Child care is a major issue. Today, few parents have the luxury of choosing to have one parent stay at home. In two-parent households, both work in most cases because of economic necessity. In one-parent households, unfortunately you usually don't have a choice. So adequate, flexible, and affordable child care to meet the needs of all parents is an absolute necessity.
Flexible child care is also an important component in the mix because many people work shifts, evenings, and/or weekends. A nine-to-five day care does not fulfill their needs and puts even more strain on families as they struggle to make a living while they're seeing that their children are adequately cared for.
Locally accessible quality child care is also an asset not only to the working parent, but to the employer. It ultimately results in helping to improve Canadian per capita productivity.
Could I speak for a minute about the apprentice training programs and things like that? We also urge the federal government to encourage the provincial and territorial governments to broaden areas of categories of work where apprentice training could be provided; to develop programs to attract a larger number of female applicants; and to publicize the availability of existing and proposed apprentice training programs.
One thing I find is that there are lots of community colleges and private colleges right now, but the cost of one-year and two-year programs is extremely high. It's equivalent to a year at university. In fact, in some cases it's higher than a year at university.
This is a real impediment to people accessing these programs and learning a trade or a profession.
It's something that really has to be looked at, because while there are programs in effect, in some cases there need to be more. They also need to be at a cost that is reasonable and accessible to most students as they try to, as you say, transition from school into the workforce.