After Trudeau promised to give his universal child benefit to charity, CBC reports taxpayers are paying wages for his children’s two nannies.
The only good news for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau about the first mini-uproar to hit since his swearing-in last month is that the term “Nannygate” has already been taken.
The CBC reported Monday that Canadian taxpayers are paying the wages of two nannies hired to care for the three young children of Trudeau and his wife, Sophie Grégoire-Trudeau.
Cabinet last week authorized the appointment of the two women under the Official Residences Act as “special assistants at the prime minister’s residence.” They will be paid between $15 and $20 an hour during the day and $11 to $13 an hour for night shifts effective Nov. 4 — the day Trudeau and his cabinet were sworn in.
In modern life, nannies and child-care present a hot-button Rorschach test of socioeconomic and political values — touching as they do on the emotion-charged issues of parenthood, feminism, race, fair compensation and exploitation. And social media promptly lit up in outrage at the nanny hirings.
Inevitably, the term Nannygate will also raise its clichéd head, thought it was first applied more than 20 years ago in the U.S. when President Bill Clinton’s nominee for Attorney General, Zoe Baird, stepped down after it became known she and her husband had employed two illegal immigrants as a nanny and chauffeur.
The CBC report came after an election campaign in which Trudeau repeatedly attacked the Conservatives’ enhanced universal child care benefit, or UCCB, and income splitting for families, arguing rich families like his and former prime minister Stephen Harper’s didn’t need taxpayers’ help.
“In these times, Mr. Harper’s top priority is to give wealthy families like his and mine $2,000,” Trudeau said in reference to the Conservatives’ income-splitting tax credit. “Let me tell you something: We don’t need it. And Canada can’t afford it.”
Trudeau is also entitled to collect annual UCCB payments of about $3,400 for his three children. He promised to give the money to charity.
The prime minister is paid about $330,000 annually. The federal government for which he is responsible has a budget of about $280 billion a year.
The CBC said one of the women hired was with the Trudeaus this past week on the prime minister’s foreign trip that wrapped up Monday at the United Nations climate change conference in Paris. She posted photos online of the couple’s two children who came on the trip. There were also shots of her with the Trudeaus’ youngest child on Facebook visiting museums and at the hotel where they stayed in Paris.
Kate Purchase, Trudeau's director of communications, says in a statement the family employs two household employees as secondary caregivers who also perform what she calls "other duties around the house."
Purchase has yet to specify what those other duties entail, but notes that a small number of staff provide assistance to the Trudeau family, and that similar arrangements existed for their predecessors.
Section 7.1 of the Official Residence Act says cabinet may appoint “a steward or housekeeper and such other employees” deemed necessary for the management of the prime minister’s residence.
This isn’t the first time questions have been raised about whether taxpayers were footing the bill for child care.
The issue arose in May 1984 when then Conservative leader Brian Mulroney was asked by a television interviewer if taxpayers would pay for “nannies” for his three children as they did for Trudeau’s father, ************ Trudeau, when he was prime minister.
“No,” Mulroney replied.
http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2015/12/01/taxpayers-pay-for-trudeaus-nannies-report.html
