the effectiveness of a plan the editorialists noted wouldn’t deliver.<\/p>\n Further, the paper was unsuccessful in obtaining analysis or criticism from the majority of provinces that would lose money they’d negotiated with the Liberals to create child care programs. Nor did it seek reports from the daycare centre operators or organizations that had created new programs in anticipation of monies already in the works that would now be lost\u2014 or parents on daycare waiting lists. Those stories would come after<\/em> the election.<\/p>\n Another opportunity for analysis was missed when the Globe<\/em> reported the results of a Strategic Counsel poll on December 8 that found 48 percent approved of the Harper child care proposal and 45 percent liked the Liberal program. But when analyzed by gender the poll found 50 percent of women preferred the Liberal plan, compared with 40 percent of men, while 52 percent of men liked Harper\u201d\u02dcs idea best, compared with 43 percent of women.<\/p>\n There was something else at play that negatively skewed analysis: the misuse of a 2003 Vanier Institute of the Family national survey of Canadian values to support the Tory plan, which appeared in Margaret Wente’s column in the Globe on December 10, among many other places. \u201cDid I mention that most parents say they’d rather stay home with their kids if they could afford to? Mr. Martin doesn’t have a nickel for them,\u201d she wrote.<\/p>\n But as Allan MacKay, president of Vanier, noted in the Globe<\/em> the day before, the notion that the Vanier Institute’s 2003 study indicated \u201cCanadians do not want to support a national system of early child care\u201d was wrong. The study found \u201cin an ideal world, the No. 1 choice of people is to have one’s partner, followed by one’s parent, then another relative, followed by home-based, followed by a child-care centre.\u201d But because parents know they don’t live in a perfect world, almost 70 percent \u201care prepared to see their tax dollars help cover the costs of supplemental child care,\u201d and one-third \u201ctold us that child care for parents working outside the home is a \u201d\u02dcvery high priority,’\u201d he explained, apparently futilely.<\/p>\n Then came Reid’s beer and popcorn quote. That led to a December 13 editorial that reversed the paper’s earlier position that the Conservative plan did not offer choice, and instead praised the Conservatives for placing \u201cthe issue of choice on the table.\u201d<\/p>\n National Post<\/em>: The day before the Tory plan was announced, National Post<\/em> writer Heather Sokoloff set out details of the expected child care programs, and in rare reporting on the Conservative program, interviewed people representing both sides of the debate, including women. But after the platform was announced, reporters on the campaign trail did not challenge the veracity of the program, and instead quoted Harper saying something now known to be false: \u201cIt’s a universal payment, but the heaviest benefits are at the lowest income.\u201d Nor did reporters challenge Conservative child care spokesperson Rona Ambrose on her report that twothirds of Canadians want care that’s not institutional\u2014 another misrepresentation of the Vanier study.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, an editorial on December 6 proclaimed, \u201cOn child care, Harper’s got it right,\u201d and lauded a Conservative plan that would put money into parents’ hands \u201cthat could be spent on whatever form of care best suits their kids’ needs best\u2014 be it formal daycare, babysitting or stay-athome parenting,\u201d though there were no requirements the money actually be spent on child care.<\/p>\n The word \u201cchoice\u201d made it into headlines, as well, creating the illusion it existed. \u201cA Question of Choice,\u201d declared the headline over Tory Hugh Segal’s regular election analysis. \u201cTories think government should facilitate choices and opportunities for Canadians. The Liberal\/NDP establishment believes they know best, and if something is not state-run, then it cannot be of any value at all.\u201d<\/p>\n What is astonishing is not that this rhetoric made it into a political pundit’s column, but that it was repeated in quotes from male politicians on an almost daily basis in Canada’s national newspapers without challenge.<\/p>\n The newspapers, for the most part, failed to analyze whether the $100 a month would enable parents to choose to put their children into child care; whether it would enable women to leave the workplace and stay home; or how much of that $100 parents would retain after taxes\u2014 and where they would ultimately spend it.<\/p>\n Nor was there analysis of language used to sell the program: Harper used the term \u201cinstitutionalized\u201d daycare programs to disparage the Liberal plan, and \u201cchoice\u201d to promote his own. \u201cYou can choose the childcare option that best suits your family’s need,\u201d the Globe quoted him as saying. \u201cGovernment should support your choices, not limit them\u201d\u2014 though his plan did nothing of the sort.