A stimulus for all seasons:

Across Canada, stimulus spending is set to go into high gear. The federal government has this week authorized the government to spend $3 billion as quickly as possible to quick-start some of the total $40 billion in stimulus spending. For its part, Quebec has promised $15 billion and Ontario, $27.5 billion.

What will all this money be spent on? On roads, schools, hospitals, public transit, worker training, and support for businesses.

Here's what it won't be spent on: A national daycare program, pay equity and improved Employment Insurance benefits that would help women. (Now, only a third of unemployed women qualify for EI, because the rules require a high number of hours worked, making it harder for part-timers to qualify.)

It was my impression that women drove cars, attended schools, worked in hospitals and some even conduct transit vehicles.  The reason EI benefits are determined by hours worked, and not days, is on the ancient principle that you get out what you put in.  Changing eligibility, by lowering the number of hours needed, would transfer EI from employment insurance into just another welfare handout.  While some in modern Canada are quite keen on government writing a blank check to all and sundry, those who believe in some degree of fiscal restraint support reasonable eligibility requirements.

A daycare network is economic infrastructure in the same way as high-speed Internet, and just as necessary to the smooth running of the Canadian economy. Quebec alone of the provinces understands this.

Well, no.  Economic infrastructure is, arguably, a public good which requires massive capital investment.  Child care is not a public good.  So elastic a definition makes any widely used good or service "infrastructure."  Supermarkets are infrastructure, gas stations are infrastructure, Burger King outlet could also be infrastructure.

Canada's low birth rate has been a source of worry to economists for years. The rate improved in 2006 to 1.59, still well below the replacement birth rate of 2.1 children per woman.

It is not a question of women not wanting children, said Sue Calhoun, president of the Canadian Federation of Business and Professional Women's Clubs, in an interview from New Brunswick.
Calhoun has done research in N.B. which shows that women generally wanted more children than they felt they could afford.

"In New Brunswick," she said, "the number of childcare spaces for children up to age 4 meets only 13 per cent of the demand." she said.

But not only are women not having as many children as they would like, a new Statistics Canada report suggests that the women might also be curtailing their participation in the labour force when they have even two children.

One of the reasons women have fewer children is they can't afford them.  Two generations ago one breadwinner, often with minimal education, could feed and clothe a family of four.  Now two breadwinners are barely able to make ends meet.  The revolutionary increase in the size of government over the intervening forty years has made the nuclear family less and less financially viable.  Those with long memories will recall that this massive increase in government spending was suppose to help working families, by making things like education and health care affordable.  

While the Left portrays government services as efficiently providing what people need, and need to pay for, they omit the vast waste that service provision by the public sector entails.  The shortage of child care space is another example of compassionate government in action.  Typically if there is a demand, a supply quickly emerges.  Unless the state restricts the supply.  Many so-called child care advocates support strict licensing laws as a way of creating a shortage, and therefore a rationale for a state system.