Finance Committee on Sept. 28th, 2009

[Susan Harney, Representative, Child Care Advocacy Association of Canada]

Thank you to the members of the committee for this opportunity to present today. My name is Susan Harney and I'm here for the Child Care Advocacy Association of Canada.

I think this is the 25th year that I've presented to the federal committee on child care. I remain optimistic that perhaps this is the year the committee will hear the arguments about the benefits of child care to children, the workforce, and particularly the economy, and this will be the year that our government will choose to prioritize the building of a national child care system.

Over the years we have provided you with a multitude of studies that clearly demonstrate that child care and early learning opportunities are good for Canada's kids in health outcomes, reducing poverty, minimizing later difficulties in learning, and preparing our children to be able to compete in the future global economy. Those studies have shown that child care and early learning is good for working moms. Let us be clear that over 70% of moms with young children are working. This is not a special interest group any more. These moms need support to be able to work.

Those studies have shown you that dependence on the market-based approach has failed. In Canada no matter where you go there are long wait lists for child care. The service is unaffordable for many families, and there is no guarantee of quality. Those studies have shown you that Canadians want a national child care program. When polled, 70%, 80%, even 90% tell you that they want a national child care system and they feel the time is now. Finally, those studies have shown you that investing in child care provides good short-, medium-, and long-term economic benefits.

You may have heard this in a presentation this morning, but in case you didn't, this past Friday a brand new study came out from the Child Care Human Resources Sector Council. The report is called “Understanding and Addressing Workforce Shortages in Early Childhood Education and Care”. I don't have copies to give you because it is so newly off the press. You can certainly go to the sector council's website and read the study there. It was done by Robert Fairholm of the Centre for Spatial Economics. He took about two years and analyzed many aspects of the economic benefits of child care. I'll highlight a couple of them.

Investing in child care is the biggest job creator. For every $1 million in the sector, it generates almost 40 jobs. That is at least 40% higher than the next closest industry and four times the jobs generated by $1 million invested in construction.

Child care jobs create other jobs. Every child care job generates 1.4 others through increased spending and parental workforce participation. Child care spending gives the economy a very strong boost. Every dollar to child care increases the GDP by $2.30--one of the strongest levels of short-term economic stimulus of all sectors.

Child care investment pays for itself. Almost 90% of the cost of hiring 1,000 child care workers goes back to governments as increased revenue, and the federal government benefits the most.

Child care is good for society. Every dollar invested in quality provides a $2.54 return in benefits.

Our first recommendation is to cease and desist misleading the Canadian public and the international community by claiming to spend $5.9 billion annually on early learning and child care. That money is mostly in tax credits and does nothing to guarantee quality. There are no targets and timelines. It does not provide the Canadian taxpayers with a guarantee of building spaces or making the service affordable.

Also, we would ask that you prioritize in the 2010 budget--and beyond--significant and increasing new federal transfer payments to provinces and territories, conditional upon their provision of a plan with measurable targets and timelines and approval of provincial legislatures, to build a system of quality, affordable, inclusive child care services. It is not just a matter of it being the right and good thing to do for our kids; economically, it makes sense.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Rajotte]

Thank you for your presentation.

We'll now go to Ms. Khazaie.

[Susan Khazaie, Director, Federation of Community Action Programs for Children of British Columbia Association]

Hi. I'm Sue Khazaie. I manage early childhood and family resource programs at Abbotsford Community Services and am a director of the board of CAPC, Community Action Programs for Children, in British Columbia.

What is CAPC? CAPC is a program that's funded by the Public Health Agency of Canada to support young families with children under the age of six. It's those families that I'm here to talk about today.

I'm here to ask two things.

I'm so pleased that I'm following Susan Harney, because in Canada we need a comprehensive system that addresses the needs of young children and their families, and part of that, a critical part of that, is child care, as Susan has so eloquently said. However, another part of it, the part that I want to focus on today, is how we support parents to raise healthy children and to have their needs met in a way that creates a society where children thrive.

