Yesterday I was listening to CBC radio. They were interviewing the wife of a Canadian man who was killed in the 9/11 attacks. She was pregnant at the time and her son is now 9 years old. She said that she told her son Osama Bin Laden was dead. He asked how he was killed. She told him that he was shot in the head by American soldiers. He then asked: “Why were they allowed to just go in and shoot him like that? Why wasn’t there a trial?” This mother expressed both her own satisfaction at Bin Laden being dead, as well as pride in her son’s sense of justice.  I wish I had a link to the exact wording or even to the names of the people involved (the perils of listening to the radio while driving and not being able to write things down), but what their dialogue demonstrates to me is the complexity of issues like this and the variety of different reactions that are possible. I’ve heard reactions that disgusted me, reactions that scared me, and reactions that I thought were appropriate.

The issues are so complex and I think that is one of the reasons people are unsure how to broach the topic with their children, especially children who would not remember the 9/11 attacks and who may have no idea who Osama Bin Laden is. I wrote my take on that today over at the Bad Moms Club:

Sometimes Bad Moms Think It Best To Stay Quiet

Are you planning to say anything to your children? If so, what will you be telling them?

In Canada you need to be 18 years old to vote, but more than 1/5 of our population is below that age. Who will vote with their interests in mind in this election? Will their parents do so? Some of them may, but unfortunately voter turnout in Canada is only about 57% among eligible voters and the turnout is much higher among seniors than among younger segments of the population. That means that not only are children not able to vote, but probably less than 50% of their parents are heading to the polls.

Who is speaking up for children?

Even though children cannot vote, there are several initiatives aimed at informing the electorate and getting the attention of candidates when it comes to children’s issues.

UNICEF Canada has started a Close the Gap for Kids campaign. It posted some statistics on the issues facing children (lacking access to mental health services, high levels of poverty among First Nations children, too many children overall depending on welfare) and developed a simple Charter for Children that it is asking the candidates and the political parties to support. UNICEF sent out a questionnaire to each of the parties asking them to indicate if they support the elements of the charter and giving them the opportunity to comment on how they would address it. Four of the five political parties responded to the questionnaire (the Conservatives did not) indicating what their plans are to support children.

The Canadian Coalition for the Rights of Children is asking the political parties to support children’s rights by:

• Treating all children fairly
• Giving children living in poverty a chance
• End discrimination that leaves some children behind
• Take effective steps to end youth violence and prevent youth crime
• Give all young children a good start in life
• Be accountable to children

Organizations like Save the Children are asking the political parties and voters to think about the health care needs of children in Canda and abroad (although their materials do seem to focus more on the needs of children in developing countries). Some of the themes, however, are similar to the issues that are facing Canada’s rural areas – i.e. an absence of local health care workers because health care professionals tend to prefer the opportunities that exist in urban areas. Some of Canada’s political parties want to work with the provinces to get more health professionals in rural areas to try to close this gap, while others prefer to download this issue entirely to the provinces and hope that they do the right thing. According to Health Canada’s website:

Roles and responsibilities for Canada’s health care system are shared between the federal and provincial-territorial governments. Under the Canada Health Act (CHA), our federal health insurance legislation, criteria and conditions are specified that must be satisfied by the provincial and territorial health care insurance plans in order for them to qualify for their full share of the federal cash contribution, available under the Canada Health Transfer (CHT). Provincial and territorial governments are responsible for the management, organization and delivery of health services for their residents.

Personally, I believe that this division of responsibilities provides a lot of room for cooperation and collaboration to ensure universal accessibility of critical health care services across the country, which includes ensuring children have access to mental health care services and also ensuring that there are health care professionals in rural communities.

Voting for Parents and Women = Voting for Children

While there are many initiatives that can be aimed directly at children, ultimately since parents are the caregivers of children, policies and programs that will support them, will also support children. Initiatives that allow parents to spend more time with their children (parental leave, work-life balance), that help them access the resources they need to care for their children (health care, day care, early childhood education), and more will make the lives of parents easier and improve outcomes for children.

