Thank you.
I'm the executive director of the Childcare Resource and Research Unit. I'm talking about the other end of the age spectrum compared to what Dr. Simpson was talking about, but there are actually a lot of policy similarities.
I'm really pleased that you asked me here today to talk about the relationship of child care to the priority of supporting families and helping vulnerable Canadians by focusing on health, education, and training.
I want to make a few points about Canadian child care. Canada is one of the world's wealthiest countries, but international analyses by the OECD, UNICEF, and other groups looking at child care policy and provision have repeatedly given us the very lowest ratings among OECD countries. I understand that this point came up in the previous session.
The most recent Canadian data from 2012 showed that progress on many aspects of child care is essentially stagnant. At the same time, high-quality child care remains out of reach for most families, as there are only enough spaces to cover about 20% of children aged zero to five, and fees in most of Canada are out of ordinary families' reach.
Families of all types lose out, but some lose out more than others. If parents are lucky, they may be able to find quality child care that not only allows them to go to work or to school or to train, but benefits the children's health and social and educational development. If parents are vulnerable—if they're low income, if they're newcomers to Canada, if they're single parents or indigenous—they're doubly disadvantaged. Not only will they have a hard time finding a quality child care space, but they will undoubtedly be unable to pay for it if they do find one.
As the research shows, young children who are in poor-quality child care while their parents are working, training, or going to school—as most children are in this country—are vulnerable to the potentially negative effects of poor-quality child care. This is true whether or not they're already vulnerable for other reasons.
Today's families are united by their drive to access early childhood education and child care that meets two criteria: one, it allows them to work, study, train, or learn English or French and, two, it allows their children to thrive, learning through play, making friends, and building language and social skills. Changing child care to make this happen for most families would be a great opportunity for Canada.
Overall, changing Canadian child care needs a national child care program that involves all three levels of government. The federal government's role in such a program would be to develop, in collaboration with provinces and territories, an overarching national policy framework, including a long-term sustained funding plan that is needed to ensure that the system's principles and goals can be achieved over time. This would mean a commitment by the federal government to be a major funder of the system and a policy leader and convenor.
This is the finance committee, so I want to talk about the financial aspects. I'll make a couple of recommendations about those.
One key to changing child care for the better in this country is that federal funding needs to be supply-side funding, or funding services, rather than demand-side funding, which is giving money to parents. I really want to cite solid evidence showing that demand-side funding such as income splitting and cash allowances like the universal child care benefit and the child care expense deduction are nothing but costly experiments that are ineffective and demonstrably poor social and fiscal policy.
Based on our analysis—and I would speak for other people who are working on early childhood education and care across Canada—in the next year we intend to argue that the next Government of Canada should begin the process of developing a national child care program based on the ideas here.
In the short term, in the 2015 federal budget, we propose first that this committee recommend that the Department of Finance evaluate the effectiveness of the universal child care benefit, the effectiveness of proposed plans for income splitting, and the effectiveness of the child care expense deduction, and publish the results publicly. These programs cost a lot of money. With the addition of income splitting, they would be costing Canadians about $7 billion a year.
The second thing I want to recommend is that there needs to be an immediate infusion of emergency money to the provinces and territories to shore up the child care that we have. Based on my calculations, that would be transfer payments of about $700 million in the next federal budget. Child care is crumbling. While a national child care program is being developed, the next federal budget could be a signal that this situation can change.
Thank you very much. I would be happy to take your questions.