CAPC has been around a while. It's a program that is targeted at vulnerable families, young families. Originally, at its inception, it was designed to address families in crisis and to prevent unintentional injury. It has grown to look at the social determinants of health, to create opportunities for families to gain the skills they need to have to ensure their children succeed, and to draw in those families who are vulnerable and struggling. We are looking at the at-risk populations in the community. Seventy-five per cent of the families participating in CAPC programs live in conditions that would compromise or challenge their ability to parent their children successfully.

CAPC is an upstream investment. It's a prevention focus. It addresses the problems that families might have before they occur and gives them the tools and the skills to succeed so they can raise healthy children. It leverages resources in our communities so that the funding we get from the federal government is only part of the resources we apply to the issue at hand. Our communities rally around these programs tremendously. We have things where there's food contributed or where there are people who make quilts for others. We engage volunteers and the business sector in a number of ways. People want to support the young children of their communities to thrive.

CAPC programs look different in different communities, because when the funding came to communities, the communities were told to address the gaps they had in the community and to identify the specific needs of their families. So this looks different in each community. Having said that, I note that they all address vulnerability for children and families.

What do we know about vulnerability?

We're really lucky to have Paul Kershaw here today, who is one of Canada's leading authorities on early childhood vulnerability. I encourage you to listen to him. He will be able to make the point much more eloquently than I can.

But what we do know is that Paul and his colleagues have been looking at vulnerability in this province. There's been a tremendous increase in recent years in young children entering school not ready to learn. They're not ready to learn, not because of biological circumstances but because the opportunities to learn in early childhood have not been available to them. We have not provided them with an environment that nurtures them appropriately.

We know that children who aren't ready to learn when they enter school are more likely to continue to be struggling with situations of risk. It's something that we as Canadians cannot afford to miss--an opportunity now where we have approximately 212,000 young children under the age of five in British Columbia who deserve our best.

Today I'm asking you to please consider a comprehensive system that addresses the needs of young children and their families in Canada. Secondly, remember, CAPC programs are our successful initiative, and they are making a difference for the young children and families they serve.

In Abbotsford, with the funding I receive for CAPC programs from the federal government and the provincial contribution, I have $45 per year per child. My opportunity to make a significant impact is limited. I ask you to consider that when you're making your budget allocations and increase that funding so that we can indeed make a difference for the children who deserve it.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Rajotte]

Thank you very much.

I'll go to the Rick Hansen Foundation, please.

[Colin Ewart, Director, Government Leaders, Rick Hansen Foundation]

Good afternoon. Thank you for having us here. We appreciate the opportunity.

My name is Colin Ewart, and I'm with the Rick Hansen Foundation. I'm accompanied by Daryl Rock, chair of the national Spinal Cord Injury Solutions Network.

In support of our written brief regarding the 25th anniversary of the original Man in Motion tour and our vision for the Rick Hansen institute, we would like to show you, on the screens just behind you, the following short presentation.

[Video presentation]

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Rajotte]

We'll now go to our final presentation.

Professor Kershaw, please.

[Dr. Paul Kershaw, Human Early Learning Partnership, University of British Columbia]

Good afternoon. It's a pleasure to be here and a particular pleasure to build off the presentations by Susan Khazaie and Susan Harney.

I come from the Human Early Learning Partnership, which is a research institute based at the University of British Columbia. The quality of our research there is internationally recognized, including by the World Health Organization, which has named HELP the international knowledge hub in research about early childhood development. In the brief we submitted to you in the summer, the punch line is as follows. We as a society in Canada need to rethink our economic growth strategy to recognize the following thing: that strong economic growth requires strong family policy. If we neglect the latter, we will compromise our economic growth henceforth.

How do we know that? For the first time in Canada, researchers have calculated what it's costing us right now to have biologically unnecessary vulnerability as kids are in their early years. We know from that research that the cost of this brain drain in the early years, an unnecessary brain drain, is staggering. In British Columbia alone, it's equivalent to about $401 billion, along with all of the interest that investment can earn over the next 60 years.

Thinking about that across the country from coast to coast, we're estimating that we're talking about trillions of dollars, which is a staggering cost. How do we know this? We have three sets of unique data that I need you to consider.

