Speaking Notes

for

Ken Dryden, Minister of Social Development

55 th Annual Provincial Conference of the
Association of Early Childhood Educators

Ottawa, Ontario

June 3, 2005

Thank you. It’s great to be here and it’s great to hear Raffi and Charles Pascal before 9 a.m. any morning. Our kids were born in 1975 and in 1978 which were prime early Raffi years and there are lots of songs that we used to sing. But the one that I liked the best - and it’s not Willoughby Wallaby Woo , although that’s fun - is a song that I still find incredibly inspirational and one that captures the excitement and the feeling of being a kid. And it’s I Wonder If I’m Growing. ‘I wonder if I’m growing, I wonder if I’m growing, my mom says that I’m growing but it’s hard for me to see.’ And then, finally, that triumphant morning when, in fact, he can reach the taps now, for the very first time - that is inspirational. And that still one of my favourite songs.

What does one say about Charles Pascal? We first met when he was the president of Sir Sandford Fleming College and I was the Ontario Youth Commissioner, and we’ve known each other ever since through our mutual love of education and baseball and lots of other things as well. We’ve had our ups and downs occasionally, but every down has always been followed by an up.

Through all my work this past year on childcare, sometimes we’ve been together in meetings, but more often we’ve been in contact through his voice mails. You can kind of imagine the kind of voice mails that he might leave might be a little bit different from certain other voice mails. They usually come after a particularly challenging moment for me, and the voice mail will always begin with something like, ‘I thought I’d call and give you a hug.’ And that’s Charles. He’s always encouraging and always, in the best sense, frank and pointed, but always with a very constructive purpose that gives energy to a moment that might be short of energy.

I became the Minister of Social Development in July with early learning and child care as one of my tasks. And the way I approach things is - I kind of need to see the tree, but quickly after I see the tree, in order to understand the tree, I’ve got to see the forest. I can’t get back to the tree until I really understand what the forest is. Then I can get back to the tree.

And for me it was to try to understand this forest, to get the circumstances right, to get the context of childcare right, and to start with the reality of it in this country. Not just the fact that 20 per cent of young children are in regulated care, but really of how the great majority of our kids are in childcare of some form. That was the fundamental reality, the beginning point to understanding what needed to be next, to know that it is the way we live, period. And almost assuredly, it is the way we are going to live. That’s a fact. And so if something is as overwhelming a reality as that is, then it is up to us to do the best we can in order to make that reality work the best it can. So that was a beginning point for me.

And the next was to get the promise right. What was the promise? Well the promise was mostly understood as $5 billion over five years. I thought what the promise was, was to help create an early learning and childcare system across the country. That was the promise. The $5 billion over five years was one of the instruments, it was the concrete tangible promise. But the real promise was a national early learning and childcare system.

And there’s quite a difference between whether you understand the promise as one or understand it as the other. In the one instance, if you spend $5 billion over five years on early learning and childcare, you’ve kept the promise and the promise is done. But if the promise is to help create a national early learning and childcare system, then the promise isn’t done until you get there. It’s a very different way of thinking of things.

The challenge of the latter promise is that it’s a whole lot more indefinite and indeterminate and, in terms of how you go about delivering on it, it’s a whole lot harder, a whole lot longer and a whole lot more challenging. And you can pretty much set up the instruments on the $5 billion over five years, but how do you get to a system when you don’t have a system. How do systems get created? I had to find an analogy. I had done some work in education and am a citizen familiar with health and those are the analogies. It actually had been done in some area at some point.

And so if it had been done in some area at some point, well, then, why not in another area at this point? Looking back 80 years, 100 years, 120 years ago, you would have found an education system that was a patchwork. Something that was strongly in mind of some people, but kind of peripheral to mind in a lot of others, and with a lot of voices saying, ‘we don’t want to institutionalize our kids in learning. I mean learning has always been around the kitchen table. Why should it happen somewhere else?’ And so on.

And those people who were the proponents of education, they didn’t know what today was going to look like. They would be stunned at what today looks like, having high school going up to Grade 12, to have colleges, to have lots of different universities. To have education as something that is an understood, essential element, a central element, almost something that you don’t even think about, as opposed to then where it was kind of discretionary…something you did until you were needed by the family and were old enough to really help out. They would have been stunned by what exists today. The same with health care, people 40 years ago, they would never have imagined what our health care system would look like today.

So the key to all of these things for them in those areas was to set something well in motion. To give it a real push. And if it is good enough and strong enough and is good and as strong as important as everybody believes, then what will happen is that more people will experience it, see how good it all might be. And the challenge for them at that time and the challenge now is to make things enough better next year and the year after and the year after that, so people start to see how much better it really might be.

