As I put in my HUMA report, which you can have in hand, it's like leaving money on the table to not invest in child care. Whereas I'm thrilled that Dr. Mintz agrees with me on this, and whereas it's absolutely true that Quebec has shown that it pays for itself, Pierre Fortin's work on subsidized child care shows that for every $100 in subsidies for child care, the Quebec government in 2008 received $104 in additional revenues and the federal government received $43 as a pure windfall. They didn't put a thin dime into the program.
When you take a look at highly learning-enriched early learning for at-risk children in the United States, four different programs show that for targeted programs, the return is from $4 to $8.75 on every single dollar invested in these programs. It's just not widely done. The market doesn't do it. Public services do it. I don't think leaving it in the market's hands and being agnostic as to whether the market can provide it or not is appropriate. All the evidence shows that for us to get the biggest bang for the dollar, we need to incorporate child care, and not just child care as warehousing, but early learning and supporting of children who are at risk of dropping out. We need to incorporate that into the educational system. It needs to be publicly accessible and it needs to be learning enriched before they hit school age for it to work its magic. That's what makes it the secret sauce.
In the other presentation I made, there is remarkable evidence on the returns on investment for pathways to education, a program that Stephen Harper expanded, I believe. It's still a pilot project. It hasn't expanded. It's not normalized. We are leaving money on the table by not investing in these programs that have returns to the individual, households, governments and society. If you want to maximize potential and maximize the future, this is the way of doing it.