Ignatieff Pledges $1 Billion To Help Care For Sick Or Elderly Family Members

Michael Ignatieff unveiled a key plank in the Liberal election platform today, pledging $1 billion to help Canadians care for sick or elderly family members.

The Liberal leader is promising to pay for his family-care plan by cancelling $5-6 billion in corporate tax cuts planned by the Conservatives.

That includes rolling back a 1.5 percentage point cut to the corporate tax rate which is slated to go into effect Jan. 1.

The announcement will hand Prime Minister Stephen Harper ammunition to bolster Tory claims that Ignatieff is a “tax and spend” Liberal.

But the Liberals are taking a calculated gamble that the move will help set up a stark choice for voters in the next election.

They see it as a choice between a compassionate Liberal leader in tune with hard-pressed, middle-class families and a cold Conservative prime minister squandering billions on fighter jets, prisons and tax breaks for rich corporations.

The Liberal plan has a two-pronged approach to easing the burden of caring for family members:

— A new refundable family care tax benefit of up to $1,350 a year. The Liberals estimate 600,000 Canadians would qualify, costing the treasury about $750 million a year.

— Replace the compassionate-care benefit under the Employment Insurance program with a family care benefit that would last longer and apply more broadly. The Liberals estimate as many as 30,000 Canadians would qualify for the new benefit, costing the treasury about $250 million a year.

The current benefit offers six weeks of EI to those caring for a family member who is deemed by a doctor to have no more than six months left to live. About 5,000 people currently claim the benefit each year.

The new benefit would provide up to six months of EI to those caring for family members with serious illnesses, but not necessarily on the brink of death. The benefit could be split among various family members and the six months could be taken all at once or sporadically over the course of a year.

Ignatieff made the announcement in Gatineau, Que., at the home of a family struggling to care for a sick family member.

Conservatives say Ignatieff’s vow to cancel scheduled corporate tax cuts would kill jobs and jeopardize the fragile economic recovery.

While the Tories did not appear to contemplate a direct federal role in helping Canadians cope with sick family members, government House leader John Baird said the Tory focus on strengthening the economy will do more ultimately to help those people.

He further noted that the Harper government has continued to increase transfer payments to the provinces for health care, even during the depths of the recession. That’s in contrast, he said, to Liberal government of Jean Chretien, which slashed transfers in the early 1990s to rein in the federal deficit.

Ignatieff’s promises fall short of the national homecare program that many experts believe is necessary as baby boomers swell the ranks of Canada’s seniors. Liberals say that will have to be discussed with the provinces, which are solely responsible for delivery of health care and which currently provide a wide array of different homecare options.

Until now, Ignatieff has said he’d pay for his platform commitments by freezing corporate taxes at the current rate of 18 per cent, indefinitely deferring the scheduled reduction to 16.5 per cent in 2011 and to 15 per cent the following year.

However, with no election on the horizon this year, he’s now been forced to specify that a Liberal government would actually reverse the coming Jan. 1 reduction rather than forfeit some $1.8 billion in tax revenue.

Liberal strategists argue that the homecare crisis is more urgent than lowering corporate taxes, which are already among the lowest in the industrialized world.

They cite some sobering statistics: 2.7 million Canadians are providing care for family members, 40 per cent of them are using up their life savings to survive, 25 per cent miss a month or more of work and 65 per cent are getting by on household incomes of less than $45,000.