Mr. Chair, honourable members, we're delighted to have the honour and opportunity of speaking to you now. At the beginning of the week, I wasn't sure we'd all be here, but we are, and that's good.
This is the fourth time that I have the honour of appearing before this committee on behalf of the Canadian Paediatric Society. This time we will be taking a somewhat different approach. I hope that you have in front of you a copy of our written submission. Instead of reading it, I would like to speak to you briefly about where we are today as we make this submission to you. Another difference is that where in the past we identified three or four priorities, this time around, we will focus on a single priority.
The issue I want to talk to you about is early childhood education. The specific recommendations and some of the specific justifications for it are found in the written presentation.
I want to step back a little from this, because this issue has generated a fair amount of heat over the years. I want to step away from our ideological positions and the chronic Canadian challenge of jurisdictional boundaries and take this from a fairly pragmatic standpoint.
The reality is that currently over three-quarters of households where the youngest child is between three and five have a working mother in that house. That means more than three-quarters of those children, one way or the other, are having care and supervision in those two years alone outside their household. We know that currently the available regulated spaces for day care barely reach 20%, so there is a great discrepancy. Whatever we think about the sociology of the transition of families over the past several decades, that's the reality we now face.
So this is a challenge, but it's also an opportunity. I would like to go beyond our understandable preoccupation with current efforts to get out of the recession we've been in and particular aspects of the stimulus package and really look beyond that in the longer term. The opportunity we face here is very clear: by assuring accessibility to quality early childhood education, we have a great opportunity to help secure our social and economic future going forward 20 years.
Economists and those of us who are engaged in social policy in general often feel torn by conflicting imperatives in any program or investment we seek to look at. On the one hand is the equity and distributive justice aspect, and on the other side is the efficiency and productivity of the piece. Early childhood development is one area where, rather than looking at intersecting curves and finding some middle point to help inform the policies we establish, the curves really go in parallel.
In the written document you're going to see a lot of European comparators and OECD ratings that situate us at the bottom of the countries we most like to compare ourselves to in our initiatives within early childhood development. But I'm going to in fact cite some American data.
This has been most lucidly put together by James Heckman, a Nobel Prize-winning economist from the University of Pennsylvania. He has shown--not from his own research but from compiling research that was generated largely in the United States on early education interventions for the most disadvantaged kids, beyond addressing the distributive equity side of the piece--that over the generation and a half that those programs have been in place there have been some remarkable successes.
Some of you who may have followed the story of Head Start will have had mixed messages. In the early days the results looked great. In the middle school years, the differences between those kids who had enhanced early childhood education programs seemed to disappear, and there was a worry that there wasn't a long-term effect. We're now at a stage far enough out that in looking at post-secondary outcomes in terms of education, engagement within the workforce, and less involvement with the law--not as professionals but as subjects--remarkably, there are persistent and impressive differences between those kids who had early childhood education and those who did not.