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Thank you Conservative Government! (no, not really) (Canadian) |
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by lilysmom  (March 2007) (rank 500+) |
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More about the new budget!
Last year the government started giving us $100 a month for child care. Personally, I don’t think that $1200 a year is any help at all if you can’t find a place to send your child when you go back
to work, but that is another story!
This year they said that they will be giving a $10 000 tax credit per space created to any business that creates a new opening for a child (this is for businesses, not day cares, btw), but they don’t expect to spend more than $5-million on it… which means that they expect to only have 500 new spaces open up across the country. It doesn’t look like our work places are going to help us out with child care either!
The Liberals were giving $1.2-billion dollars annually (divided between the provinces proportionally) to create new daycare spaces. The Conservatives have scaled that way back to $250-million. Essentially, they have cut the spending for new daycare spaces by 80%. So we really shouldn’t expect too many new daycares to be opening any time soon! The responsibility has been dumped on the provinces and the money just isn’t there.
On to a tiny bit of good news… families are going to be getting a $2000 tax credit per child for the 2007 tax year. This means that most of us working middle class people will be getting an extra $310 per child back on our tax return for 2007. If you are a low income family with a couple of kids, this is really good for you, because you may be taken off the tax rolls completely. For the rest of us, it doesn’t really mean that much.
So, in the end, the new budget screws working families. They try to make it seem like they are giving us this wonderful gift of a $2000 tax credit, but what is $310 a year going to do for us when they cut day-care spending by $960-million?
