Thank you very much.
My name is Dr. Kershaw. I'm here today on behalf of the Human Early Learning Partnership at UBC. For the last two years, HELP has been selected by the World Health Organization to be the international knowledge hub on research about the social determinants of health in the early years.
I've come to ask you today to help us apply some of our research here at home, and our message is pretty straightforward. The federal government can and should invest more in family policy, and specifically in a set of systems of universally accessible quality child care services that are available across the province, all the while respecting the unique status and headstart that Quebec already has.
There were three reasons to do this. This first is that when you look in the international arena, Canada is an international laggard. You may have already heard in previous meetings that the OECD once again found Canada ranked last out of a series of rich countries when it comes to investing in the early years, and early child care and education in particular. At HELP we try to say maybe Canada is not being treated charitably enough. What if we looked at the Canada child tax benefit and the national child benefit system? What if we looked at comparable tax initiatives at the provincial level? What if we also looked at maternity and parental leave, or our child care expense deduction, and our spousal credit that helps one-earner families? What if we added to that health care savings that we provide families with kids, pharmacare and dental care for poor families, and income assistance as well? What if we were that generous to Canada's ranking?
Sadly, even when we are that generous, we still find that Canada ranks 14 out of 16 countries when we look at our total package of family benefit policies. Our package has less than one-quarter of the value of Austria's, not even half the value of the U.K.'s and Australia's, and even below that of the United States, which is well recognized in the literature as an international laggard on its own.
Two other things are important when thinking about our family benefit package. One-earner families continue to receive a benefit--a modest one, but that is something the new universal child care benefit will address. Families who rely on regulated child care services consistently have the most substantial penalty when it comes to incurring the cost of raising our next generation of citizens. That penalty is found across the social grain using an income threshold, and in particular among lower-income families.
If we want to fill that lacuna and create a child care system that respects provincial jurisdiction and works in partnership with provinces, it will nonetheless promote a couple of important goals relating to Canadian competitiveness. Human capital scholars across the country are regularly telling us we need to focus on the early years to start our human capital acquisition from the very first days. That is because research about early development shows that in the very first years of life, human biology is so sensitive to optimizing environments that can elevate development throughout life, and that timed optimized development remarkably dissipates once kids pass ages three through seven.
We have a tall order ahead of us. In the province where you're sitting, 25% of kids reach the formal school system at age six vulnerable in at least one domain of development. There's no reason to think it's not the same across the country.
Similarly, your own budgetary documents talk about the importance of labour supply in the competitive economy. In that budget it's important to recognize that today our family policy is putting in place a couple of worrisome disincentives to attracting both earners and couples to the labour market. For example, for a one-earner couple where the second earner is thinking about going into the labour market to earn half average earnings, about $22,000 here in British Columbia, the nominal pay would be about $11. After you subtract taxes, child care expenses, and the lost-income-contingent benefits that our family policy makes available, that person would take home just over $5, not even 50% of the nominal take-home pay. That's bad for labour supply, which means it's bad for our competitive economy, and it's also not good for gender equality.
My last point is that we can afford to do it. The last data we had about hard surpluses at the federal level had a surplus of over $13 billion. The province where we are currently sitting is projecting a $1.2 billion surplus. It means we can afford a quality system of universally accessible services across each province and territory without even raising taxes. I know some in the room will think that we're already doing that with the universal child care benefit, but I'm here to tell you that in terms of promoting gender equality, in terms of promoting labour supply, and in terms of promoting human capital acquisition, it cannot match and will not compensate for the absence of a system of regulated child care services.
We are not an international laggard when it comes to health care. We are not an international laggard when it comes to early school investments for school-aged children. We are leading in debt-to-GDP ratio, and we are competitive when it comes to our tax-to-GDP ratio. Where we are not leading is in the early years and investment in a regulated system of quality child care services across the country.