Human Resources Committee on March 12th, 2009

[Tony Martin, NDP, Sault Ste. Marie, ON]

In this country there's a debate over whether we should have a national child care program and whether child care is something that would be a good early intervention in the lives of young children. Give each young person, at an early age, good early learning development and what comes along with that oftentimes is food, nutrition, and that kind of thing. Is that something that in your research or in your study you've identified as something that would be important and helpful?

[Iain Duncan Smith]

This brings me back to the point I've just made, which is on early intervention. This encompasses all of that sort of work.

There are some interesting things about child care that we discovered. Again, if you have a chance to really go through this stuff you'll see there's a section on child care in here. Also, in the report that I've done with Graham Allen, the Labour MP, we looked very carefully at the early intervention models that exist around the world. We've done a huge amount of work on this. I recommend that you have a chance to look at that as a group, as an organization, as a committee.

What we do know is that there is child care and child care. The very best child care is of course the parents taking the decision to see that child through for a period of time and having that one-on-one care, with one of the parents responsible for the empathetic love and nurture that is critical at the beginning. But if that for some reason can't be done, if there are pressures of money, etc., and if there are two parents and they both want to go out to work, or if there's one parent who has to work, it's who replaces that. Then you have a hierarchy of child care, and it's worth looking at that hierarchy.

We think there's not enough done to support the functional extended family in this process. If you are a member of an extended family in the U.K.--I don't know what it's like here--you cannot receive any money for looking after your daughter's child, let's say, as a grandmum, or whatever. We think that's rather stupid and pointless. We think some money should be available for them, because after all they're doing a service, and if it's not them, then they're going to be paying a lot more money to go to a child minder anyway. So we know that therefore the figures show that really good support from the extended family--obviously where the family is functional and capable--has a very good effect on the child in the absence of the mother or the father looking after them. We think that works.

Failing that, we think that obviously very good one-on-one nursery care works. At the bottom of the pile, which people don't understand, are these multi-child nurseries, I have to say, which we found have very poor results. In some cases they may lead, even in middle class families, to difficulties later on. The parents place them there in the belief that they're giving a good service, but in fact because there are so many children in them and there are so few people who look after the children, they don't get this one-on-one development, which is vital, absolutely vital, to the child.

We think more work needs to be done looking at that multi-child nursery. We think that too often government is obsessed with health and safety. We in the U.K. have this big thing about that, so when they're inspected they look at whether they have fire exits, is everybody clean, and are there enough people here to look after them in a general sense. Nobody actually looks at the quality of care. The quality of care should really be looked at in child care. This empathetic, one-on-one care is absolutely vital, and it can be quite difficult if it doesn't exist.

So we do believe in that, but as I say, the hierarchy works. As for early intervention, if you can please have a look at that, it's critical.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Martin.

We're going to move to Mr. Vellacott, for seven minutes, sir.

[Maurice Vellacott, Conservative, Saskatoon—Wanuskewin, SK]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you for being here today, Mr. Smith.

One of your overarching conclusions, which you inferred again today, as you do in some of your other materials, is that there are many things that can and should be done to help reduce poverty and prevent more of it in the future. Much of that, or a fair bit of it, focuses less on the spending of money but rather on--I think you would use the term--the encouragement of social networks and values and habits, those kinds of things instead, contributing to a strong social fabric. What exactly are those “networks”, “values”, and “habits”? Maybe give us a little more detail.

This is my first question. I'll ask the second right away as well. But maybe you could give us a little bit of a definition or insight in terms of those networks, those values, those habits as the foundation for social justice and positive socio-economic outcomes.

My second one is a follow-up to that. You alluded to it in response to some of the other members here. In regard to the local initiatives that you argue are more effective in combatting poverty and its causes than the larger, more remote programs, what are some of those local initiatives and smaller programs that are, in your view, more effective than some of the global, large, remote programs?

The first question is on the networks, values, and habits as the foundation.

[Iain Duncan Smith]

It's related to what I've said, in a sense, which is that the building of networks in community is what essentially helps support. You start, obviously, with families. Family is the first community any child is going to have experience with, so the more stable that community for them, the more likely it is they will develop in a constructive manner. Almost every figure we refer to in there shows that.

That's not to say it isn't feasible for somebody whose relationship broke up to bring up a child with care and nurture and support. It's just a lot harder, and this is the point. The difference between the amount of effort that's required for somebody who is on their own bringing up a child is enormous. That means, therefore, that the likelihood of that child getting less care and less support is simply a fact. It's incredibly difficult to do that, and it is more expensive, ironically, to do so because you're having to do everything two people would two. It's not finger-wagging or lecturing people on that, in terms of relationships; it's simply making the observation that this is not something anybody would really want to do if they had the balance of choice.

When we looked at some of the stuff in the creation of networks, we did look at relationships inside here, because that first community, that family community, is critical to setting the path for everything else. We looked at cohabitation, whether it was the same as marriage and if it led to higher levels of lone parenting, more broken homes. We looked at the figures on that and found that was the case.