That’s the way systems get created. That things get to be good enough. That people see them and go ‘wow, I can’t believe it, I never would have guessed, never could have imagined that it could be as good as this.’ So that expectations start to change, hopes start to change, ambitions start to change. And then you’re getting there. And so you know it was to understand what the real promise was and what the real task was.

And it was also, in a lot of ways, to get the framework right. Sometimes in order to build a system you just need to add pieces or to fix pieces. But sometimes in order to add pieces or to fix pieces you’ve got to build a system. So which was it in this case? And in all, so many of those things that are ongoing questions: the patchwork, the inconsistencies, the public ambivalence and the fragile trust, the quality of the physical spaces and, of course, the training and retaining of people and wages and all of that. Now those are those ongoing questions, questions that you have been dealing with for 10 years, for 20 years, and without a lot of resolution.

And so it was to understand that in order to deal with a lot of those things, as well as others, you had to build a system. In terms of wages, you know the fights that you have had. Even as you had the public rhetoric saying all kinds of nice things about you, you know how, in fact, it translates into not much.

Well, you’re stuck in the wrong analogy. That’s been the fundamental problem. You know the original analogy. The real initial public understanding, of course, is daycare as babysitting. So those who are in it get understood as babysitters, get treated as babysitters, get paid as babysitters. And even as things change, even as people see them change, even as people know that they’ve changed, once you’re in that analogy, it’s very hard to break out of that analogy.

That’s why the key to all of this is that understanding of early learning and childcare, early learning and childcare, childhood development, making things enough better that people start to see things differently. Making it enough better so that when people walk through your doors and they see what you do and they see what the kids are doing, they say, ‘really, how is this different from school?’ It shifts the analogy. And once the analogy gets shifted, all the rest starts to shift.

But if you can’t shift the analogy you’re stuck. You’re stuck now, you’re stuck 10 years from now, you’re stuck 20 years from now. And that’s the challenge of, again, getting that framework right. Building a system matters in all kinds of ways, but it matters in a way of shifting the analogy, shifting the understandings, shifting public expectations and shifting the expectations on you, but shifting the rewards as well.

It’s been a year of lots of ups and downs. I must say another turning point for me, was several weeks ago, when on the front page of the Toronto Sunday Star was the headline: Is Daycare Dead? And the quote in the story that is absolutely haunting to me, but in the most constructive and energizing and inspirational way, is from Monica Lysack, who, as you know, is the head of the Childcare Advocacy Association of Canada. And her quote was: ‘We’re so close, I just can’t imagine being this close again. I feel I’ve been waiting my entire professional life for this moment. If it slips away I don’t know how I’ll carry on.’ And it said it so well.

The next milestone was to start making agreements, and the first one was in Winnipeg. I’m sure that most of you have been around government announcements and they’re fine, but they’re announcements. And well this was something else - this was amazing. The room was connected to a childcare centre and it was jammed with people like you and people who had that Monica Lysack quote inside themselves. And then all of a sudden there was this announcement and it was bedlam, it was cheering, fists in the air, high five’s. It was amazing.

And of course the signings since that time have been the same. They’ve been these moments of celebration.

We keep going in a number of ways, but the key, as I said, is to set this in motion. To set it in motion in a way that it is enough better and enough bigger that it becomes part of an expectation, part of an ambition and at that next point that somebody might be in a position to either slow it down or attempt to reverse it, it’s too late. It becomes irreversible.

As, just as a last point - and I’ve said it in each of the announcements that have been made - and I know you know it, but I think that you should be reminded of it. That whatever it is that we are doing now as a federal government, as any of the provincial ministers, territorial ministers - we’re not the ones who are writing all of this.

As I have said before, I used to write books. And one of the things that I have learned is that the last chapter should be the easiest to write. And if, in fact, you’ve written the first 19 chapters right, it is the easiest chapter to write, because the rest of it leads towards it. All the other chapters go into all of the details, all of the explanations. The story propels itself along. And once you get to that last chapter, it almost writes itself, because the other 19 chapters so much push it in a direction that there’s no other place for that last chapter to go.

And you’re the ones who have written those first 19 chapters. You’re the ones who have pushed it to the point where there’s no other 20 th chapter. The 20 th chapter has to go in this particular direction. And the 20 th chapter can take a while to get there and it can have ups and downs, but those first 19 chapters have been written in such a way that the 20 th chapter will be written, and the 20 th chapter will be written in a certain kind of way.

So all that we’re doing is helping you write the 20 th chapter. That’s what our job is: to read really carefully those first 19 chapters and help you write the 20 th chapter. And I think the 20 th chapter is going to be terrific.