Finance committee  Those are very good questions. To the first one, the area of research that I look at for policy is grassroots in the sense that it is being made and constructed by those who are most directly impacted. We can think of early years educators. If I had a focus group that was talking about wages, what would be the message?

Finance committee  No. That was well said.

Finance committee  I beg to differ, in the sense that right now, considering my own experience as a brand-new grandmother with a grandchild in B.C. and young nieces and nephews in the Ottawa and Montreal areas, we don't have choice currently—

Finance committee  I think one of the ways that we are looking at Quebec is not exactly that this is going to be our answer to all of our issues. We know there are going to be various levels of engagement from parents, because they do wish choice, so when we start to look at expanding a system, we need to consider various ways of delivery, depending on the various areas.

Finance committee  Yes. We are one of the few countries within the G20 that... Basically, for parents, especially in some of our larger cities—Montreal, Vancouver, and Toronto, and London is moving up there—the cost per year of having one child in regulated child care, if not two, is even higher than tuition fees for post-secondary education.

Finance committee  Thank you.

Finance committee  I have. I think it's based on, obviously, different perspectives and whether we do it gradually. I was involved with the implementation of full-day kindergarten in our southwestern Ontario region. Again, I believe that the current proposal over a certain number of years is perhaps a more prudent approach than going full peed ahead.

Finance committee  We really can't have a high-quality childhood education and care system across the country, and for us more specifically in the London-Middlesex area, without high-quality early childhood educators. They're the key to a successful national child care framework, and this was duly noted yesterday in the First Policy Response webinar with guest speaker the Honourable Ahmed Hussen, Minister of Families, Children and Social Development.

Finance committee  Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you very much for having us today. I am Céline Bourbonnais-MacDonald. I am a professor at Fanshawe College in the early childhood leadership degree program, as well as an adjunct associate professor at Western University. My area of focus is educational leadership.

Finance committee  There is some of information that you may be familiar with, either from a global perspective or from the province of Ontario. The Association of Early Childhood Educators and the Ontario Coalition for Better Child Care has just completed a report on the status of the ECE workforce.