Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Professor Bourbonnais-MacDonald, it's great to see you again. Ms. Pihlak, it's great to see you.
Thank you for taking part. I want to begin with you. In fact, I'm going to hazard a guess that my entire six minutes will be spent questioning you both, not to take anything away from the other witnesses who have come before us today.
I would clarify something, and Mr. Chair, I put this to you as well. The idea that the federal government is trying to impose what's in the budget as a national early learning and child care program on Canadian families and the idea that—as we heard yesterday, very surprisingly, and I'm being polite—families would be coerced into taking part in the program are completely false ideas. Parents will, of course, retain choice. Canada is a democracy. I'm not sure where the sorts of questions that we just heard.... Again, we heard some of this yesterday, Mr. Chair. It's bizarre. I was going to say it borders on the bizarre; it's just bizarre. Let's clear that up. This is about making sure that of course parents have choice, but parents have options. It's very expensive.
That's my first question, in fact, to Kara or Céline. I'm not sure who wants to take it. Child care is very expensive throughout Canada. Can you expand and go into that for us?