I think that's precisely the point I'm making. In fact, child care is embedded in all of these agendas. It's embedded in the indigenous education agenda. It supports post-secondary students. It certainly supports women in every way that you can imagine.
I'm only talking about it as a program for adults, but that's only one of the two main facets of early learning and child care. The other one is that it's a program for children. We know that, as a program, early learning and child care is good. It's good for all children. It does provide more vulnerable children with more advantages—cognitive advantages, language advantages and social advantages—if it's well done.
When we talk about how it fits into a competitiveness agenda, there is specific research on how this helps women enter the workforce. There's research with regard to women of different socio-economic categories. It helps employers, because there aren't worker absences and things like that. You can add up all of the research, but it really is so that it is an impediment to a society, in a whole variety of ways that I don't think I have even enumerated here, if we don't have the kind of systemic approach to early childhood education and child care that really successful countries have developed. In this we're way behind most of the OECD. Today universal child care is accepted as a pillar of a modern society. Essentially, you can't have a modern 21st-century society unless you've paid attention to this program, which delivers multi-benefits to different people.
Again, we're not saying it's a one-size-fits-all program, but there are certain things that we know about it that are across the board. It needs to have good people working in it. They need to have decent salaries. They're almost all women, by the way. It needs to be in decent facilities. It needs to have enough people. It also needs to fit parents' schedules for work. I want to emphasize that. Unless you build it to be systemically funded as opposed to a user-pay market, which is what we have, you can't meet the needs of our precarious workforce with non-standard hours for workers and so on.
There are a lot of facets here. It's not a tiny little consumer item. How does it fit into a competitive society? There's a long list of ways. That's why it needs to be addressed systemically. Canada is lucky, in a way, because we haven't done much on this yet. There's lots of learning to be had from other places about what to do and what not to do.
I hope that answers your question.