By Terry Vanderheyden
OTTAWA, February 10, 2006 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Newly elected New Democratic Party member for Toronto and wife of the party’s leader, Olivia Chow, said she will introduce legislation to resurrect the Liberal’s proposed national daycare program. The ruling Conservatives under Stephen Harper said they would scrap the program in favour of offering parents a cash incentive that would allow one parent the option to stay-at-home or to use it to pay for child care, while also addressing the need for daycare spaces.
Chow said she wants to enshrine daycare as a universal right for Canadians, just like publicly-funded health care is now.
BC Catholic Editor Paul Schratz explained that according to the writings of former Pope John Paul II, mothers should not be forced to work outside the home. “The Pope acknowledges the pressures that practically force mothers to return to the world of employment, but he makes clear such situations are not the ideal,” he wrote in an editorial denouncing the Liberal’s proposition.
In the Pope’s encyclical Laborem Exercens (On Human Work), Schratz stated, “[Pope John Paul II] writes that for mothers to be forced to abandon the care and education of their children ‘in order to take up paid work outside the home is wrong from the point of view of the good of society and of the family when it contradicts or hinders these primary goals of the mission of the mother.’”
See related LifeSiteNews.com coverage:Â
Catholic Paper Takes issue with Liberal Agenda Forcing Mothers to Work Outside the Home
https://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2004/jun/04060905.html
Liberal’s “Universal” Childcare Leaves Out 75% of Canadian Families
https://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2006/jan/06010512.html
Conservative Woman MP Slams Liberal Party’s Child Care Plan as Sexist
https://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2005/feb/05021605.html