By Terry Vanderheyden
TORONTO, March 1, 2006 (LifeSiteNews.com) – The Ontario Liberal government has proposed denying the province’s poorest families a Conservative campaign promise of a federal childcare allowance.
Under an election promise from the federal Conservatives, $1,200 per child per year would be given to families with children under the age of six years old to offset the cost of childcare. Stephen Harper said that passing the childcare supplement bill will be a priority for his government when MPs return to the house in April, with cheques going out by July.
The Ontario Liberals have said that they have not overlooked the option of deducting the proposed federal childcare supplement from social assistance and disability payments, as it already does with the National Child Benefit Supplement.
Income Security Advocacy Centre lawyer Cynthia Wilkey told the CBC that she’d “be horrified if they did. But would it surprise me? No.” Ending Ontario’s clawback of federal National Child Benefits was a campaign promise made by Premier Dalton McGuinty’s Liberals during the last Ontario election but never honoured said Wilkey.
The Ontario Conference of Catholic Bishops slammed the Ontario Liberal proposal as “unconscionable”: “With their knowledge of the hardship that the existing clawback causes, it would be unconscionable for the Ontario government to claw back another federal allowance for families,” OCCB spokesman Tom Reilly stated in an e-mail to LifeSiteNews.com. “The welfare of families who need help is surely more important than squabbles between levels of government.”
Â
“For some time the OCCB, with other religious groups, has been trying to persuade the Ontario government to stop clawing back the federal child allowance,” Reilly explained. “The clawback takes money away from families where the parents can be classified as working poor – that is, earning little more than the minimum wage – the parent may have a disability and be on ODSP (Ontario Disability Support) or the parents may be dependent on the Ontario Works program. These are the most vulnerable families in our society.”
Contact Ontario MPPs:
https://olaap.ontla.on.ca/mpp/daCurRdg.do?locale=en&ord=RDG_NAME
Contact Sandra Pupatello, minister of community and social services:
https://olaap.ontla.on.ca/mpp/daMbr.do?locale=en&whr=Id=82