In the article Only Half of Moms Vote, Amy Willard Cross wrote:

As women, it’s especially important for us to spend our vote wisely. The more we vote, the more likely we are to get mom-friendly, woman-friendly policies. In Saudi Arabia where women can’t vote, they also won’t let them drive. If they could vote, wouldn’t they toss politicians who deny them independent transport? However, the Nordic countries that have the highest percentage of elected women 41.6%–also happen to have great parental leave, childcare etc.

She also makes the excellent point that “casting your ballot for more women candidates will bring more diversity and balance to decisions. Recent research has shown that diversity in decision-making (in the financial sector and tech sector) brings about better results. Getting more women at the table politically also changes the outcome.”

Please Vote

If you are a parent, grandparent, or any type of responsible citizen, please do the right thing and get out and vote for May 2. When you vote, try to vote for what is best for our country, for those who cannot vote for themselves, rather than voting simply by what will suit your life the best. Please, when you vote, think of the children who do not have a voice in this election.

If you don’t want your vote, my six year old has some pretty strong opinions on this election. Would you be willing to cast a vote for him?

More Election Coverage! I’m also guest posting today on the great American political blog PunditMom. Please go check out my post:

To Be Tough on Crime, Do You Invest in Prisons or Preschools?

I’m sitting in the dark in my basement typing on my laptop. The power is out and my blackberry battery is dead, which means that all contact with the outside world has been cut off for now. No CBC news, no #momthevote discussions on twitter, no reading and responding to comments on my latest Care2 Causes post. Just silence and darkness.

I wonder briefly how many of our neighbours have started up their generators to be sure they don’t miss what might be the last hockey game of the season and consider how much vitriol will be spewed from the people of this region towards Hydro Quebec if this is indeed the end.

But then my thoughts turn back to the election. I wonder: Will Canadians be more engaged in the election if the hockey season is “over” for us? Will students be more engaged once their exams are done? Will royal watchers be able to refocus after soaking up the wedding of their future king? Is the apathy in our country contingent or is it absolute?

Our political system isn’t perfect and our political parties are not perfect, but opting to stay home on election day isn’t going to change that. So on May 2, be sure to go out and vote.  If you feel like that isn’t enough, then get involved in the political process – make your views heard, get involved with a party, consider running for office. There are many ways to get involved and casting a vote is both the start and the bare minimum.

My Election Strategy

In our first past the post system, I hear a lot of people talk about the need to vote strategically to keep the Conservatives from getting a majority or to keep a Conservative candidate from winning a seat. Personally, I don’t consider that to be strategic voting. To me, a strategy involves developing and executing a plan to achieve specific goals. My personal election strategy includes both short-term and long-term goals and a path that will help me to achieve them in general and as I cast my vote next week. The three parts of my election strategy are: engage passionately, invest strategically and vote tactically.

1. Engage Passionately

Outside of the election campaign, I am very politically engaged. Through my writing here and in other places (e.g. Care2 Causes), I share my thoughts on political issues with my readers. On twitter, I am frequently engaged in political discussions. On specific issues, I sometimes get involved in advocating for a position or engaging in consultations.  In the future, I would like to become more involved with grass roots organizations on specific issues and help to influence political party policies and platforms on issues of importance.

During an election campaign, my political engagement ramps up significantly. While I certainly have strong viewpoints about some issues and some political parties, my most important goal during an election campaign is to help people learn about the issues and to try to understand what the politicians are saying (or not saying) on issues of importance. During this campaign, I wrote summaries of the platforms of the five major political parties, I have been writing about the election at Care2 Causes, and I have been engaged in discussions on twitter under the #elxn41 and #momthevote hash tags.

2. Invest Strategically

I choose to invest in the political parties that I support during an election campaign. The Income Tax Act allows Canadians to donate to political parties as well as specific electoral district offices and candidates. Canadians receive 75% of the first $400 that they donate back as a tax credit. That means if you donate $20, you get $15 back on your tax return. If you donate $400, you get $300 back on your tax return. After $400, the rate of your tax credit decreases a bit, but is still quite generous.

