I want to start out by saying I will be making some of my remarks in French.
The New Brunswick Child Care Coalition is pleased to appear before the Standing Committee on Human Resources, Social Development and the Status of Persons with Disabilities.
The New Brunswick Child Care Coalition is a membership-based, non-profit organization that includes both organizational and individual members from across the province. Our organization promotes high quality, universally accessible, non-profit, publicly funded child care, with trained and well-remunerated staff, for all New Brunswick children who want or need it.
We are affiliated with the national organization, the Child Care Advocacy Association of Canada.
Our organization commends the Standing Committee on Human Resources, Social Development and Status of Persons with Disabilities for undertaking this study of critical employability issues. We appreciate the opportunity to demonstrate the links between employability and child care. Relating to several employability issues mentioned in the study's terms of reference, we offer the following evidence that child care supports the employability of parents while at the same time helping to provide children with the foundations for lifelong health, learning, and skills development.
Child care supports the employability of parents, particularly mothers, immediately and on an ongoing basis. In the immediate term, child care is a tremendous support to families because it allows parents, particularly women, to increase their labour force attachment.
Canada's productivity relies on working mothers with young children. They contribute $53 billion annually to Canada's GDP. That reliance is only increased due to widely predicted shortages in skilled labour, yet Canada and most provinces have not built a network of income supports and public services, such as quality affordable child care, to broadly facilitate women's economic and social contribution.
The Canadian national child care study, which was released in 1988, confirmed that it is overwhelmingly mothers who make child care arrangements and scramble when they fall apart. Labour market surveys find that mothers are most likely to refuse work, promotions, or transfers because of family responsibilities.
Child care provides children with foundations for lifelong health, learning, and skills development, all related to their future employability. The evidence supporting public investment through program spending to develop a pan-Canadian child care system is clear and compelling. The early years set the foundation for school readiness, and all children benefit from quality early learning and child care, not just targeted groups of children.
Public support for child care is therefore an investment in our future and helps the future employability of the Canadian labour force. What makes the case for accessible, universal, publicly supported quality child care so compelling and so relevant to the issue of employability is that it meets the needs of both children and their parents. This explains why multiple studies show that the benefits of a universal child care system outweigh the costs by a factor of two to one, and that's not including the needs of at-risk children.
A focused public investment in quality universal services is required. As discussed in the New Brunswick Child Care Coalition submission to the Standing Committee on Finance, which we are going to be doing this afternoon, the federal government is terminating the bilateral agreements that committed $1.2 billion annually in dedicated funding to improved child care services. These agreements are being replaced with capital incentives of $250 million annually. While these incentives are not yet fully defined, already there are concerns about how they will play out in communities, particularly given the fact that the current federal government's child care spaces initiative represents an annual funding cut of $950 million for child care services, which is a cut of almost 80%.
To build a child care system that Canadians and New Brunswickers want and need, the New Brunswick Child Care Coalition therefore calls on the federal government to adopt the focused investment strategies that follow.
First, restore and increase the sustained long-term federal funding to provinces and territories. Federal transfers must be specifically dedicated to improving and expanding child care services, based on provincial and territorial commitments to advance quality, inclusion, and affordability.
As well, enact federal child care legislation--and I believe legislation is actually being evaluated right now before the House--that recognizes the principles of a pan-Canadian child care system, makes the federal government accountable to Parliament with respect to child care funding and policy, and respects Canada's first nations' right to establish their own child care systems.
Redirect the capital incentives for child care spaces to dedicated capital transfers for the provinces and territories to use to build child care services that communities prioritize, own, deliver, and account for.
Provide effective income support for Canadian families by incorporating the current taxable family allowance into the Canadian child tax benefit.
In order to capture the numerous benefits of public child care investments, including the employability benefits described above, the federal government needs to restore and increase its public investment substantially beyond the recently terminated bilateral child care agreements and to sustain this funding over the long term.
Working with the provinces and territories, this public funding must be accompanied by a focused investment strategy; that is, by public policy and accountability requirements for community service providers in all levels of government that will advance the range of quality, inclusive, affordable, community-based child care services across Canada.