INDEPTH: DAY CARE
Day care in Canada
CBC News Online | Updated July 5, 2006
It was first proposed in 1970 – a program that would provide affordable day care across the country. It was promised when Brian Mulroney and the Conservatives swept to power in 1984. And again four years later.
By the time Jean Chrétien's Liberals did some political sweeping of their own in 1993, promises of a national day-care strategy had fallen victim to the realities of a government wallowing in debt. With budgetary knives sharpened and drawn, day care would have to wait.
But the economic climate began to shift – and in 1997, Quebec introduced its own day-care system, offering spaces at $5 a day. Demand quickly surpassed supply.
By 2001, there were nearly 600,000 regulated day-care spaces across the country. Just under 235,000 of them were in Quebec. While only one in five Quebec kids had access to these spaces, the rate was much better than the national average of one in eight children.
As successive governments ran up surplus after surplus, the call for more money for day care began to be heard again.
In October 2004, the newly elected Liberal minority government declared in its throne speech, "The time has come for a truly national system of early learning and child care."
During the campaign leading up to the June 28, 2004, election, the Liberals promised $5 billion to create 250,000 child-care spaces by 2009. The plan pointed to Quebec's now $7-a-day day-care plan as a model.
The speech said:
Parents must have real choices; children must have real opportunities to learn. The time has come for a truly national system of early learning and child care, a system based on the four key principles that parents and child care experts say matter – quality, universality, accessibility and development.
The Government will put the foundations in place with its provincial and territorial partners, charting a national course that focuses on results, builds on best practices and reports on progress to Canadians. Within this national framework, the provinces and territories will have the flexibility to address their own particular needs and circumstances.
The Martin government signed deals with each province before the government fell, and Canadians once again were faced with an election. During the campaign, Conservative Leader Stephen Harper introduced his own child-care plan. Called "Choice in Childcare," it provided cheques of $100 a month to parents for each child under six. The money could be spent by parents as they saw fit. It would be also be treated as income and taxable in the hands of the parent with the lower income.
When the Conservatives won the election, they announced the child-care benefit would go into effect July 1, 2006, and quickly moved to cancel the Liberal plan. The first cheques are expected to be mailed out July 20, 2006.
Human Resources and Social Development Minister Diane Finley sent letters to the provinces confirming that the government will terminate the $5-billion series of federal-provincial child-care deals after the first year is up.
The new government's first budget in May 2006 made the plan official.
Day-care activists warn that the cut in funding will be a blow to Canada's day-care system, but to call day care in Canada a "system" may be a stretch.
In October 2004, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development released a report that described Canada's child-care system as a chronically underfunded patchwork of programs with no overarching goals. It found that many centres were shabby and many workers were poorly trained. As well, staff turnover at many centres was very high.
The report also found a shortage of available regulated child-care spaces – enough for fewer than 20 per cent of children aged six years and younger with working parents. In the U.K., 60 per cent of children find regulated child care; in Belgium, 63 per cent; in France, 69 per cent; in Denmark, 78 per cent.
The OECD recommended that Canada boost its child-care spending to the OECD average of about 0.4 per cent of Gross Domestic Product. It's currently half that.
It also recommended integrating child care with kindergarten, and improving the training and recruitment of workers.
There are calls for even more. The Child Care Advocacy Association of Canada issued a report of its own on the heels of the OECD report. It, too called for more money. The association wants Ottawa to commit at least one per cent of GDP – or about $10 billion – for day care within 15 years. The report argues:
"The amount is a 'modest and minimum' investment for the one-third of Canadian youngsters under six, compared to the six per cent of GDP now devoted to educating older children."
But the report also warns that devoting so much public money to child care would likely attract foreign corporate day-care chains, eager to be part of a growing market. The report recommends Ottawa ensure that the money it spends on day care be earmarked for the public/non-profit system.
It wants the federal government to pass legislation that protects provinces and territories that wish to expand services in the public/non-profit sector from being challenged by foreign for-profit chains that want to get into the act.
Those concerns are echoed in yet another report. This one – by two economists from the University of Toronto – found that the quality of care at non-profit centres averaged 10 per cent better than day-care centres established to make money.
Gordon Cleveland and Michael Krashinsky looked at 325 day-care centres across the country. They examined 42 different components of child care on a scale of one to seven. Components included personal care such as diaper changes, the educational character of toys, and how well information is exchanged with parents.
While most centres got mediocre rankings, the top-ranked ones were mostly non-profits and the bottom-ranked ones were commercial.
The report also concluded that sole proprietors provided the best care among the commercial operators. Incorporated businesses (a single centre or part of a chain) provide lower quality care. Partnerships and other commercial providers provide much worse quality on average.
"I'm not a politician and I don't know all the ins and outs of policy. But what I do know is that quality matters. It's hard to get quality in for-profits. A 10 per cent increase in quality at non-profits is very substantial," Cleveland told CBC News.
StatsCan weighs in
According to Statistics Canada, 54 per cent of Canadian kids aged six months to five years received some care from someone other than their parents in 2002-2003. That's up from 42 per cent in just eight years.
About 28 per cent of those children were enrolled in a day-care centre as their main care arrangement, up from 20 per cent in 1994-95, but a growing number are now being cared for by relatives. Over the same eight-year period, the proportion of kids cared for by a relative grew from eight per cent to 14 per cent. The proportion of children who were looked after in someone else's home by a non-relative fell to 30 per cent from 43 per cent.
And it's not just an urban phenomenon. The growth in the use of day care is even more pronounced in rural areas. Statistics Canada says that in 1994-95, 36.3 per cent of rural kids used some form of day care. By 2002-2003, that rate had grown to 52.4 per cent, nearly the same as the urban rate.
The OECD holds the Quebec system up as a model for the rest of Canada, but the program has had its critics.
There are nearly 235,000 children enrolled. Another 35,000 kids are waiting for spots to open up. Some centres have stopped adding names to their lists.
The Action démocratique du Québec called the program a "Soviet-style" service and said the waiting lists are typical of a socialist system. The ADQ's 2003 election platform called for $30-a-day vouchers for parents, which they could spend on public or private care.
Quebec's largest employers' group, the Conseil du patronat, suggested a similar plan that would give families a $5,000 allowance for each child to spend as they please.
^TOP
|
|
 |
 MENU |
|
|
| EXTERNAL LINKS: |
|
|
| MORE: |
|
|
|
CBC does not endorse and is not responsible for the content of external sites. Links will open in new window.
