Thank you. I appreciate that very much.
Thank you for being here today.
I had the pleasure of working very closely with one of the ministers in the development field in the U.K.
I just wanted to continue with this conversation with respect to the children from zero to three. You don't have to convince me with respect to zero to three or zero to six. We say that from zero to six is fundamentally important.
What I do want to want to ask you, though, is on what you mentioned earlier about multi-child nurseries being a negative and a problem. One of the things that we from the Liberal Party had been looking at and had put in place was a national child care and early education program. It was a quality, cognitive, developmental program, attached to schools preferably, if possible, so that the transition is easier for the child and also for training of teachers. I think the child-teacher ratio in Ontario now is probably one teacher to five children. There aren't large groups of kids. It's that kind of thing.
Seventy-six percent or more of Canadian women work. Whether we like it or not, there are many families where both parents need to work. Otherwise, we'd have a lot more families in poverty than we already have. As well, I'm not sure what our economy would do if we took out 76% of the labour force.
As for the reality of child care, I call it early education child care, because for me the early cognitive program, the early prevention, as you refer to it, is very critical. In the U.K., then, are you saying that the early education or child care programs, the early intervention programs, or, as you call them, the multi-child nurseries, do not have the cognitive built into them if they're good-quality programs?