Thank you very much.
It's a great pleasure to be in front of this committee once again, and like one of my colleagues, Susan Harney, in the last round, I too am a multi-year presenter. Susan mentioned to me as she left that it's great that we don't have to convince you any more that child care is important; now we just need you to do something about it.
My colleague, Crystal Janes, and I are presenting from the Coalition of Child Care Advocates of British Columbia. We are a not-for-profit organization made up, obviously, of many parents across the province and also caregivers, early childhood educators, grandparents, labour unions, businesses, and many others. We do speak to the need for a comprehensive policy that funds and has standards for a child care system that meets the needs of working families for children zero to 12, that is in the not-for-profit sector, and that is adequately publicly funded to maintain quality that parents can afford--all the kinds of things that a progressive, rich country like Canada can and should be providing.
We will be brief. There are two things we'll do for you today. I'm just going to highlight some of the findings from a pivotal report that was just released from the Child Care Human Resources Sector Council on Friday that speaks to workforce shortages and also to the socio-economic benefits of investment in child care. Then Crystal will have a more detailed presentation.
You may already have heard about this report delivered by the Centre for Spatial Economics, a very respected economic business in this country. It talks about the workforce shortages in early childhood education and care. The research shows that the benefits of early childhood education and care to children come mainly from increased future earnings due to the greater likelihood of attaining higher education. For mothers, the benefits come in the form of higher current and future earnings due to increased labour force activity. Access to early childhood education and care allows mothers to increase their labour force activity, translating into more working hours, increasing mothers' current earnings and increasing future earnings. A lower smoking rate and lower special education and grade failures are also some of the benefits that accrue to children.
It is important, and it has been referenced—Member of Parliament Don Davies mentioned it earlier: the multiplier effect of investment in child care is something we would like to highlight for you. Most literature concerning the impact on mothers of children in early childhood education and care, ECEC, programs indicates that higher program fees decrease a mother's hours of work, so we don't want to have high fees, and $100 a month from what we call the family allowance benefit that comes now from the federal government does not, obviously, help build child care spaces, does not improve quality of child care spaces, and does not actually help anybody afford child care spaces, given the current cost.
Most of the Canadian research is similar to what is found elsewhere in the world regarding the socio-economic implications of early childhood education and care. Within Canada, developments around this area in Quebec are particularly noteworthy, given the speed of magnitude of the change in the sector after the government introduced $5-a-day child care.
Research lands on both sides of the debate about the impact of ECEC on children's socio-economic development. However, on mothers' labour force supply, there is no argument with increased mothers' labour force participation of 12% in Quebec. In the 2008 study the estimated effect of the policy was to increase labour force participation rates by 6.5% for more educated mothers and by 7.3% for less educated mothers. Total annual hours worked rose by 133 and 114....
I will pass it over to Crystal now.