BRIEF FROM THE CHILD CARE ADVOCACY
ASSOCIATION OF CANADA
Introduction
The Child Care Advocacy Association of Canada (CCAAC) has
identified ways and means to ensure that Canadian families continue to have
access to the early learning supports and services that they need, and
strategies for the government to emerge with a strong social and economic
foundation. Canada is the one of the latest countries to be impacted by the
world economic crisis, and the not-for-profit sector in Canada is not immune
from its rapid impact. The Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister
describes the current economic crises as unique – with six global financial
sectors destabilized, where only one or two would cause a normal downturn.
Traditional sources of stable funding for the not for profit sector (community
foundations, municipalities, businesses, etc.) are in crisis themselves. The
Child Care Advocacy Association of Canada has consistently identified ways and
means to ensure that Canadian families continue to have access to the early
learning supports and services that they need, and we continue to provide strategies
for the government to emerge from this crisis within a strengthen and stronger child
care sector. Plus as the chronic need for early care and learning continues,
the evidence demonstrating the importance of public policy development and
investment and our recommendations remain substantially unchanged. Therefore on
behalf of the Child Care Advocacy Association of Canada we submit for your
consideration the CCAAC’s contribution to the Canadian Centre for Policy
Alternative’s 2011 Alternative Federal Budget (AFB) http://policyalternatives.ca/afb2011. Rethink,
Rebuild, Renew, page 42, Section 1, “Securing our Common Wealth”.
Who is the CCAAC?
The Child Care Advocacy Association of Canada (CCAAC) promotes
quality, inclusive, publicly funded, non-profit child care services accessible
to all. The association’s membership has a direct connection to more than four
million Canadians, including parents, caregivers, researchers and students as
well as women’s, anti-poverty, labour, social justice, disability and rural
organizations.
Overview
The CCAAC’s budget submission to the House of Commons Standing
Committee on Finance addresses specific questions. The first is how to achieve
a sustained economic recovery in Canada, secondly how to create quality
sustainable jobs, thirdly how to ensure relatively low rates of taxation, and
lastly how to achieve a balanced budget. It is for good reason that Canadians
are concerned about the future of our well-established health and public
education systems. For many, there is an uneasy sense that years of tax cuts
have lessened our collective ability to publicly fund high quality and
equitable access for all. The evidence suggests that Canadians question the
unrelenting push to bring market-oriented, often profit-making approaches to
public services whose very foundations rest on values of sharing, caring and
equality.
Canada is a poster child for market failure and inadequate public
investment in the common good. Rather than merely strengthening child care --
as is necessary with our health and public education systems -- we actually
need to build a system of early childhood education and care in Canada.
Canada’s market-based child care
Child care services in Canada are marketized, having always relied
on the private sector (both for-profit and non-profit) to plan, finance and
operate programs for young children, with parents paying most of the costs even
for regulated child care.
The result? Child care in Canada demonstrates triple market
failure, with:
· High parent fees: BC data shows that child care is the
second highest cost to families, next to housing.9 This is true across Canada as well: many
young families are paying more in child care fees than other families are
paying for their children’s university tuition.
· Low staff wages: Compensation for staff trained in early
childhood education is a key indicator of the high quality that is important
for child development. However, Canada's training requirements for early
childhood educators fall short of the average standards across OECD countries.
Furthermore, the predominantly female child care service sector remains one of
the lowest paid in Canada. More than half of Canada's trained early childhood
educators do not work in child care (The
resulting recruitment and retention crisis across the country compromises the
quality of our children’s care.
· Unmet demand: While about 75% of mothers of young children
are in the paid labour force14, only
about 20% of 0-5 year olds have access to a regulated child care space.10 Yet in 2007 and 2008, the number of
regulated child care spaces in Canada grew by only 3% annually, about one-third
of the growth rate earlier in the decade.
High fees, low wages and unmet demand — these
conditions should be a wake-up call to governments about the fundamental
inequality of their longstanding market-based approach to child care services.
