Thank you. I wanted to mention that we are going to be submitting a formal brief outlining all the points I'll be making today, with some precise recommendations.
I wanted to begin by thanking the committee for inviting us to come to inform the study on the federal government's role in reducing poverty in Canada. I represent an organization called the Child Care Advocacy Association of Canada. Our organization recommends that the federal government assume a leadership role in the development of a high-quality, universal, pan-Canadian child care system. This system will accomplish multiple social and economic benefits for children, families, and the economy. Chief among these benefits is poverty reduction.
Improving child care services will reduce poverty by increasing family incomes in three important ways. By improving child care availability, we support parents in maintaining and increasing their labour force attachment. Labour force attachment itself is essential to poverty reduction, although, as others will have described, it's in no way a guarantee. By improving child care affordability, we reduce parent fees, lowering the cost associated with increased labour force attachment. By improving child care quality, we support children's healthy development. In the long term, this leads to improved educational outcomes and earnings.
We acknowledge up front that child care services is only one of several components that are essential in an effective poverty reduction strategy. The CCAAC supports the recommendations of our partner organizations, such as Campaign 2000 and others, who call for a federal role in the development of a set of complementary policies that together will increase family income and promote well-being.
Given the focus of our work, this presentation will focus specifically on child care's role within a poverty reduction strategy. It is based on what we've learned from parents, from caregivers, from communities across Canada, and from research in international studies.
We have four points to make: the parents approach to child care outside of Quebec is not working, quality universal access is essential, federal leadership is required, and accountability is key.
In terms of our first point, that Canada's approach is not working, outside of Quebec only 12% of children under the age of 12 have access to regulated child care. Parent fees are among the highest in the developed world, often exceeding the annual cost of university, and quality is constantly undermined by the low wages and poor retention rates of the college-trained early childhood educators.
Why is this happening? Canada relies on a market-based approach to child care. Community groups and entrepreneurs build and deliver services according to their priorities, with government involvement limited to fee subsidies for low-income parents and wage subsidies for low-income staff. But 30 years of experience with this approach in Canada confirms that the market has failed to deliver high-quality, affordable, accessible child care services for children, families, and communities.
The crisis in child care in Canada outside of Quebec has been confirmed by a series of international studies. In 2006 the OECD reported that Canada has the lowest early learning and child care access rate in 20 developed countries and invests the least public funds of the 14 reporting countries. In December 2008 the UNICEF research centre released report card eight, The Child Care Transition, which compared a range of family policies, including child care, in 25 rich countries. Once again, Canada ranks last.
Shamefully, we only achieved one out of ten benchmarks established based on commitments that Canada and most other nations have signed on to in order to uphold the rights of our youngest citizens. Canada fails on the most fundamental benchmark, as it does not have a national plan with priorities for the disadvantaged. Canada fails to provide enough early learning and child care spaces, fails to ensure that minimum quality standards are met, and fails to invest 1% of GDP in early childhood services. Canada also fails to ensure a near-universal access to the essential child care health services. As a result of these policy failures, it's not surprising to see that Canada fails to achieve a poverty rate of less than 10%.
The UNICEF report card adds to the body of evidence showing that jurisdictions that advance quality universal child care are more likely to have lower family poverty rates. While many European and Nordic countries are examples to look to, results in Quebec are also noteworthy. Since introducing its family policy in 1997, with child care as a key component, child and family poverty rates have dropped in Quebec, and women's labour force participation and incomes have risen substantially.
Quality is essential because good child care is good for all children, with additional benefits for vulnerable children, but poor-quality child care can cause harm. Evidence of the benefits of quality child care is so established in science that any claims to the contrary lack credibility. They're the equivalent of claiming that the earth is flat.
Child care in Canada is in crisis, which has been fuelled by the cutting of the bilateral agreements signed with the provincial and territorial governments. While progress in child care under these earlier agreements was painfully slow, it is clear that federal leadership did make a difference. As a result of the current federal cuts to child care funding transfer payments to provinces, B.C. has cut operating funding to child care programs, and today we're facing the potential loss of thousands of subsidized child care spaces in Ontario and cuts to child care programs in New Brunswick.
The problem with the dedicated child care transfer agreements established in 2003 and in 2005 under SUFA is that they neither required nor adequately funded a fundamental shift towards an accountable, publicly funded system. But replacing federal-provincial agreements with cash transfer payments--the UCCB--is not the answer to child care problems in Canada.
In 2007 the number of regulated spaces in Canada grew by only 3%, the lowest increase in a decade. Given the persistently high fees for parents and the ongoing problems with staff recruitment and retention, it is clear that the unaccountable universal child care benefit is not building the range of affordable and available quality programs that parents need to support their labour force attachment.
While accountability for the federal child care transfers to provinces and territories has long been a concern of the CCAC, the current federal government's claim to be spending three times as much money on child care raises even more concerns. If the current federal government is spending three times more than the previous federal government, Canadians are justified in asking why access to quality affordable child care has not tripled as a result.
Why, in fact, is the child care crisis in Canada continuing to grow? The answer? None of the federal funding is accountable to improve quality affordable child care services. Therefore, in order to realize progress in child care services in Canada, and to fulfill our human rights obligations to children and women, accountability must be measured within conditional transfers to provinces and territories.
In conclusion, establishing a federal role in poverty reduction comes at the perfect time, as we are experiencing the worst economic slowdown since the Great Depression, with thousands of Canadians losing their jobs. This economic downturn provides Canada with the opportunity to catch up with our peer nations in supporting the employability of parents in a meaningful way and overcoming one of the most stubborn poverty traps: the lack of affordable and available child care services. A federal investment in child care will provide a double benefit. It will allow parents to work and upgrade their skills while compensating children at risk due to their family's social and economic circumstances.
We have four recommendations.
We recommend that the federal government take a leadership role in adopting a federal poverty reduction strategy and that child care be part of the strategy used.
Our second recommendation is that the government use federal spending power to establish, through legislation, an early learning and child care policy framework that will attain the goals of service affordability, universal entitlement, and quality non-profit and/or public delivery. This framework should set conditions under which provincial and territorial governments can access funding, while recognizing that Quebec has already the foundations of a provincial child care program and should receive its funding unconditionally.
Our third recommendation is to commit adequate and conditional funding to the provinces and territories, with accountability.
Thank you.