Thank you for having me.
I sent a written brief, and I thought you would have it, but you don't. You will.
Today I'm speaking as the executive director of the Childcare Resource and Research Unit. It and I have been active in the social policy field for about 30 years, and I'm primarily concerned with early childhood education and child care and family policy.
Today I want to make three main points. A universal high-quality early childhood education and child care system is an absolutely necessary but not sufficient part of any poverty reduction strategy, and I'll describe why. The second point I want to make is that these programs for ECEC in Canada are today really at their lowest point that I can remember. This is certainly true when we compare Canada to its peer countries and the evidence that we have about what these programs do. The third thing I want to say is that an effective approach to early childhood education and care that fits a poverty reduction strategy must include robust policy from the federal government.
Just to set a little bit of context, I want to note that today there's quite wide recognition that early childhood education and care is about much more than looking after or watching children while the mothers are employed. What this means is that today early childhood education and care services are well understood to provide early childhood education, child care, and parent support, if they're done well.
We also know that families of all economic categories and social groups and regions—poor, middle class, and affluent families, immigrants, refugees, aboriginal, and rural parents in every region in Canada—use early childhood education and care programs if they're available and affordable. This is connected to two things: first, that a broad spectrum of parents seek the best start in life for their children; and second, that the labour force participation of mothers of young children has been steadily increasing for years in Canada. It was up to 77% in 2007 for mothers of children aged three to five years, which is quite high compared to the rate in other industrialized countries.
I have some evidence about the state of ECEC policy and programs. First of all, the programs themselves are in very short supply. You can just look at waiting lists across the country and desperate parents' newspaper stories. A second thing is that the quality of child care in Canada is rarely high enough to be developmental. It's underfunded. It's not good enough.
In addition, regulated child care is usually too expensive, even for ordinary families, let alone for low-income families; and most families, if they can afford to, use unregulated private arrangements, which are often unsatisfactory from both a reliability and a quality perspective.
Finally, although no families have good access to child care, some groups have especially poor access, and here I would note aboriginal Canadians, immigrants and refugees, and parents working at non-standard hours and non-standard jobs. All of these are most likely to be low-income families.
Notwithstanding the evidence about the benefits to child development of good-quality early childhood education and care, and the fact that parents need it, Canada has failed to make progress in this field. We have a 2008 UNICEF report card that ranked our provision at the very bottom of 25 developed countries. We tied with Ireland, only making one point out of 10 of the international benchmarks that were established by UNICEF.
We also have the OECD, which did a very in-depth 20-country study. They found us to be considerably behind most other OECD countries, even the poorer-quality OECD countries in this area. The OECD commented specifically about the poor provision of ECEC for aboriginal children and the access for low-income children in Canada, which was much lower than it was in other countries to which they compared us. They recommended strengthening access for disadvantaged families within a universal system.
Why is good-quality, accessible early childhood education and care a fundamental, necessary part of any effective anti-poverty strategy? There are two main reasons. First of all, it is because of mothers' employment. It's an essential support for mothers who need to take a job, enter a training program, or go to school so that they can work. Without reliable, affordable child care, mothers are often forced to stay out of the paid workforce or to work at poorly paid employment or be stuck in a dead-end job.
We know not only that having two earners in a family is a very important part of buffering family poverty, but also that single mothers who can't get child care are often forced to stay on social assistance and stay out of the paid workforce.
Let me just wrap up.
Overall, what we have in the Canadian situation is that economic circumstances mean that most mothers of young children are in the labour force. So most young children, especially those whose parents have the fewest resources, are not in high-quality, enriching programs that can benefit them. They're in a variety of patchwork, often unregulated, and often inconsistent arrangements.
What can Canada do? The problems really can be summed up simply as not enough money and not enough policy. Those two things really go together.
Do I have another minute to run through some policy recommendations?