Then you move from family into the next level of community.

[Maurice Vellacott, Conservative, Saskatoon—Wanuskewin, SK]

I didn't get what the cohabitation led to.

[Iain Duncan Smith]

The figure we came up with in here is drawn not just from the U.K. but pretty much from around the world. Almost every figure we show is that it appears there is a fundamental difference between cohabitation, particularly when children are involved, and marriage.

We have high divorce rates in the U.K. They are much higher than the rest of Europe. We in the U.K. also have the highest level of lone parenting and the highest level of teenage pregnancy. What was interesting about this was when we looked at what the main driver of this was, most people started to focus in on the early bit about teenage pregnancy. Actually, we found that while that is a growth area, a significant growth area, it isn't the main cause of lone parenting. The fastest growing cause of lone parenting is the breakup of cohabiting relationships. The ratio of breakup, if I remember off the top of my head, is that just under one in two families that are cohabiting and have a child will break up by the time the child is five. It's about half, or just below that. Almost all the figures demonstrated that. Compare that to a high level of divorce. What happens is that it's about one in twelve for a married couple who will break up before the child is five.

There are other breakup figures along the way, but I'm settling on the child at five because they cover the nought-to-three area, and it was interesting to us. We simply asked the question about what was going on.

I don't have all the details of how that is, but what we did seem to get to was that the arrival of a child to a cohabiting relationship seems to accelerate that breakup. The arrival of a child to a married relationship slows down the breakup levels. They actually go in two different ways. I don't make any lectures on this; I just make it as an observation of fact and that's what we found. I would be very surprised if the figures aren't similar here in Canada, but I don't know what the figures are.

[Maurice Vellacott, Conservative, Saskatoon—Wanuskewin, SK]

Time is escaping on me here.

What are some of the “values and habits” in terms of your observations and conclusions with your Labour colleague or others this has been done with? What are some of those values and habits that need to be instilled as the “foundation for social justice and positive socio-economic outcomes”?

[Iain Duncan Smith]

Well, I come back to the point I made earlier, that it all starts before the child is born. It starts with the stability of family life around that child and that mother. So that mother arrives at that point of the birth in a stable, unstressed relationship. If you look at it, most of the sociologists will tell you now that if a mother is deeply stressed and in trouble, stress is taken across straight to the child.

For example, there was an interesting figure--I just saw it today from a lecturer I was reading about--and it said that a child is more likely to suffer from asthma if his mother has had a very high stress level at the time of birth and just after. Interestingly, chemically, there are real crossovers between high levels of stress and the superficial conditions of asthma. I'm not an expert in this, but the point we did discover throughout this is that relationship between the would-be mother and child is absolutely critical.

Secondly, what we did find was that all of those points about empathetic care and nurture, reading, conversation, and calm environments are critical again for the further development through to three. The reason why I'm a bit obsessed about naught to three is because I really now believe that this is the critical place where most of our communities are breaking down because families do not realize how important this is. We've had debates with people saying that children will cope. Children do cope, but the trouble with coping is sometimes coping means failing, but not demonstrating how much failure there is and what is going on is a refusal to understand that this period is so important.

Now one of the areas we've argued about is, for example, if a mother did want to stay at home and look after her child for the first year or two, and she was good and capable of doing that, I would think from society's standpoint that that's an incredibly strong and powerful decision to make, if she feels she wants to do it. If she doesn't and she is somebody who would prefer to be at work again, that's her choice. What we shouldn't do, though, is set the choices so that she finds staying at home so much more difficult financially than having to go out to work. We need to look at allowing parents to make those choices so that they're balanced. In other words, they can make that choice without panicking about the idea that they're about to take such a hit on their finances that they're not going to be able to survive that process.

So it seems to me that society has a vested interest in being able to get that balance right. I don't ask that society, that government, tells anybody what to do, because we're not very good at doing that, but I simply say that we should just even up the playing field so that people can make those choices. That is the critical component, because from all that comes community; everything about our community starts with that relationship, particularly, between the mother and child. From extended family to extended family, it's the balance of community. The more stable families in a community, the more stable a community is going to be, the more they're likely to help each other, the more they're likely to work for each other. Then your voluntary sector groups are set up from stable families, from people who understand that.

The point I make about this outreach and the encouragement of the voluntary sector is that most of this is about picking up the pieces for the breakdown in family and extended family; they then come in to be the extended family where none existed. That's the point I'm making. So understanding that this is the beginning of it all and that our attention in government should be here.... And I have to tell you that in our spending programs in the U.K., the older the child gets, the more money we spend on them. We spend next to nothing, it's a bit better now, but comparatively nothing.... Most of the figures show that for every dollar spent on a child between naught to three, it's worth a minimum of $16-plus that you spend on a child of 14, 15, and 16. The differences are quite dramatic.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Thank you.

I know Ms. Minna wanted to ask a couple of questions. We're almost out of time, and we're going to have to switch over, but Ms. Minna, I'm going to give you an opportunity to ask a couple of questions.