In Canada, political parties also get $1.75 for each vote they receive, as long as they get more than 2% of the vote overall. This is used by a lot of political parties (and their supporters) to discourage so-called “strategic voting” (which I actually call “tactical voting”, as you’ll see in a moment). My perspective is that if I donate $2 to the party (of which I get $1.50 back), I’m off the hook if I opt to vote tactically.

In any case, I donated much more than $2. I donated $400, split between two political parties. I consider this to be a strategic investment in helping the parties that I think have the best plan and vision for Canada (sustainability, growth, compassion, equality) to share their ideas with Canadians and to further develop their ideas on a go forward basis.

3. Vote Tactically

Like many Canadians, I long for a proportional representation system. Instead of feeling like a vote for the party I believe in would be a wasted vote, I would like to know that every vote counts towards sending people from that party to Canada’s Parliament. Unfortunately, like many Canadians, the parties that I would like to vote for do not have a good chance of winning in my riding.

Thankfully, there are four political parties whose platforms I think are decent. By decent, I mean a whole lot better than the status quo (Conservative government). That doesn’t mean that they don’t make me cringe from time to time (none of them are perfect, all of them have things in their platforms that make me raise my eyebrows). But they are better than what we have now. From that perspective, I am willing to vote for any of those four parties and will vote for the one that has the best chance of beating the Conservative incumbent in my riding.

I have signed up to participate in Pair Vote. This means that I could be matched with someone in another riding and we would swap votes. That person would vote for the party that I want to vote for and I would vote for the party that they want to vote for. This would ensure that both of our true choices get “counted” somewhere (for that $1.75 and for the recognition that a Canadian somewhere did want to make that choice). It would also allow both of us to vote in a way that could beat a Conservative candidate, instead of both feeling like our vote is wasted.  However, not everyone gets a match in the Pair Vote system. Even if I am unable to find a match, I will still go to the polls and cast a tactical vote for the party that I think has the best chance of beating the Conservative candidate.

What is Your Election Strategy?

I’ve outlined my election strategy above: Engage Passionately, Invest Strategically, Vote Tactically. Now tell me about yours….

Still not sure how to vote?

Read my posts on the parties’ platforms here:

• Bloc Quebecois
• Conservative Party of Canada
• Green Party of Canada
• Liberal Party of Canada
• New Democratic Party

Please also check out my Care2 Causes post called Tools to Help You Navigate the Canadian Election and my Bad Moms Club post called If the Political Parties Were Bad Moms. If you want to discuss politics with other moms, also be sure to check out the #momthevote hash tag on twitter and the Mom The Vote facebook page.

This week, I’ll be posting highlights from the platforms of Canada’s five major political parties, focusing on their policies and promises with regards to family, parenting and women’s issues. I am going to try (but do not promise!) to simply report on or summarize what they have promised, rather than providing colour commentary in my posts. However, I am happy to have detailed conversations about the value and feasibility of the proposals in the comments on each post.

Image Credit: Conservative Party of Canada

Conservative Party of Canada

The full platform of the Conservative Party of Canada (CPC) is available online at: http://www.conservative.ca/policy/platform_2011/. The Conservatives platform focuses on five priorities: create jobs, support families, eliminate the deficit, make our streets safe,  and stand on guard fro Canada.

Some of the key promises relating to family, parenting and women’s issues are:

Taxes and Jobs

• Keep taxes as they are, but allow income splitting for up to $50,000 of a family’s earnings after the federal budget is balanced.
• Doubling the Children’s Fitness Tax Credit (to $1000) once the budget is balanced.
• Establish a Children’s Arts Tax Credit to cover up to $500 per child in qualifying expenses for eligible arts or cultural activities (I’ve written about this proposal previously).
• Establish an Adult Fitness Tax Credit of up to $500 .
• Establish a Family Caregiver Tax Credit of $2,000.
• Top up Guaranteed Income Supplement, providing an additional $600 per year for single seniors and up to $840 per year for senior couples.
• Implement Pooled Retirement Pension Plan that self-employed workers can opt into.
• Doubling the tax-free savings account limit once the federal budget is balanced.
• Provide training for Canadians who are out of work.
• One year EI break for small businesses to encourage them to hire new employees.
• Prohibit federally regulated employers from setting a mandatory retirement age and extend program designed to help older workers find jobs.
• Enhance Wage Earner Protection Program to help pay wages and vacation pay to workers whose employers go bankrupt.