As Susan Khazaie said, we know that in British Columbia and many other jurisdictions around the country about 30% of our population arriving at the formal school system in kindergarten is vulnerable. We're not talking about wanting kids to be Mozart or the next Einstein at that age. We're talking about kids coming to school too tired to learn, without the motor skills to hold a pencil, having difficulty following directions or getting along with peers, not necessarily knowing 10 letters in the alphabet, and not being able to tell a story about their day in an official language.

Now, we then can track kindergarten children in every classroom in British Columbia, in every school district around the province, and watch what those kids do as they move their way to grade 4. We then can watch the entire population move from grade 4 to grade 7 and then from grade 7 to grade 12. With those observations--these are no longer predictions--we're able to understand what it means when kids come to school vulnerable in kindergarten, in terms of what it means to their later school success.

We know that were we to reduce early vulnerability from 30% down to 10%, where it ought to be, you would be able to improve kids' ability to earn grades that will get them into university by one third and you would reduce crime by one third. We can then link that research that looked between 1960 to the current date in asking how school achievement improves economic growth, how it influences economic growth.

There's a very robust economic literature that shows that countries are achieving lower rates of vulnerability. If Canada were able to emulate that and achieve better school progress through ages 9 to 15, we as a country could count on our economic growth going up by 0.63%. That doesn't sound very exciting, but today 0.63% of GDP in Canada is about $9 billion, and we all know the promise of compounding interest.

It's with those kinds of figures, calculating over 40 years of a child's working career once they hit the labour force, that we're generating these alarming estimates of what we're throwing away today by allowing three times as many kids to be biologically vulnerable as there need to be. We can no longer say we don't know what we're throwing away. The question is, what do we do about it?

I really applaud the combination of the two Susans' presentations, with one talking about how we need to invest in services and the other saying that we need to support families with the time and resources they need, because all families need that combination of time, resources, and community support. It's not an either/or issue. Election campaigns of the past have pitted it as an either/or issue. That misleads the public and doesn't take us towards this place of recognizing that strong economic policy requires strong family policy.

We're making three recommendations for the federal government to implement. They're expensive and we are not ashamed of it. The first is to build on the system of parental leave. We have to extend it to 18 months in this country, reserving the bulk of additional time for fathers to take. That will cost about $4.5 billion a year. We're also talking about eliminating poverty amongst families with young kids, or at least bringing it to below 5%, by enriching the Canada child tax benefit and the national child benefit supplement. That will cost $6.2 billion a year. Last but not least, designing the kind of early learning and care system that Susan Harney mentioned would cost the country $10.5 billion per year. The grand total is $22 billion, give or take a wee bit.

This means that as you're deciding where to allocate money and thinking about family policy in the future, an extra $100 million here or there may sound impressive, but it's no longer going to achieve what we need it to do. As a country, we can decide not to spend more. In fact, we're likely to do so in the current economic climate. You have tough decisions, in part because our culture has not yet asked for us to spend so much more money. But no longer can we imagine that we are not wasting a tremendous amount of potential that ultimately will undermine our medium-term economic growth.

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Rajotte]

Thank you.

Thank you to all for your presentations.

We'll start with our members' questions.

Mr. McCallum, we'll start with you. You have seven minutes.

[John McCallum, Liberal, Markham—Unionville, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you to all for being here.

Perhaps I could begin with the three who talked about child care.

To Susan Harney, you say that maybe this time you'll convince the committee. I think you have already convinced the majority on the committee. The question is convincing the government. I would remind you that when we were the government, we had a $5 billion signed agreement with the provinces for child care. I personally have been an admirer of Fraser Mustard for many years. It was the Conservatives who ripped up those agreements when they came to power.

I'm not saying that we could spend $22 billion per year in year one. Even if you abolished the Department of National Defence, you'd still be short of money to fund that.

I would give one piece of advice to you, Ms. Harney, even though I'm with you in spirit. I would recommend that you not say that child care pays for itself, because it doesn't. People on the right sometimes say that tax cuts pay for themselves. They don't. It is equally untrue to say that child care pays for itself. I am an economist, and I know that you can build up big multipliers and show that somehow that's true, but it defies common sense. Ask the Province of Quebec if they think child care pays for itself.