<\/p>\n Harper’s language so successfully drew on feminist catchphrases that one Post reader wrote: \u201cI find it ironic that Paul Martin is pro-choice when it comes to abortion rights, but is anti-choice when it comes to deciding how parents should raise their children.\u201d<\/p>\n In short, child care was a major election issue, but whether readers were informed by the reporting on it was doubtful.<\/p>\n Fast-forward to the year after the election, and the portrayal of the program was very critical, indicating readers had not understood the child care platforms\u2014 and journalists hadn’t either.<\/p>\n Newspapers reported that Harper’s promise to create 125,000 new child care spaces in five years through tax incentives for businesses and grants for community groups was impossible to fulfill: A similar $10-million plan initiated by the Mike Harris government in Ontario had not created one new space between 1998 and 2004. They also reported the government had to establish a task force to make recommendations on how to encourage businesses to create the promised child care spaces\u2014 consultation one might think might have been done before the proposal was dropped in the election campaign.<\/p>\n And in an article titled \u201cChild-Care Proposal Gives Least to Poorest,\u201d the Globe<\/em> gave front-page coverage to an update on a Caledon Institute of Social Policy report, released during the election campaign, which neither the Globe<\/em> or the Post<\/em> had covered then. Its analysis indicated families earning $30,000 to $40,000 were the least likely to benefit from the plan. A family with two children, with one under six, earning $36,000, for example, would net only $388 a year for the child out of the $1,200. Though neither the Globe<\/em> nor the Post<\/em> reported that, the Post did publish Harper’s earlier-mentioned contention\u2014 unchallenged\u2014 that the Tory plan would help the middle class and poor, while the Liberal plan wouldn’t.<\/p>\n After the election, and after the Conservative government announced it was axing a Canadian Child Tax Benefit (CCTB) that was due to pay out $249 annually, Caledon’s updated study found that those who make $200,000 a year or more, with one parent already at home\u2014 in short, those who already have plenty of choice\u2014 benefit the most. They get to keep, after taxes, $1,076 of the $1,200 annual amount. Families that benefit the least: those with two working parents and a combined income of $30,000. Out of the $1,200 for each child, they’ll net a shocking $199.<\/p>\n As Ed Gillis, a legislative assistant in NDP MP Savoie’s office, explained, the rest is going back to Ottawa as an \u201cincome tax claw back of $244 million that the Conservatives have refused to reinvest in child care,\u201d on top of the $400 million they saved when they axed the CCTB.<\/p>\n Though the Caledon report was freely available during the campaign, the papers failed to report on it\u2014 but apparently not for lack of resources. Consider how the Globe hired the C.D. Howe Institute to compare which tax platform would most benefit taxpayers: a cut to the GST, promised by the Conservatives, or a cut to income taxes promised by the Liberals. The money was there to compare tax proposals, but not the platform that most affected women, though it was a main platform plank for all three major parties.<\/p>\n Newspapers also reported that families were surprised to find\u2014 as they filed their income tax returns in the spring of 2007\u2014 that they had to pay tax on the child care benefit. While that was reported during the campaign, it apparently hadn’t sunk in, possibly because of a lack of emphasis. Reporting something is taxable is much different, as the C.D. Howe example illustrates, than showing readers with charts and studies.<\/p>\n And the kicker post-election story? The government spent $123,205 on a study that informed them that Scott Reid may have been right about beer and popcorn: \u201cThe general consensus was that the $1,200 will not have any real impact on child-care choices and instead will be used to help with the next bill… No one is going to be in a position to go back to work or stay at home to raise children because of the $1,200.\u201d<\/p>\n Post-election newspaper analysis and reporting was so critical that the Harper government announced major changes to his marquee election promise in the March 2007 budget. Acknowledging business was not going to create 125,000 spaces, Harper reversed the plan to give $250 million a year in tax credits and incentives to business and community groups, and instead transferred those monies to the provinces, as the Liberals had planned, to create child care spaces the Tories had earlier painted as bureaucratic and institutional. The step was taken months after the government received the task force study that reported what business was saying all along\u2014 business owners don’t have the money, time or expertise to create daycare spaces, something Canadian Federation of Independent Business president Catherine Swift had long been pointing out.<\/p>\n The budget reversal achieved what no amount of effort on the part of child care advocates during the election could: It led to a flurry of news stories analyzing the failures of the Conservative child care program. Giesbrecht noted he had conversations with reporters during budget week, \u201cwhere they’ve actually asked the questions they should have asked a year ago like: \u201d\u02dcWhat if? What’s at stake here?’ Those questions were not being asked in the last election.\u201d<\/p>\n In the end, neither paper gave readers a complete picture\u2014 until after the election.<\/p>\n The fact that those being quoted, unchallenged in most reports with alternative viewpoints, were, like Conservative leader Stephen Harper, mostly privileged men with a political stake in defending the Conservative child care program definitely influenced the quality of analysis, while the one woman on the file, Conservative MP and \u201cchild care\u201d critic Rona Ambrose, simply repeated Harper’s message. And there was another place the female voice was missing during the campaign\u2014 and that was on analysis.<\/p>\n Political pundits in the papers were all men: In the Globe,<\/em> the three strategist critics were Moe Sihota, Thomas Axworthy and Peter Donolo. In the Post, Conservative pundit Hugh Segal squared off against Liberal John Duffy. They had representation from various party followings\u2014 but not from half of Canada’s population.<\/p>\n And while female journalists like the Globe’s<\/em> Gloria Galloway and the Post’s<\/em> Sokoloff were reporting on the stories, analysis, for the most part, was by men: Andrew Coyne and Don Martin in the Post<\/em> and Jeffrey Simpson and Lawrence Martin in the Globe,<\/em> with Margaret Wente weighing in once, incorrectly, as it turned out.<\/p>\n Martin, for example, analyzed the child care program announced by the Tories in one paragraph, and concluded: \u201c[For] a $1,200 grant for every six and under child, parents could hire a relative or family member to give far superior loving care.\u201d For $1,200 a year?<\/p>\n But what also may have skewed coverage was the women whose voices were not heard until after the campaign, including the 70 percent of women with kids aged three to five who work outside the home and the 65 percent of all women with children under three who work for pay\u2014 or, memorably, immigrants forced to send their children back to China to be raised by grandparents because they couldn’t afford daycare on minimum wages.<\/p>\n The Citizen’s<\/em> Norma Greenaway was later perplexed to discover readers didn’t realize they had to pay tax on the $1,200 annual credit, or that the program, in the end, wasn’t about choice. \u201cMost mothers I know knew it was taxable, and though the [political] focus was on choice, to me it was so clear it wasn’t going to provide choice.\u201d<\/p>\n But in retrospect the Globe’s<\/em> Galloway thought there was a lack of analysis on the word \u201cchoice,\u201d and how much parents would retain of the $100. \u201cWe probably could have poked much bigger holes in child care, specifically, than we did before and during the campaign,\u201d she says, though she does not attribute it to gender issues.<\/p>\n In the end, confusion in the public’s mind may have spelled the end of a child care program, not just for this election, but for many more: \u201cWe had a sniff at a future of actually putting together a national system of early learning and child care,\u201d says Giesbrecht. \u201c[Now] we’re as far from it as we’ve ever been.\u201d<\/p>\n Greenaway agrees: \u201cTo be honest, I’m convinced there won’t be a big program to create universal child care in our lifetime. I think it’s gone.\u201d<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Like the Virginia Slims cigarette ad slogan \u201cYou’ve come a long way baby,\u201d that successfully tapped into a feminist desire for women’s freedom in the late 1960s\u2014 even as it enslaved them to tobacco\u2014 the Conservative government’s $10.9-billion child care platform in the January 2006 federal election campaign initially appeared friendly to women, even to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":0,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"content-type":"","ep_exclude_from_search":false,"apple_news_api_created_at":"2025-10-08T00:03:49Z","apple_news_api_id":"c1745bdc-3ee9-4428-ac44-c629a7700bdb","apple_news_api_modified_at":"2025-10-08T00:03:49Z","apple_news_api_revision":"AAAAAAAAAAD\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/w==","apple_news_api_share_url":"https:\/\/apple.news\/AwXRb3D7pRCisRMYpp3AL2w","apple_news_cover_media_provider":"image","apple_news_coverimage":0,"apple_news_coverimage_caption":"","apple_news_cover_video_id":0,"apple_news_cover_video_url":"","apple_news_cover_embedwebvideo_url":"","apple_news_is_hidden":"","apple_news_is_paid":"","apple_news_is_preview":"","apple_news_is_sponsored":"","apple_news_maturity_rating":"","apple_news_metadata":"\"\"","apple_news_pullquote":"","apple_news_pullquote_position":"","apple_news_slug":"","apple_news_sections":[],"apple_news_suppress_video_url":false,"apple_news_use_image_component":false},"categories":[9346],"tags":[],"article-status":[],"irpp-category":[],"section":[],"irpp-tag":[],"class_list":["post-262478","issues","type-issues","status-publish","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"apple_news_notices":[],"yoast_head":"\n