Education and Training

• Enhance and extend Canada Student Loans program, providing more access to part-time students in particular.
• Provide loans to recent immigrants to help pay for skills training and accreditation.
• Expand adult basic education programming in the territories in order to increase education and employment levels among Aboriginals in the North.

Health Care

• Renew the Federal-Provincial Health Accord and emphasize the need for results on wait times.
• Defribillators in every hockey arena in Canada.
• Forgive a portion of the federal student loans fordoctors and nurses who agree to practice in under-served rural or remote areas.

Housing and Community Infrastructure

• Extend the ecoENERGY Retrofit-Homes program by one year.
• Supporting environmental safety upgrades to fuel tanks and promoting the deployment of clean energy technologies in Aboriginal, rural and remote communities.
• Permanent funding for municipal infrastructure by making the Gas Tax Fund permanent (via new legislation).
• Improve and expand Canada’s snowmobile and recreational trails.

Women’s Issues

• Will continue to rally world leaders to follow through on commitments to improve the health of women and children in developing countries.

Other

• A variety of measures to be “tough on crime”, but also an end to the long-gun registry.

What do you think of the Conservative platform? Do their promises sound like a good fit for your family? For Canada?

Please also check out my Care2 Causes post called Tools to Help You Navigate the Canadian Election and my Bad Moms Club post called If the Political Parties Were Bad Moms. If you want to discuss politics with other moms, also be sure to check out the #momthevote hash tag on twitter and the Mom The Vote facebook page.

This week, I’ll be posting highlights from the platforms of Canada’s five major political parties, focusing on their policies and promises with regards to family, parenting and women’s issues. I am going to try (but do not promise!) to simply report on or summarize what they have promised, rather than providing colour commentary in my posts. However, I am happy to have detailed conversations about the value and feasibility of the proposals in the comments on each post.

Photo Credit: Bloc Quebecois

Bloc Quebecois

The Bloc Quebecois’ platform is available on its website. The Bloc Quebecois website (and full platform) is mostly French-only, but there is an English version of the Bloc Quebecois’ policy statement.

Most people are familiar with the fact that they want Quebec to separate from Canada. However, they cannot achieve that through the federal House of Commons and while they are represented there, the Bloc Quebecois wants to fight for what it sees as the priorities of Quebeckers. From that perspective, they do have policies on the same types of family, parenting and women’s issues as the other parties.

Some of the key promises in the Bloc Quebecois platform relating to families, parents and women are:

Protecting the rights of working families

• Changes to employment insurance, including:
  • Harmonizing the eligibility criteria
  • Eliminating the 2 week delay before benefits begin
  • Increasing the benefits from 55% to 60% of the person’s salary
  • Base the benefits calculation on the best 12 weeks of work
  • Explore the possibility of allowing self-employed workers to opt in to the program
  • Exempt foreign workers from having to pay into the system since they can’t receive benefits
  • Refund EI contributions of full-time students (up to maximum of $3000)
  • Etc.
• Harmonization of federal and provincial labour laws to ensure Quebeckers in federally regulated jobs enjoy the same rights as Quebeckers protected by the Quebec Labour Code.
  • This includes, for example, ensuring that the parents and spouses of victims of crime who are in federal jobs have the same job protection as those under the Quebec Labour Code if they need to take time off from their job (note: they are also proposing a financial benefit program of up to 52 weeks of paid benefits for the parents or spouses of victims of crime).
• Increasing the tax credit for caregivers and expanding eligibility for that tax credit.
• Ensuring Quebec maintains its ability to provide Quebeckers with a social safety net through enhanced equalization, increased post-secondary education transfers and an end to fiscal imbalance.
  • For example, stop trying to impose “national” solutions in the area of family policy, when Quebec has one of the most progressive systems in the world in this area. Instead, allow Quebec to continue to develop its own family policy and transfer the funds that the federal government collects off the backs of Quebec families to Quebec.
• Introduction of a program to help older workers and support for progression into retirement (instead of a strict cut-off).

