The caregivers will receive $15-20 hourly during the day as well as $11-13/hr for overnight shifts.
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Interim Conservative Leader Rona Ambrose says Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is a rich man who should pay for his own nannies and not saddle taxpayers with the cost of raising his three young children.
Yes, I know, Trudeau made a big to-do during the campaign about exactly how much his family doesn’t need taxpayer dollars to cover child care.
These hirings were apparently approved in late November with cabinet authorizing the appointment of the two women under the Official Residences Act as “special assistants at the prime minister’s residence”.
The Trudeau government plans to scrap a series of existing benefits and tax credits for parents, including income-splitting, and has vowed to replace them all with a single Canada Child Benefit the Liberals say will leave most parents better off.
I think we need to get past an intentionally naive notion that the Prime Minister’s household should be run just like any other household. Margaret Trudeau (top left) and nanny Marilou Trayvilla (top right) look on.
New Democrat MP Sheila Malcolmson, the party’s status of women critic, called out the prime minister for paying his nannies so little. Ah, no. Will it even register next to the oh-so-Canadian tut-tutting in the 1980s over Mila Mulroney’s spending, which once included $2,000 for flowers at a lunch, or the furor over Pierre Trudeau’s $275,000 indoor lap pool at 24 Sussex?
After it had been disclosed he was using public money to fund nannies to look after his kids, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau continues to be accused of hypocrisy.
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.
Dogged with questions about the caregiver controversy, Kate Purchase, Trudeau’s director of communications, released a statement Wednesday indicating the prime minister will adjust his staff complement to suit his family’s needs.
“Like all families of prime ministers, a small number of staff provide assistance”.
Trudeau is also entitled to collect around $3,400 as part of Canada’s universal child care benefit, though he has said this money will be donated to charity.
“The prime minister will not expand the household staff of the prime minister’s residence”, Purchase said.
Purchase said the caregivers are both Canadian citizens who were born outside of the country but have been here for some time.
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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.