The evidence-based response should be a publicly-managed and funded system that
blends early childhood education and child care, and that prioritizes equality
in both access and service provision.
Most Canadians agree. A series of recent polls shows that at least
three-quarters of Canadians support a national child care program, considering
the lack of affordable child care to be a serious problem.
Fortunately, the solution is clear and powerful: a consistent body
of evidence shows that building a public system of early childhood education
and care is not just the right thing to do for parents and children, but
the smart thing to do for Canada’s economy.
· Child care grows the economy: Every dollar invested in
child care programs increases GDP by $2.30 — one of the strongest
levels of short-term economic stimulus of all sectors and far ahead of construction
and manufacturing.
· Child care creates jobs: Investing $1 million in the child
care sector generates almost 40 jobs — at least 40% higher than the
next closest industry, and four times the jobs generated by investing $1
million in construction activity.
· Child care more than pays for itself: Even in the short
term, more than 90% of the cost of hiring child care workers goes back to
governments as increased revenue, and the federal government gains the most.
Over the long term, every public dollar invested in quality child care programs
returns $2.54 in benefits to society.
Although the benefits of public system-building are clear, and the
failures of market-based approaches to ECEC are in plain sight across the
country, it is disturbing to observe that for-profit child care is growing in
Canada, increasing from about 20% of total spaces in 2004 to 25% in 2008.
Countries such as Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States, which
are dominated by for-profit programs, including Big Box chains, provide the
following lessons for Canada if it continues to ignore this threat:
· Growth in spaces will be offset by closures, particularly of
small, for-profit operators
· Growth will be least likely to occur in less ‘profitable’ areas
and for less ‘profitable’ children (for example, rural or isolated communities
and children with disabilities, , infants and toddlers)
· Because of the high fixed costs (staff, facilities, etc), child
care chains will not be any more financially viable than existing programs.
Governments will be lobbied to promote profitability by relaxing quality
standards and/or increasing public funding. In other words, public funds will
support private profits rather than the public goals of quality, affordability
and access.
Moving towards more public early childhood education and care
Most countries that have implemented effective systems have done so
through education rather than social services ministries, as many have moved to
integrate the traditional separation between early education programs in public
schools and child care in community settings. The principles of public
education systems across Canada — universal entitlement to programs provided by
reasonably paid and well trained staff, with democratic governance— are consistent
with the evidence-based principles recommended for child care.
The fact that, to date, the full working-day needs of families have
not been part of the mandate of Canadian education systems provides an example
of the restructuring required through this process. Furthermore, the public
education field in Canada has not yet adjusted conventional conceptions about
how young children learn to ensure that “schoolification” of ECEC is avoided.
Finally, the implications for child care services and early childhood educators
of a move towards public education have yet to be fully assessed and
discussed.. In building a new, publicly-funded system of education and care for
young children, one would hope for a process and a solution that respects and
includes those who are keen to participate in advancing a quality, universal,
democratically-controlled system.
The absence of the federal government
Today the biggest barrier to advancing a system of early childhood
education and care in Canada is the federal government’s absence from the
table. While in the past, federal governments have promised more than they've
delivered on child care, the current federal government has gone one step
further by abandoning all responsibility for the file. In this instance, doing
nothing is a policy decision and from our point of view, it’s a bad one: the
federal government’s lack of leadership on child care is limiting
provincial/territorial progress today and restricting our ability to act in the
future.
Interestingly, there is now a growing awareness of problems created
by over-reliance on a market-based approach that is not balanced by government
intervention to achieve equitable access to quality services. Even before the
recent recession, the public discourse acknowledged the need for government
involvement in addressing issues like climate change. In the end, this
awareness may enhance opportunities to develop a publicly-funded system of
early childhood education and care; or it may encourage market advocates to
seek new ways to make private profits from this public good.
"We would but we can’t afford it” was the excuse for inaction
on child care prior to 2000. Then, as federal and provincial surpluses began to
mount annually— reaching a dizzying $30 billion combined in 2007—a small
but increasing federal commitment to child care funding finally emerged.