Affordable Housing

• Using the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation surplus to finance the construction, renovation and transformation of affordable housing.
• Ensure that Quebec receives $50 million per year to help address homelessness.

Crime and Safety

• Oppose the proliferation of guns and the abolition of the Gun Registry and make rehabilitation of young offenders and their reintegration into society a priority.

Women’s Rights

• Defending women from attacks on their rights, such as the right to control their own bodies — do not reopen the debate on abortion.
• Instituting federal pay equity.
• Re-establishing the Equal Opportunities for Women Program and the Court Challenges Program.
• End of cuts to funding to women’s groups and literacy groups.
• Implementation of an “anonymous curriculum vitae” program for federal and federally regulated jobs that would remove personal details (e.g. first and last name, age, gender, ethnic origin and address) before forwarding the application to the recruiter.
• Support a bill that provides financial incentive to political parties that increase the representation of women in the House of Commons.

Other Issues

• Ensure that immigration policy prioritizes the reunification of families and ensure that immigration applications are dealt with more efficiently.

What do you think of the Bloc Quebecois’ platform? Do their promises sound like a good fit for your family? For Quebec? Possible for the rest of Canada?

Please also check out my Care2 Causes post called Tools to Help You Navigate the Canadian Election and my Bad Moms Club post called If the Political Parties Were Bad Moms. If you want to discuss politics with other moms, also be sure to check out the #momthevote hash tag on twitter and the Mom The Vote facebook page.

This week, I’ll be posting highlights from the platforms of Canada’s five major political parties, focusing on their policies and promises with regards to family, parenting and women’s issues. I am going to try (but do not promise!) to simply report on or summarize what they have promised, rather than providing colour commentary in my posts. However, I am happy to have detailed conversations about the value and feasibility of the proposals in the comments on each post.

Image credit: Michael Ignatieff

Liberal Party of Canada

The Liberal Party’s full platform is available online at http://www.liberal.ca/platform/. The slogan for the Liberal Party’s platform is “Your Family. Your Future. Your Canada.” This is a very long platform and there is a fair bit of explanation (rationale) along with the promises and quite a bit of repetition (i.e. things being mentioned in more than one section of the document). So, after a long, long read, I hope I caught all the important elements.

Some of the key promises in the Liberal platform relating to families, parents and women are:

Education and Child Care

• New Early Childhood Learning and Care Fund that will begin with $500 million in the first year rising to $1 billion by the fourth year. Provinces and territories would apply to the Fund for cost-sharing of early childhood learning and care plans that create new care spaces with well-trained professional staff.
• Canadian Learning Passport worth $1 billion annually with the motto “If you get the grades, you get to go.” Gives $100 per year over four years for every high school student in Canada to use for college, university or CEGEP. For students in low income families, the amount will be $1,500 per year for four years. (Note: I wrote about this proposal on Care2 Causes).
• Will forgive $1500 in student loan debt for young Canadians who engage in volunteer service.
• Working with Aboriginal leadership, invest $200 million in its first two years into post-secondary education for Aboriginal students and $300 million in its second year in K-12 Aboriginal education. Create a $5 million annual investment in Métis students.
• Invest $120 million over the first two years into Veterans Learning Benefit to help smooth the reintegration of Canadian Forces personnel into society and the workforce.
• Invest $100 million annually within four years to improve and expand language skills training programs for immigrants.

Family Care and Finances

• New six month Family Care Employment Insurance Benefit to allow Canadians to take time off work to care for gravely ill family members at home without having to quit their jobs.
• New Family Care Tax Benefit, modeled on the Child Tax Benefit, to help low- and middle-income family caregivers who provide essential care to a gravely ill family members at home.
• Gradual increase of the defined benefits under the Canada Pension Plan (CPP) and implement a new voluntary supplement to the CPP called the Secure Retirement Option (allowing Canadians to save an additional 5 to 10% in a secure CPP backed retirement fund).
• Increase Guaranteed Income Supplement (GIS) benefits for low-income seniors.

