Okay.
Most of the European countries that have universal accessible early childhood education and care programs charge parents a fee, but the fee doesn't support the whole program. In answer to your question, I think all the evidence is that what you call demand-side money doesn't do the trick. I know that the goal of the $1,200 is to give families more choices, and that means choices to stay at home or choices in some kind of child care. But I've looked at it quite a lot and I don't think there is any evidence that it does that. For one thing, we don't have data, but things certainly do not seem to have gotten better. You could say they may have gotten worse.
I would say that if your goal is to have accessible, high-quality developmental child care that is early childhood education, you give programs. If you want to give people income, you give them money.
Personally, I think it's important to give some families who need it money. I think the national child benefit is a good program. I'm a part of Campaign 2000 as a national partner. I think that putting a lot of that money into the national child benefit, and not making it a universal program but skewing it down to the people who need the money the most, would be a really good use of public money. When I say “universal” early childhood education programs, I mean they should also be for children whose mothers are not in the paid labour force, because they want early childhood education too—probably not full-day.
That's my answer.