Thank you. Good morning.
I'm wearing three hats as I speak to you today. I'm the mother of two children, ages eight and ten; I'm a sociologist at the University of Manitoba who works on child care policy; and I'm active in the Child Care Coalition, an organization with a broad range of stakeholders.
I want to speak to the brief that you hopefully have already been able to read. I want to raise both a conceptual and a practical point that arises from our brief.
I'm only exaggerating slightly if I point out to you that we don't fund health care in Canada by giving all citizens their share of the health budget, that we don't fund roads and highways in our country by giving everyone a few kilometres' worth of asphalt, and we don't ensure firefighting and fire safety by giving everybody funds to buy their own water hose, but the current government has proposed that this would be a way to build a child care system--giving $100 to all parents of children under the age of six.
I'm actually quite enthusiastic about family allowances. I'm sorry they disappeared when they did, in the early nineties, and I'm glad to see a version of them back. But the program that has been proposed as a choice in child care allowance will not build a child care system for Canadians, notwithstanding the child care spaces initiative, which perhaps we'll speak to.
I want to tell you one of the practical problems that will flow from this conceptual approach. Two years ago Status of Women Canada women's program funded the Child Care Coalition in order to produce some economic and social impact studies. We looked at the effect of child care in Winnipeg.
Now, with another round of Status of Women Canada women's program funding, we're able to go to three new regions--the large agricultural region of Parkland, the northern town of Thompson, and the francophone village of St-Pierre-Jolys.
One of the things we've discovered is that in all three regions there are waiting lists. Parents report that they are trying to get into licensed child care programs, but the spaces are not available for them. This is quite similar to what we found earlier this year in Winnipeg, where the best indications seemed to be that there are more children on waiting lists to get into Winnipeg child care centres than there are spaces available.
These problems of spaces are systemic and they will only be solved by direct funding to programs. That's why the coalition has made the four recommendations before you.
The first is for secure multi-year funding to provinces and territories in order to enable them to spend directly on services; the second is the importance of a federal-provincial-territorial social policy framework; the third is the requirement that funds be spent directly on improving access to child care that is quality, developmental, and educational; and the fourth is to ensure full accountability in the spending of public funds.
Thank you.