Health, Nutrition and Food Safety

• Address increasing obesity rates in Canadian youth by introducing:
  • new Healthy Choices program to education Canadians about healthy eating, the food system, and minimizing threats to food safety
  • new, progressive labelling regulations that give clear and simple information to Canadians
  • new regulatory standards on transfats and salt
  • $400 million annual investment in Health Start program to help 250,000 children from low-income families to access healthy, home-grown foods.
  • $80 million investment over four years to create a Buy Local Fund to promote high-quality, homegrown foods produced by local farmers and support a Farmers’ Market Development Program
  • comprehensive review of Canadian Food Inspection Agency, Health Canada and the Public Health Agency of Canada to ensure Canada’s food safety system is effectively coordinated to minimize risks and assure Canadians that their food is safe
  • $50 million investment over four years to improve food inspection and food standards
• Brain health strategy focusing on awareness, education, prevention, research, income security, treatment and support, and preventing genetic discrimination.
• Pan-Canadian collaboration on quality improvement, innovation and best practices in health care
• New incentive for doctors, nurses and nurse practitioners to practice in underserved rural communities (includes forgiving student loans of up to $40,000 for family doctors and up to $20,000 for nurses and nurse practitioners).
• Ensure Canadians across the country have a drug plan that covers the cost of prescription drugs for expensive illnesses and also look into ways to lower the cost of prescription drugs (e.g. expanding bulk purchasing).

Housing and Community Infrastructure

• Green Renovation Tax Credit that allows Canadians to claim a tax credit of up to $13,500 for making energy efficient changes to their homes.
• Implement a renewed Afforable Housing Framework that aims to reduce homelessness, maintain and renew existing affordable housing stock, and stimulate new construction of affordable housing.
• Variety of initiatives aimed at municipal infrastructure and transit.

Women’s Issues

• Mandate a national task force to examine the systemic causes of violence against Aboriginal women.
• Reinstate the Court Challenges Program that provides financial assistance for pursuing language and equality rights under Canada’s Constitution (cancelled by Conservative government).
• Create an effective, proactive system for implementing and monitoring pay equity at the federal level.

Other Priorities

• 100% coverage of high-speed Internet across rural Canada (I include this because if we had this now, I would be able to work from home more often, so it is a key family issue for me)
• Poverty Reduction Plan worth $5 billion over two years.
• Youth Hiring Incentive for small and medium-sized business (100% EI holiday for every Canadian youth age 18 to 25 that they hire)

What do you think of the Liberal Party’s platform? Do their promises sound like a good fit for your family? For our country?

Please also check out my Care2 Causes post called Tools to Help You Navigate the Canadian Election and my Bad Moms Club post called If the Political Parties Were Bad Moms. If you want to discuss politics with other moms, also be sure to check out the #momthevote hash tag on twitter and the Mom The Vote facebook page.

This week, I’ll be posting highlights from the platforms of Canada’s five major political parties, focusing on their policies and promises with regards to family, parenting and women’s issues. I am going to try (but do not promise!) to simply report on or summarize what they have promised, rather than providing colour commentary in my posts. However, I am happy to have detailed conversations about the value and feasibility of the proposals in the comments on each post.

Image credit: Green Party of Canada

Green Party of Canada

The full Green Party Platform is available online at http://greenparty.ca/platform2011. Its budget (which provides the true details on their plans) is available here: http://greenparty.ca/platform2011/budget. The Green Party’s platform is centred around three key themes: Smart Economy, Strong Communities, True Democracy.

Some of the key promises that relate to families, parents and women include:

Family Tax Initiatives

• Lower income taxes (reduce EI and CPP contributions by a third, eliminate personal income taxes below the low-income cut-off of $20,000).
• Introduce full income splitting (joint calculation of income) immediately to reduce the tax burden on married couples and families.
• Implement carbon pricing (emissions tax), but provide a carbon pricing rebate (similar to the GST rebate) for low income Canadians.