[Maria Minna, Liberal, Beaches—East York, ON]

Thank you. I appreciate that very much.

Thank you for being here today.

I had the pleasure of working very closely with one of the ministers in the development field in the U.K.

I just wanted to continue with this conversation with respect to the children from zero to three. You don't have to convince me with respect to zero to three or zero to six. We say that from zero to six is fundamentally important.

What I do want to want to ask you, though, is on what you mentioned earlier about multi-child nurseries being a negative and a problem. One of the things that we from the Liberal Party had been looking at and had put in place was a national child care and early education program. It was a quality, cognitive, developmental program, attached to schools preferably, if possible, so that the transition is easier for the child and also for training of teachers. I think the child-teacher ratio in Ontario now is probably one teacher to five children. There aren't large groups of kids. It's that kind of thing.

Seventy-six percent or more of Canadian women work. Whether we like it or not, there are many families where both parents need to work. Otherwise, we'd have a lot more families in poverty than we already have. As well, I'm not sure what our economy would do if we took out 76% of the labour force.

As for the reality of child care, I call it early education child care, because for me the early cognitive program, the early prevention, as you refer to it, is very critical. In the U.K., then, are you saying that the early education or child care programs, the early intervention programs, or, as you call them, the multi-child nurseries, do not have the cognitive built into them if they're good-quality programs?

[Iain Duncan Smith]

What I'm saying to you is that I don't think in the U.K. we ever measure the quality end of it in terms of that.

[Maria Minna, Liberal, Beaches—East York, ON]

Okay.

[Iain Duncan Smith]

We measure the quality end of it in terms of health and safety or the physical protection of the child.

The second point I'd make on your point about women in the workforce is that, absolutely, that development is the same everywhere across the western world. I don't think that's a particular issue. My only point about this is that I hope people get away from what I call the rather elitist discussion about women in the workforce that I find often takes place--and I've had a few arguments about this--and is always cast in the eye of careers. Now, the honest truth is, most women in the workforce, whether we like it or not, work because they need the money. It's a job.

As I said to somebody the other day, if you're eviscerating chickens on an assembly line in Bradford, I defy anybody to tell me that's a career and that you're interested in your career patterns at the chicken-eviscerating factory. The fact is, it's a job, and you're probably doing it because, if there are two of you, there's not enough money in the family, or you're by yourself and you have to get a job to try to get some extra money, etc. That's a job. The job is driven by money. Many of these women, if they had the opportunity, would actually like to be doing some of that nurturing work themselves, but they can't afford to because there's not enough money around, so they're offloading it.

The balance in looking at this is to say that in the early years, do we actually spend our time driving people out to work because there's a financial issue here? Have we looked at that? Are you looking at this and the balance of saying, well, if you were given the choice and it was a balanced decision, where would you go with this?

[Maria Minna, Liberal, Beaches—East York, ON]

Certainly.

Here's my final question. Do you have parental leave that either a mother or father can take when the child is born? At the moment in Canada we have one year.

[Iain Duncan Smith]

Yes, we do. It has developed in the U.K. In fact, there's another session ahead on this one, but it's reasonably extensive now. I don't think it's quite as extensive in general terms as what you have here, but it's much more extensive than it was 10 years ago and takes this into consideration.

[Maria Minna, Liberal, Beaches—East York, ON]

Our parental leave is one year so that the mother or the father can in fact choose or share, but one parent can stay at home.

[Iain Duncan Smith]

Yes. Plus, you know, you can't always--

[Maria Minna, Liberal, Beaches—East York, ON]

Between the two, they can stay home for one year. I was hoping to push that to 18 months, which would then get us to a time where--

[Iain Duncan Smith]

One of the areas we suggested, for example, was to look at what we call our universal child benefit. I don't know if you have that here. Everyone who has a child gets so much money per child.

[Maria Minna, Liberal, Beaches—East York, ON]

Here it's called the child benefit program.

[Iain Duncan Smith]

That's universal. It doesn't matter what your income is. One of the things we suggested was that you might want to sweep some of that forward and give somebody in the first two years the option of taking that money in the first two years and not looking to take it later on.

In other words, they've put it together to give themselves a supplementary income early on, which they take, on balance, because they'd like to stay at home for a year or two before then possibly going out to work again. To give them that extra bit of income enables them to do that without too much hardship, recognizing that after three or four years they won't get the child benefit at all and they'll be at work by that stage.

Now, child benefit, I know, is enough to buy certain things. It's not huge, but compressed together, 10 years of it brought forward into the first year or something, actually would then give them quite a more significant purchasing power at that period. Little things like that we were talking about, to give people--

[Maria Minna, Liberal, Beaches—East York, ON]

If we extended our parental leave of one year to 18 months and then two years, I think we'd pretty much be where you are suggesting.... We're halfway there in that context.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Mr. Smith, thank you so much. We appreciate you taking time out of your busy schedule to talk to us about your fascinating work.

I know a number of members have requested some of the reports, and perhaps you could send us something.

[Iain Duncan Smith]

I'll send all of these things.