Norma Greenaway, CanWest News Service; Ottawa Citizen Canada.com
OTTAWA -- The minority Conservative government has abandoned its much-maligned plan to rely heavily on businesses to create 125,000 new child-care spaces over five years. It has decided instead to channel directly to provincial and territorial governments the $250 million a year it had originally earmarked for tax incentives and grants to businesses and other private organizations, CanWest News Service has learned. The government's change of course will be outlined Monday in the federal budget.
The child-care money, which will be divvied up among the provinces and territories on a per capita formula, will start flowing on April 1. The government has been under the gun to produce details of its plan for creating child-care spaces since Stephen Harper announced on the day he was sworn in as prime minister last year that he would not honour the former Liberal government's child-care agreements with the provinces and territories beyond March 31 of this year. The move meant the five-year agreements signed with the Paul Martin government, worth $5 billion, were cancelled after just two years, leaving the provinces and territories with $3.5 billion less than they had been banking on.
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