Thank you.
Kids First Parent Association of Canada began in 1987 with two objectives: support for the optimal care of children, and support and recognition for parental child care. Unlike the day care lobby, we are 100% volunteer-run and are neither founded nor funded by government, unions, or corporations.
Personally, I am a low-income, single mother in what others call poverty. The day care lobby has a paternalistic habit of speaking on behalf of women like me without our consent, which feminists call appropriation of voice. I understand that you have also been speaking about women like me, so I'm sure you'll be glad to listen to one of us.
Though most of my work is unpaid, I have been doing paid work since four months after giving birth. I have both used and provided high-quality child care and early learning in parent-regulated situations without state involvement.
Kids First opposes this bill. Our reasons include the following.
This bill promotes the false premise that child care and early learning are defined as government-regulated situations only. This discriminatory, exclusive definition is not found in any peer-reviewed research. Child care is the care of a child. Early learning is the learning a child does, and a child care space is a space a child is in.
All children need child care 24/7, 365. This is a universal essential need. We are fully in favour of child care and early learning, and of course research shows that it's good for children. They'd die without it. However, no peer-reviewed research shows long hours in group care improve children's long-term outcomes, and no peer-reviewed research supports the hypothesis that day care expenditures produce returns of $2 or $7 or $16 per dollar spent. This bill is another crass attempt by the day care lobby to hijack all funding for child care and early learning by hijacking these definitions.
If you are truly concerned that mothers are poor or that families have no choice, empower us. Fund families directly with the money now spent on day care spaces and bureaucracies. That's over $20,000 a year for one infant. This bill is based on a campaign of disinformation intended to manufacture consent for unmarketable, hidden agendas. You've heard of activist judges. We are concerned about activist statisticians.
One untruth is that 70% of mothers are working. All mothers are working mothers. Dr. Donna Lero has worked for Statistics Canada and says that this 70% is for paid, full-time work, including mothers of infants and toddlers. Actually, only about 6%, and not 70%, of mothers of children under three spend 30 hours or more per week on a job.
A hidden fact is that only 14.9% of children six months to five years are in day care centres. You can find this fact buried on page 97 of the 99-page Statistics Canada 2006 report. They did not publicize this fact, and instead their press release says 54% are in child care, giving the false impression that day care is the norm.
Another fact is that wait lists are bogus. They are reservation lists at best. Names are multiple-listed, put on far in advance of possible use, and not removed. Using these lists as an indicator of demand is an indicator of the abysmal level of day care scholarship. In fact, hard data from the You Bet I Care! report from B.C. and Toronto show that vacancies are common in day care centres and indicate an excess of supply over demand.
Another false premise of this bill is that regulation by government assures high quality in child care and early learning. It doesn't. Canadian studies such as You Bet I Care! and Quality Counts! find that the majority of licensed day care is of minimal to mediocre quality in Canada and Quebec. Even in Sweden, the ministry of education reports that poor quality is pervasive in day care there.
One key reason for poor quality is poor allowable staff-child ratios. A U.S. study found that with ratios of one staff to three or four children ages 14 to 24 months, fully 45% did not receive adequate caregiving, and fully 50% did not receive adequate developmental activities. But ratios in Quebec and Ontario are one to five for under 18 months. At 18 months in Quebec, it jumps to one staff for eight. These are the same bad ratios found in Australia, where for-profit day care chains dominate.
Dr. Jay Belsky, internationally renowned developmental scientist, called this “a licence to neglect”.
Dr. Edward Zigler, Yale child development guru, has said licensed day care provides “psychological thalidomide”.
Another false premise of this bill is that it is about children's “well-being”, as the preamble mentions. The strange mix of bedfellows that make up the day care lobby is dominated by the corporate right. This includes the OECD and Fraser Mustard's backers, the World Bank and the Royal Bank of Canada. These entities are not known promoters of children's well-being or justice for women. What is the left, the NDP, doing in bed with the World Bank? With socialists like this, who needs capitalists?
Dr. Mustard's organization's chairman, Charles Coffey, is also the vice-president of the Royal Bank of Canada. In a speech to the World Bank, he states that early child development is “a business imperative”. He looks to investment opportunities, including “data collection”, and indeed he praises Dr. Clyde Hertzman of UBC, who is now busy harvesting children's private data from “preconception to early adulthood”.
The OECD ideologues reject what they call “the ideology of the family” and say that we are in transition to a new order of greater state intervention in the family and something called “the new child” and “the public child”. Try to sell that to the voters.
The corporate right's hidden agenda is partly for day care to “subsidize low wage employment ('welfare in work')” . We call their misogynistic so-called post-familialist policies with jobs for moms in the forced labour force.
We urge you to dump this bill and revive the Liberal government's 1999 policy, which embraced equality and stated that policies should “neither encourage nor penalize caregiving choices”.
Thank you.