Speaking Notes

For

Ken Dryden, Minister of Social Development

Early Learning and Child Care Announcement

Vancouver, British Columbia

September 30, 2005

Thank you Prime Minister, Premier, Ministers Hagen and Reid, ladies and gentlemen, I’m very happy to be here with you today for this very important event.

I would first like to thank those of you in this room who have worked so hard for so many years to see this happen. I am glad you are here. This is your day.

I used to write books, and I learned in writing books that the easiest chapter to write is the last chapter. Because if you get the first 19 chapters right, the last chapter almost writes itself. All the details and explanations have been laid out. There’s no place left to go other than that right and final step.

Those of you who are here, and those like you in the other provinces and territories of this country, have written those first 19 chapters. The rest of us are here just to help you write the 20^th. So congratulations and thank you for getting us to where we had no place left to go than here. It’s the right place to be.

As the Prime Minister mentioned, we have all just come from a child care centre. And why we are doing what we’re doing today was all so clear in what we saw: We saw kids doing, playing, interacting, exploring, adventuring, eyes alive and engaged.

This is, of course, what early learning and child care can be. And the exciting part is that in five years or 10, it will be so much more and better, in ways we can’t even imagine. It will be better because as parents, as citizens, we will see the possibilities of it and we will push to make it better. Because no longer a patchwork of good and bad and non-existent, it will have the understanding and ambition and sense of importance to all of a real early learning and child care system.

If we think back 18 months ago, despite the near heroic efforts of so many in this room, so many across the country over so many years, not much was happening to drive this system forward. And not much was foreseeable in the years ahead.

Then came a commitment, then came last February’s federal budget and now here we are today. The key had been to give early learning and child care a push - $5 billion over five years, but crucially with a goal, with the right, ambitious goal, “to create a national system of early learning and child care.” To set it in motion. To give it a chance. And that is what we have done today.

Prime Minister Martin - I hope you are proud of what you have done. Premier Campbell, for wanting this to happen for the parents and children of British Columbia , Minister Hagan, for being so committed and smart and encouraging through every step of this way - I hope you are proud, too.

Today is a good day, a good day for parents and kids, a good day for those who have been involved in early learning and child care often for decades, who have stayed with it because they love seeing kids develop and learn and grow, who love to see light go on in their eyes and who have stayed with it through struggle and frustration, because they believe in it.

And it’s a good day in another way. In politics, I have learned, there is noise, and somewhere in behind the noise, there is the prize. And the challenge is not to be distracted by the noise, but to work over, under, around, through it - however, whatever - to get to the prize. Today is a reminder of why any of us get involved in politics. Today is a reminder of why politics matters.

Thank you.