Good afternoon.
My name is Carol Gott, and along with my colleague Jane Wilson, I co-manage Rural Voices for Early Childhood Education and Care.
Rural Voices is a broker of knowledge, learning, and best practices in early childhood education and care locally, provincially, and nationally.
Each of you has our submitted brief, so our intention today is to say a few words to summarize our views.
Jane and I both volunteer our time and energy to provide this link between rural, remote, and northern communities across Canada because we know first-hand how difficult it is to develop responsive, flexible, quality services in our rural communities for families and children.
It is difficult, but not impossible. It's not impossible, but it's certainly not probable, simply because, as a country, we have not made it a priority to ensure that every child in this country receives the best start in life and that every parent, regardless of their work status, receives our utmost support in their parenting role.
This will not be achieved by leaving leadership on child care issues at the provincial-territorial arena alone. To hope that, as a country, each province and territory will have the political will or the financial ability to ensure equity of access to quality child care services and supports is not socially responsible. For decades, child care has been the jurisdiction of provincial and territorial governments, yet the most critical issue in rural, remote, and northern Canada remains access to quality child care services. This is true whether you are in rural Alberta, Ontario, Nova Scotia, the Yukon, or any other province or territory in this nation.
We can only assure equity of access to services through federal leadership, a leadership that begins with the approval of Bill C-303.
As each community across rural, remote, and northern Canada sees themselves as different and distinct, so does each province and territory. Although this diversity does us well at a local level, it hinders our ability to act as a nation, a nation that needs to strongly support our youngest citizens.
We have research that affirms the benefits of quality child care for children and families, and now recently we have rural research from the University of Manitoba that affirms the economic benefits of child care as well.
We can tell you, from our travels and work with Rural Voices across this country, that the benefits of quality child care for children, families, and communities are much more powerful and long term than any document could adequately attest. Although it's only a beginning, Rural Voices believes that Bill C-303 will develop a framework to support the challenges that rural, remote, and northern Canadians live every day.
Thank you.