However, at the height of Canada’s economic success, the current federal
government terminated Canada’s sole significant national child care
initiative. Thus, federal transfers in 2007–08 were reduced by 37% from 2006
and by 61% from the previous government’s commitment for 2009. As a result,
Canada’s public spending on ECEC programs is only 0.25% of GDP – about one
third of the OECD average (0.7%) and far short of the international minimum
benchmark of 1% of GDP.
Having missed the opportunity to share the economic good times with
children, women and families, Canada entered the recent recession with deep
poverty and inequality, exacerbating the problem by ignoring the opportunity to
reap the social and economic benefits of stimulus spending on child care.
Conclusion and Recommendations
Again, on behalf of the Child Care Advocacy Association of Canada,
and quoting our 2011 contribution to the Canadian Centre for Policy
Alternatives, page 42, Section 1, Securing our Common Wealth, we
reiterate that there is compelling evidence that the right kind of public
investment in early childhood education and care —with its multiple benefits to
multiple groups -- offers among the highest benefits available from policy
strategies that nations can adopt. Economic studies have repeatedly shown that
well-designed public spending promotes health, advances women’s equality,
addresses child and family poverty, deepens social inclusion and grows the
economy.
In order to protect and promote the public
interest, the federal government should provide leadership and significant
funding support to provinces and territories that commit to building public
systems of early childhood education and care. The federal government should
establish a policy framework to guide collaboration with provinces and
territories, providing federal funds to those that are accountable for:
1. Public plans (including legislated universal entitlement and targets
and timetables) for developing comprehensive and integrated systems of ECEC
services that meet the care and early education needs of both children and
parents.
2. Public expansion through publicly-delivered ECEC services
(including integration of existing community-based services into
publicly-managed systems).
3. Public funding delivered to ECEC systems, not to individual
parents, designed to create and maintain high quality, accessible services.
4. Public monitoring and reporting in the legislatures (federal, provincial/
territorial) on the quality of, and access to, the early childhood education
and care system.
Within these broad recommendations, CCAAC acknowledges the right
of Canada’s First Nations and Aboriginal peoples to design, deliver, and
govern their own early care and learning services. We also respect Quebec’s
right to develop social programs and applaud the leadership Quebec has shown in
initiating its child care system. However, it is clear that additional federal
funding is required in order to further advance Quebec's system, so CCAAC
encourages the federal government to work with Quebec to achieve the province's
goals for child care.
In countries that have adopted these kinds of strategies as a key
component of family policy, early childhood education and care services are an
expected and planned part of communities. Like schools, libraries, and
recreation centres, early childhood education and care services are available,
accessible, and affordable to all who choose to use them. Children’s healthy
development and parent’s work/life balance are well-supported, the current and
future labour force is enhanced, and the economic returns on public investment
are promptly realized.
Canada has all the resources and motivation it needs to build the
early childhood education and care system that families want and need. On the
one hand, we have the everyday crisis that families face as they struggle to
patch together child care arrangements from extremely limited, frequently
high-cost options of varying quality. Conversely, we have overwhelming research
proving the multiple benefits of a comprehensive and integrated approach to
early childhood education and care — benefits that can only be
realized if we ensure that services are high quality and accessible.
We have models to support the development of plans with timelines,
targets, and key system indicators for achieving accountability for results. We
have all of Canada’s opposition parties agreeing on the importance of early
childhood education and care services, and many provinces are anxious to move
forward. And, not surprisingly, given all of the above, we have polls that
repeatedly show Canadians want greater public investment in these services.
In fact, there is very little stated opposition to early childhood
education and care that is not based on harmful myths or wishful thinking that
continuing the status quo approach to child care services will somehow address
the crisis – despite the overwhelming evidence and thirty years of experience to
the contrary.
Federal leadership on early childhood and care is the last
remaining barrier to achieving significant progress.