So I just think you weaken your own argument when you add things like that, things that are not necessary to the argument and are patently untrue.

I'd like now to turn to....

Perhaps I should let you answer, if you want to. But don't be too long, please, because I don't have much time.

[Susan Harney]

You go ahead.

[John McCallum, Liberal, Markham—Unionville, ON]

Okay. Thank you.

There are two here from Simon Fraser. I've spent twice as much time in education, including four happy years at Simon Fraser, teaching, as I have in politics. I'd like to ask a question about students and a question about Simon Fraser.

First of all, to Shamus Reid, I agree in principle with your proposals, but I have anecdotal evidence that the situation facing students is substantially worse this year than, say, a year or two ago. Youth unemployment is at a record high, so more students can't get jobs. The parents of students are feeling the pinch because of the stock market crash and so on. I have heard that applications for student aid are at record highs because of this combination of circumstances.

Do you agree, based on your membership, that students are facing difficulties substantially greater than a year or two ago?

[Shamus Reid]

Thank you for the easy question, I guess, because I would say absolutely; I can't speak for every other province, but certainly in British Columbia student debt is at an all-time high.

You mentioned that youth unemployment is at an all-time high. We've seen tremendous difficulty, particularly for students from low- and middle-income backgrounds, to access education. If they are accessing education, they are taking on far more loans than they were even perhaps two years ago.

I'd like to take a moment to talk about just the debilitating impact of student debt.

[John McCallum, Liberal, Markham—Unionville, ON]

Just a short moment.

[Shamus Reid]

Yes, certainly.

Part of the difficulty in the economy and the recession is the high level of consumer debt and the lack of spending. We're now graduating 22-year-olds who have, on average, upwards of $30,000 in student debt and all the interest payments that go along with that. It makes it very difficult for them to then contribute after getting that education.

So it is very difficult, certainly. I think the federal government has a strong role to play in terms of ensuring that there is funding, that there are principles such that no matter what province you are born in or happen to be studying in, you will be able to access education without taking on staggering levels of debt.

[John McCallum, Liberal, Markham—Unionville, ON]

On the subject of Simon Fraser, I've been to the campus a number of times for a variety of events. I have fond memories of having taught there, so I have nothing but best wishes for Simon Fraser. But when you just give out the number of $60 million, are you asking the federal government to give all of that, or what are you saying in terms of how that is to be financed?

[Elizabeth Model]

In life if you don't ask you don't get, so we're asking for the $60 million.

[John McCallum, Liberal, Markham—Unionville, ON]

That's from the federal government alone.

[Elizabeth Model]

Yes, please.

[John McCallum, Liberal, Markham—Unionville, ON]

Is that in the context of any particular program, or just in general?

[Elizabeth Model]

In general--it's to support the building. The land is already currently owned by Simon Fraser University.

[John McCallum, Liberal, Markham—Unionville, ON]

I'm wondering if it might fit into some sort of infrastructure program.

[Elizabeth Model]

I would think so too.

[John McCallum, Liberal, Markham—Unionville, ON]

Thank you. I just wanted to know if there was some cost-sharing approach, or something of that nature.

My last question is to Mr. Dirom on infrastructure. You said you thought part of the infrastructure funding should be put aside in particular for infrastructure of a nation-building nature. Michael Ignatieff in particular is very fond of that concept, but can you elaborate on what you mean by infrastructure that is nation building?

[Gavin Dirom]

My colleague Byng pointed to something such as Highway 37--the power line and the grand vision that would perhaps link it to Yukon, Alaska, and other places in British Columbia. That's nation building versus smaller local programs that have immediate benefits but perhaps not long-term benefits. That would encourage many more industries to develop and perhaps pay for these very important programs we're talking about today. So that's one example of nation building.

Another one is the Geological Survey of Canada, which basically surveys Canada for its mineral potential, and so forth. It creates that database of knowledge and information that we can then draw from. We can develop these resources for the benefit of all Canadians.

[John McCallum, Liberal, Markham—Unionville, ON]

Thank you.