Loved the twitter discussion on child benefits last night. Thanks to @JenniferRobson8 @TheHerleBurly @KenBoessenkool @gmbutts @AlexUsherHESA. I appreciated the insight.

My take. Thread.

When we were working on the Canada Child Benefit for the Liberals’ 2015 platform, we were building on the logic, goals and design of the National Child Benefit Supplement and the Canada Child Tax Benefit.

The CCB was not building on the Harper Government’s Universal Child Care Benefit. The CCB was not designed as a progressive tweak to Harper's benefit. It was designed to replace it.

The CCB has two primary policy objectives: significantly reduce extreme poverty in families and children; and have a material impact on quality of life for lower-middle and middle-middle income families and children.

It succeeded on both of these. It is an income security policy for families. It dramatically proved its value over the past year. It was never intended as “a childcare program.”

I was reading this book by Keith Banting and John Myles (and the great piece by Jane Jenson in the book) when working on the design of the CCB and this research provides great descriptions of the various childcare benefits and some of the policy gaps. https://www.ubcpress.ca/inequality-and-the-fading-of-redistributive-politics.

The work of the Caledon Institute and the advocacy by Ken Battle, Michael Mendelson and Sherri Torjman to expand the NCB was crucial to the design. Policy matters, research matters.

The Harper UCCB didn’t really have substantive policy goals. It was a communications and political initiative designed to kill Martin’s childcare plan. I defer to Ken and David on whether it worked electorally with key constituencies.

The CCB is a progressive, means tested, scalable cash benefit that has a real impact on poverty and quality of life. Its design was informed by years of work by progressives to expand and modify the National Child Benefit; it is not an expanded or modified UCCB.

I am happy that there is now consensus on CCB, which means, like public health care, no party is seriously suggesting undoing it.

But the two benefits are not similar -- the key design features that make the CCB successful at achieving policy goals were absent from Harper’s UCCB. FIN