Thank you very much.
SpeciaLink's mission is to expand the quality and quantity of opportunities for inclusion in child care, recreation, and other community settings for young children with special support needs and their families. I think this is our third year presenting to the finance committee, and we thank you for giving us this time to speak.
When we talk about children with special needs, we're mainly talking about children with disabilities, children in rural and isolated communities, and children with ethnocultural challenges. But what I'm going to address today is children with special needs and the discrepancy between current government policy and what these children, other children, and their families need.
Research has said, people's values have said, and anecdotal information has said that children with special needs fare much better if they are in child care situations with typically developing kids. The research is really strong on that. When you speak with parents and people in the child care community, they say, “The law doesn't say so, but we know it's right”. The community itself has made heroic efforts to make sure that children with disabilities are included in child care, even though they need more support to do it well than they really have.
Research is also beginning to show the effects of what we call “inclusive child care” on typically developing kids. If you think about it, the opportunity to learn from kids who are differently abled—that's our expression this year—both as friends and as children who may need extra help, is a marvellous thing to start when children are very young. If it starts in the earliest years, in the preschool years, the difficulties of dealing with classroom situations haven't happened yet and kids go off to school as friends--both typically developing kids and kids with disabilities.
Finally, though—and I'm glad three of the other speakers have talked about it—we have a ghettoized workforce, or non-workforce really, of mothers, in particular, of children with special needs, who cannot work because child care simply isn't available, at any price, for their children with disabilities.
Back in 1993, when the social security reform parliamentary task force was making its way across the country, parents of kids with disabilities and a lot of caregivers spoke at every city that this committee was able to go to. And that committee was able to go to I think about 13 cities, from Whitehorse to St. John's. I still remember the mother who was a doctor, a physician, in the Yukon who said, “I used to be a physician, but neither money nor advocacy can get a space for my child in a child care centre in Whitehorse. So I'm no longer a practising physician, and I wish I could be one.”
There are workforce issues--you bet.
By the time the committee got to the Prairies, one of the parents who spoke there was a mother who appeared with her twin girls with cerebral palsy, in their wheelchairs. She talked about how she managed to be in the workforce, but only just. The child care was fragile, and so was the van that the rotary club in her community had bought so that the girls could be transported to child care. She had the job, but the fragility of the situation was very, very difficult for her.
One parent talked about feeling ghettoized. The social security reform initiatives from then until now have often been about encouraging people on social assistance to get back into the workforce, but they don't address the extra challenges of parents who have kids with special needs.
Each of you will get copies of these two books that SpeciaLink has produced, along with recommendations as to what finance and the other committees can address in terms of helping children with disabilities, the general community, and parents of kids with special needs in particular.
The six recommendations are on the first page of the executive summary, and I hope we'll address those later.
Thank you very much.