Thank you, Madame Zarrillo, and again thank you for setting up this conversation and study on this topic at committee. I appreciate that you are asking me these questions, albeit some of them I can't answer, of why we haven't invested in them before.
We do know that health care is the most publicly supported program. What the pandemic has shown is that child care is now every bit as critical to the functioning of the economy as education is, except child care was primarily provided through the market across the country. A bunch of it will have collapsed because of pandemic economics. These are the same things that Richard Holden was mentioning: higher costs, lower revenue, fewer people coming in, and more expenses to be able to provide it. That also affects businesses that provide child care that have much lower margins and are very high touch, very labour intensive.
Why haven't we invested more in child care? I've been asked so many times in the last few months, how are you going to pay for it? Yet all of the evidence over the last 25 years shows that if you buy it, it pays for itself in higher labour force participation rates. That's in the short term. In the longer term, depending on the type of program you have, because just spending more won't necessarily give you maximum returns, the maximum returns come when you provide high-quality care for kids who are at risk of not being learning-ready when they enter school, and not learning-supported as they go through school.
If you do that and provide high-quality care for these kids who are at risk and for some of the people Rebecca Shields was talking about—newcomers, immigrants and refugees, people who have been through trauma—you support people, or kids who have disabilities, and you give everybody a fighting chance as they enter school in their early school years and you maximize their potential for the rest of their lives. You reduce their reliance on unemployment insurance. You reduce their reliance on health care. You reduce their reliance on the policing and incarceration system. It pays dividends to the public purse in so many ways and it increases their individual incomes and earning potential. You improve their learning potential and you improve their earning potential, how much they pay into the public purse instead of taking out of the public purse.
We should have done this 50 years ago when the Royal Commission on the Status of Women asked for it. It took us 50 years. We're here now. It's not enough to simply to sign the deal: We have to deliver great care.
Now I'm going to turn long-term care. The pandemic showed that it matters how you deliver long-term care. Private, for-profit care, which is the majority of care across the country, was the coffin for so many people because profit preceded care as the number one principle. There were too many people in overcrowded rooms, too many low-paid workers who were not permitted to add enough hours for benefits to kick in, so they had to go from one home to another bringing the disease with them everywhere they went. This is craziness. We need to learn from the pandemic, especially with an aging population, the importance of having services at home, services in long-term care facilities, services in child care centres and services in hospitals that are there for people when they need them so they can go about the job of growing prosperity, doing other things that grow GDP. Too often we think about the care economy as the derivative, as I said. It's the thing that happens after the economy grows.
In fact, we need to understand that it is the foundation for an economy growing to its maximum potential. The reality of population aging is not unique to Canada; it is happening throughout the global north. There are going to be labour shortages in every country. We are going to be competing with other rich countries everywhere to attract newcomers, whether they're temporary or permanent because there simply aren't enough workers anywhere.
What we are going to discover is what the pandemic already revealed if we are willing to pay attention to it, which is that once you give people the chance to go about their work, because they're not spending all of their time providing unpaid care, you will maximize their potential. You make people healthier, as Rebecca Shields was saying. Like the people who both Dr. Burry and Richard Holden were talking about, when you have a healthy mouth you can get a better job, right? Cavities are mostly preventable if you get at them early with fluoridization programs and you do regular check-ups. These are costs that we could be saving. Why aren't we investing more? It's because if it bleeds it leads. That is, whatever is the noisiest is what's gets funded. There's the preventative health care approach, which the pandemic is forcing us to take a look at and, in fact, the war with Ukraine is forcing us to look at.
What are we doing to prevent these things in the first place? It's deeply unsexy. They pay “dividends”, and we won't have a lot of money to burn as a quarter of the population becomes older, pays less in taxes and draws more in services, so we'd better figure out a way of maximizing what we get for our tax dollar pretty darned fast.