Affordable Housing and Improved Community Infrastructure

• Establish a national affordable housing program, ramping up to building 20,000 new affordable housing units per year and renewing 8,000 units per year to ensure the existing stock. Providing rent supplements or shelter assistance for an additional 40,000 low-income households per year for ten years.
• Increase EcoEnergy home energy retrofit grants by 50% (note: this program is currently expired and the Green Party is recommending reinstating and increasing by half the amount people receive).  Also implement energy retrofit programs for low income housing and municipal, university, school and hospital buildings.
• Invest in the creation of energy efficient community housing co-ops and affordable housing units.
• Investment in basic infrastructure (education, safe drinking water, improved housing) for First Nations communities.
• Invest in the creation of green recreational and cultural facilities and refurbishing of existing facilities.
• Invest in mass transit and car sharing initiatives, as well as cycling and pedestrian initiatives.

Education and Childcare

• Implement a municipal youth employment program to provide federal minimum wage jobs across the country for 40,000 youth from age 18 to 25 for a one year period each, followed by a tuition credit of $4,000 for those who successfully complete the program.
• Invest in early childhood education by working with the provinces on the implementation of innovative programs that work for their populations. This investment would start at $500 million per year and increase to $1 billion per year in the third year.

Work-Life Balance

• Give people more flexibility in their work lives by focusing on things like making it easier to telecommute/work from home, share jobs, have flex hours, access flexible child care spaces and early childhood education, more workplace child care spaces, support for those who want to stay home and raise their children and support for those who need to get back to work while their kids are young.

Health and Food Safety

• Support rapid transition to organic agriculture rather than subsidizing costly agro-chemicals, industrial food production and genetically modified crops.
• Invest in Universal Pharmacare program, a bulk purchasing agency, and make new drug patent protection times shorter. Encourage a successful generic drug market.
• National campaign to discourage marijuana use (similar to anti-tobacco), in tandem with the legalization and taxation of marijuana.

What do you think of the Green Party’s platform? Do their promises sound like a good fit for your family? For our country?

Please also check out my Care2 Causes post called Tools to Help You Navigate the Canadian Election and my Bad Moms Club post called If the Political Parties Were Bad Moms. If you want to discuss politics with other moms, also be sure to check out the #momthevote hash tag on twitter and the Mom The Vote facebook page.

This week, I’ll be posting highlights from the platforms of Canada’s five major political parties, focusing on their policies and promises with regards to family, parenting and women’s issues. I am going to try (but do not promise!) to simply report on or summarize what they have promised, rather than providing colour commentary in my posts. However, I am happy to have detailed conversations about the value and feasibility of the proposals in the comments on each post.

New Democratic Party (NDP)

The NDP’s platform is available online at http://www.ndp.ca/platform and its tagline is “leadership you can trust to give your family a break.”

Some of the key promises that relate to families, parents and women include:

Benefits to allow people to care for their families

• More generous and flexible benefits to allow people to take up to six months leave from work to tend to relatives near the end of their lives (currently six weeks).
• New Caregiver Benefit of up to $1500 per year (similar to Child Tax Benefit) to help low and middle-income families care for children, spouses, parents and other family members.
• Target child poverty with new non-taxable Child Benefit (in addition to existing Child Tax Benefit and Universal Child Care Benefit) that would increase support by up to $700 per child over the next 4 years, in addition to setting goals and targets for poverty reduction with other levels of government.
• If your family includes small business owners, a family farm, or tradespeople, there are additional benefits that could help your family.

Childcare and education

• Canada-wide child care and early learning program that includes 100,000 new childcare spaces over the next 4 years (25,000 per year), as well as investments in the community infrastructure required to support child care. The community-based child centres would provide parents with a one-stop-shop for family services.
• More affordable post-secondary education through direct transfer of $800 million to the provinces and territories to help them lower tuition fees.
• Increased funding to Canada Student Grants program of $200 million per year, targeting accessibility for Aboriginal, disabled and low-income students in particular.
• Raising education tax credit from $4,800 per year to $5,760 per year to help with increasing education costs.

