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.