TORONTO — To raise children “properly” one parent should stay at home while the other goes to work, Alberta’s finance minister suggested.
In a tangent at the end of a speech on Alberta’s economy to the Economic Club of Canada in Toronto, Iris Evans also suggested a lack of education is linked to mental illness and crime.
Evans said Canadians are missing important opportunities by not educating their children about finances.
After struggling with finances herself, Evans said she made it her mission to teach her kids about money. As adults, her kids have topped up RRSPs, live in good houses and have good savings, she said.
She also said good parenting means sacrificing some income to stay at home, as her children have done.
“They’ve understood perfectly well that when you’re raising children you don’t both go off to work and leave them for somebody else to raise,” Evans said.
“This is not a statement against daycare. It’s a statement about their belief in the importance of raising children properly.”
But Andrea Calver, a co-ordinator for the Ontario Coalition for Better Child Care, said daycare can be a healthy part of a child’s upbringing.
“Times have changed and for many families you need two incomes to have a reasonable standard of living,” Calver said.
In her speech, Evans also suggested a link between a lack of education and mental illness or criminal behaviour.
“The huge failure of Canadians is not to educate the children properly and then why should we be surprised when they have mental illnesses or commit dreadful crimes?” she said.