Thank you.
I'm minister for education as well, and early learning and child care programs come under that ministry. There is a clear alignment. We have developed clear lines of what we expect to see in the programs. We have a direct role in supervising and in ensuring that operators are meeting the requirements. We have no problem with the four principles of quality, universality, accessibility, and accountability. We ensure that our programs meet those right now.
To me, Ms. Davis's comments strengthen the need for an approach that isn't unilateral across Canada, because right now we have that system in place. We report annually and very publicly on how we're spending our money. We send that report across Canada, in fact, so that others can find out how we spend money in early learning and child care, and we are spending way more of our money than we are of federal money.
What scares us about this bill is whether we will be able to continue getting that little portion of the federal money that we're getting right now. This isn't a situation in which our government is pocketing a bunch of money; we want to know that we're going to continue to get the little bit of support we're getting right now, and hopefully in the future build that into something more meaningful.