Ms. Chow, I think this is definitely not the way we want our early learning and child care system to go. In many ways it's terrible that Canada is the lowest spender and therefore the slowest industrialized country to get off the ground with early learning and child care, but at least it gives us the opportunity to learn from other countries' experiences. For example, as soon as there is substantial government funding in programs like child care, what you see internationally is that there suddenly becomes much more motivation for large corporations to be able to get involved with industrial expansion.
Australia is probably one of the most significant examples, because ten years ago they had a system exactly like ours today, which was dominated by not-for-profit centres. The government started introducing funding through tax credits and subsidy mechanisms in significant amounts, and what we now have in Australia is the development of a $3 billion boom industry, with profit margins of up to 58%, and $1.6 billion of that is flowed to those corporate gains through taxpayers' money.
So I think it is true--and I think Ms. Reid will also explain this--that when we have a system of child care where about 85% of the portion of expenditures has to go to wages, which is the most important ingredient in quality programming, and when we have such low wages as we have today, you will see there is not very much room for profit to be made in a child care centre. Consequently, what we are concerned about is not the existing programs that struggle probably in the same way as our not-for-profit centres struggle, but that if you expand the element of government funding, what ends up happening is that large corporate chains will buy all those centres.
A Gold Coast expert in Australia has said the government pays the subsidies, the parents pay the fees two weeks in advance. That's nice, because it's guaranteed, and property prices keep going up and up and up and that's where they make their asset values and increase their property 58%.