The Conservative Party's Stephen Harper is promising that the Tories would offer a child-care allowance of $1,200 a year for each child under six to parents across the country.

The party says parents could then decide how to spend the money -- whether on day care, babysitters or having a parent stay at home.

The party is also offering $250 million in annual tax credits to fund a community child-care investment program, which it says will create 125,000 new child-care spaces over the next five years.

Altogether, the Conservative Party says their plan provides $10.9 billion over five years.

The Tory plan differs sharply from the Liberal child-care strategy, which the party has been working on for more than 10 years. The Liberal plan focuses on early childhood development in government regulated day care centres.

During the last federal election, the Liberals offered $5 billion to the provinces, which will then have control over subsidizing day care. On Tuesday, Martin raised the ante, saying a re-elected Liberal government would more than double its spending, to $11 billion through 2015.

Over the past year, the Liberal minority government has signed full funding agreements with three provinces, and agreements in principle with seven more. The money was announced in the June budget, and first-year funding has been placed in a trust fund.

WHERE THE PARTIES STAND

Liberals

The Liberals say what parents want it high-quality, regulated and subsidized day care.

While the Conservatives say stay-at-home parents would face discrimination under the Liberal plan, the Liberals respond that it is simply responding to reality, which finds that seven-in-10 mothers with pre-school children are in the workforce.

"We all want to spend more time with our kids for lots of reasons, economic, social, (but) for reasons of independence, we don't," Social Development Minister Ken Dryden has said.

Prime Minister Paul Martin says the Conservatives' plan would do little to help low-income parents.

"My understanding of what he's talking about is a program that will probably give you roughly $25 a week," said Martin during a press conference in St. John's, Newfoundland.

"What are low- and middle-income Canadians going to do for the rest of the week?"

The Liberals also believe that the best kind of day care is government-regulated non-profit care. They say that any plan encouraging for-profit day care would not be properly regulated and would fail to ensure quality education for children.

Conservatives

The Conservatives believe that a national, universal day care program as the Liberals have proposed discriminates against parents who choose to stay at home with their children, because there is no funding provided to them.

The party's Intergovernmental Affairs Critic, Rona Ambrose, says she doesn't believe most parents want to send their kids to day care centres. She says her party is not against national day care, but doesn't believe that the federal government should be presenting institutional day care as the sole option.

"Of course parents need child care support, there's no doubt about that. But this will just scrape the surface," she told CTV.ca earlier this year. "We think there needs to be options extended beyond what's on the table. It just won't meet the needs of parents."

Ambrose says that many provinces and territories have already come up with their own solutions to meeting child care needs and don't want the federal government telling them their programs need to change.

The Conservatives have also said that the Liberals' day care plan is flawed because it benefits only for 9-to-5 workers in urban areas.

"But who speaks for shift workers? Who speaks for the low-income parent who cannot afford institutional care? Who speaks for rural Canadians?" Harper wondered.

Finally, the conservatives say there is room for private, for-profit day-care providers in their plan, and that their tax credit plan would help those businesses grow.

NDP

The NDP supports the public delivery of early child care and is excited about the creation of a national early learning and child care program.

The party says there is overwhelming evidence that publicly funded day care centres are much more likely to deliver high quality programs that support "early learning" compared to private day cares. They also say public day care centres provide equity by ensuring that children with special needs are included and that services are accountable and stable.

The NDP wants the plan extended so as to phase out for-profit day care centres, bringing them into a new funding regime and restricting funding to for-profit day cares.

They would also like to see protective mechanisms to ensure that public money goes only to public and non-profit services. And they want a public agency to oversee the provision of services.

Green Party

The Green Party says it is committed to developing a national child-care strategy – one that includes non-profit, professional day care, as well as increased support for at-home parents.

They would like to see funding for non-profit day care and they want a referendum on whether Canadians want a publicly-funded national day care program.

Bloc Quebecois

The Bloc is of course not interested in a national day care program but it is concerned with ensuring that Ottawa transfers funds into Quebec's existing low-cost day care program. They also want Ottawa to allow the Quebec government to put in place a universal parental leave program.

WHAT OTHERS SAY

Monica Lysack, Executive Director of the Child Care Advocacy Association of Canada, says her group believes in allowing parents choice but says the first step is to make sure Canada has decent, regulated child care centres.

"If people have the option of family care, that's great. But most of us don't have that option – or we are forced to use that option because we don't access to a full range of early learning care centres. We don't have choices right now," she told CTV.ca earlier this year.

"When I had small children in Saskatchewan, we had the lowest per capita rate of child care spaces. I didn't have choice about whether to use those facilities, regardless of money. Tax cuts wouldn't have helped me; a cheque from the government wouldn't have helped me. I didn't have choices and that was what was really unfair."

Lysack says creating more day care spaces is the solution to providing care to young children, not handing out cash to parents.

"If we simply give the money to parents, we're saying 'Take the money, now it's your problem.' And I think that would be a really cowardly thing for the government to do."

The conservative lobby group REAL Women of Canada says the Liberals' proposed program would specifically favour two-income families while ignoring those families who choose to have one parent stay home to take care of children.

"We're not against helping day cares, but we want flexibility. We want a range of choices: private neighbour care, care from parents, grandparents, care from centres from a religious community, etc. We think everyone should be considered and not deliberately left out," Watts told CTV.ca.

"The family that chooses institutional, government-run day care can take advantage of this tax money. But the family that chooses home care or care from grandparents or neighbours, they don't get any of that. But they pay into it. And that's what we think is unfair."

Paul Moist, the national president of the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE), says the Conservative plan is flawed because it would use public funds to open the door to "big box" commercial child care chains.

"This is bad policy and bad for kids," believes Moist.

He says what working parents need is not another tax deduction but a high-quality, not-for-profit child care program.

France St-Hillaire, vice-president of research for the Institute for Research on Public Policy think-tank, says determining which is the better plan -- that of the Conservatives or that of the Liberals -- depends on which factors each family considers most important.

"The Conservative plan will help more families, especially those with a stay-at-home parent, or two working parents with either varied shifts, who work part time or on contract,'' she told the Canadian Press.

"If on the other hand, you support the notion of establishing a system of regulated, public day-care with an education component that is focused on quality, the Liberal plan would probably get you there faster.''