Helping families reduce costs

• Reinstating the Rehabilitation Assistance Program (RRAP) and Affordable Housing Initiative, among other things, to provide more affordable housing for Canadian families.
• Initiatives aimed at promoting energy efficient homes and helping families cover the costs of heating their homes.
• Credit card interest rates of no more than 5% above prime.
• Implementing a variety of procedures to reduce the prices of prescription medication.
• National minimum wage.
• Variety of initiatives to encourage clean energy production and strengthen public transit.

Women’s Rights

• Variety of initiatives aimed at addressing gaps in women’s equality, such as reversing the Conservatives attacks on pay equity, restoring funding to women’s programs, expanding access to shelter and transition houses for women fleeing violence, improving support to aboriginal women (especially victims of violence), and ensuring that using maternity/parental leave benefits does not change an individual’s eligibility for Employment Insurance benefits.
• Re-affirming women’s rights to safe, accessible abortion services.

Healthcare

• Guaranteed commitment to our single-payer public health care system.
• Measures to address the shortage of doctors, nurses, midwives and other health care professionals (including programs to recruit and support low-income, rural and aboriginal medical students).

Children’s Health and Safety

• Children’s Nutrition Initiative to support and expand provincial and local programs that provide healthy meals to school children, while also increasing emphasis on food safety and proper labelling of food.
• Implement a strategy for reducing serious injuries in amateur sport.
• Plans to hire more police and give parents, teachers and police more tools to protect children by making gang recruiting illegal and implementing initiatives to ensure that prisons do not serve as “crime schools”.

What do you think of the NDP platform? Do their promises sound like a good fit for your family? For our country?

Please also check out my Care2 Causes post called Tools to Help You Navigate the Canadian Election and my Bad Moms Club post called If the Political Parties Were Bad Moms. If you want to discuss politics with other moms, also be sure to check out the #momthevote hash tag on twitter and the Mom The Vote facebook page.

Canadian Parliament made history today. It was the first time that a government has ever been defeated because it was deemed to be in contempt of Parliament.  This brings Stephen Harper’s Conservative government to an end thrusts Canadian citizens into a Spring election.

During our last election, I scoured through the platforms of each political party and reported here on the parenting and family related priorities and promises that each of them were making. I plan to do that again.

As you think about which party to support, what questions do you have? What would you like to see me address as I pick apart their platforms?

Image credit: Tigana on flickr

In Flanders fields the poppies grow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

Some people remember in silence. They stop what they are doing at 11:00am to pause and reflect. To be thankful for the sacrifices of the women and men who fought for our freedom. While I have nothing against a minute or two of silence at 11:00am, and while I generally do participate in the quiet, it feels symbolically fake to me. I don’t appreciate those sacrifices more by being quiet. I appreciate them more by telling stories, visiting museums, and speaking out for the rights of veterans, child soldiers, prisoners of war and innocent victims.

I remember…

• By visiting the War Museum with my children, not necessarily on November 11 (too many crowds), but at a time when I feel they are ready to listen and to absorb.
• By stopping at monuments, taking the time to learn and write about the stories behind them when I get back home, and talking to people about the sacrifices others had to make.
• By visiting places where horrors took place because the pain of seeing is second only to the danger of not knowing or not believing.
• By thinking about the union of my French mother-in-law and German father-in-law who married not long after such a union would have been unspeakable.
• By reflecting on my father-in-law’s early childhood and the physical repercussions he still carries from a childhood in Germany during World War II when they never had enough to eat.
• By remembering my grandfather who missed much of his children’s early childhood while in Europe fighting in World War II.
• By remembering my great uncle who died at sea in World War II and my great aunt, also a veteran, who went blind when he never returned.
• By remembering our shock when a friend who thought he was just getting a free education (I mean Canada would never go to war, right?) got shipped off to the Gulf War.
• By expressing disgust at the Harper government’s changes to Veteran pensions and disability benefits, which have both decreased the benefits and made it more difficult to obtain them (how is that respecting our veterans?).
• By acknowledging that war is not a thing of the past and that there are still many wars being fought in many countries around the world that are devastating many lives.

Two minutes of silence is nice. It is respectful. It is good. But being unsilent on these issues is even more important. There are so many victims, past, present and future. Our silence won’t change that, but our voices, our votes, and our actions may.

Image credit: _Skender_ on flickr