Human Resources Committee on March 10th, 2023

[Krystal Churcher, Chair, Association of Alberta Childcare Entrepreneurs]

Good morning. I am very grateful for the opportunity to share with this committee this morning. My name is Krystal Churcher. I am a private child care operator in Alberta. I am also the chair of the Alberta Association of Childcare Entrepreneurs, which is a non-profit industry association that represents the interests of private child care operators in Alberta, who currently make up 70% of our child care delivery.

What we have heard around Bill C-35 and the Canada-wide early learning and child care program is all very high-level information with very lofty intentions. I want to provide some of the on-the-ground, real-life experiences that operators and families are facing.

This program and legislation are all about the long term and entrench the federal government's vision for early learning and child care. It is critical that we move forward in an aligned way that respects the rights of children to quality, flexible child care and choice for parents.

The goal of this bill is for all families to have access to high-quality, affordable, inclusive child care. However, what we are seeing on the ground is the human toll and the impact around the rollout of this program.

The bill was introduced without adequate consultation with all industry stakeholders and without respecting how the child care sector has evolved in provincial jurisdictions across the country. What we're seeing is a program that has created a demand without the infrastructure to support it, which is causing wait-lists, a two-tiered system and undue stress to families and operators. Women entrepreneurs are facing bankruptcy and closure of businesses that have now lost all their value. The system is, frankly, not equitably accessible and is failing to meet the promises to parents and families. Operators are asking what the real cost is of meeting this $10-a-day goal. Parents are losing choice; the quality of programming is at risk; educators are burned out; and women are losing their businesses.

Bill C-35 does not sufficiently recognize that Canada's current child care system still very much depends upon thousands of private operators despite directional preference for the non-profit business model. When subsidies go to child care spaces rather than directly to parents, it becomes a form of soft coercion. This doesn't create options that respect the difference of families or provide them with a form of child care they choose.

Decreased fees, which are also only available at specific centres, are actually eliminating parental choice and provide a forced standardized system. By limiting access only to programs that are predominantly non-profit, this program is forcing families to surrender their choice in child care.

While this program advocates for the full economic potential of women, our sector is made up of largely female entrepreneurs like me, and we are seeing the expropriation of our businesses. We all want to see women succeed, but what about the women who are investing in creating child care spaces in their communities? By wanting to provide affordable child care to the families we serve and opting into this program, we have had an expansion freeze placed on our private businesses, lost the ability to control the fees for our services, and ultimately lost the value of our investments.

The truth is that the promised child care spaces are not actually available to all families. In Alberta, what we're seeing is urban cities with wait-lists of 75 to 150 families on average and rural areas like Grande Prairie having wait-lists of 600 or more families. This legislation promises access to child care regardless of where families live, but that's not the reality. Parents are facing less access because the program has created a demand that can't be met, resulting in wait-lists.

When the guiding intent is to prioritize non-profit child care spaces, private expansion has been halted, yet demand for private programs continues to grow. Increased demand for child care has forced private programs to expand to meet need, despite having no access to grants for parents. This is resulting in parents paying upwards of $50 or more per day for the same program in the same centre. In Alberta, we are seeing a two-tiered system.

Do we really have affordable child care if we can't access it? The CWELCC program does not create equitable access to child care, especially for lower-income parents who were promised support to go back into the workforce. Parents and operators alike cannot understand how this CWELCC affordability grant funding is provided to every family, regardless of income bracket, when operators currently witness the majority of those on wait-lists fall into low-income brackets. Right now, families of varying income levels benefit, not necessarily prioritizing those who need affordability the most.

In closing, I urge the committee to take an approach to meet the Government of Canada's goals to make Canada child care more affordable to families.

I leave you with five solutions. They are to provide funding directly to families; change funding to an income-based model on a sliding scale so that true equitable need and accessibility can be met; focus legislation around the concept of parental choice, regardless of business model, and instead have the funding follow the child; open the full expansion of child care to private operators to meet the demand for child care; and respect and allow free market competition as a way to ensure quality and innovative niche programming that meets the needs of all parents.

We have a duty to Canadian families and children to make sure that we create a program that truly represents the needs of families, protects the quality of care for children and provides real accessibility to all families. We can't continue to ignore the issues that we're seeing across the country and move ahead with a well-intended but flawed program.

I'd like to share a few stories from operators this morning. I had one child care operator reach out to me....

I'm sorry. Am I out of time?

[The Chair, Liberal, Bobby Morrissey]

Ms. Churcher, we're over, but because the first one was over, I'll give you the flexibility to—

[Krystal Churcher]

It's just one story.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bobby Morrissey]

Okay, that's fine. Go ahead.

[Krystal Churcher]

Thank you.

I have one child care operator in a rural, under-serviced area of Alberta who has proudly operated a high-quality day care centre for 17 years. She has invested in creating 194 child care spaces for her community. When asked how she felt when the CWELCC program was announced, she said that she was excited for families to finally have access to more affordable child care and optimistic that it would bring relief to families sitting on wait-lists.

Yesterday she sent a letter to all of her 194 families in her centre, plus 563 families on her wait-list, to notify them that she was closing her centre. After 17 years of successful operation, the viability of her business is gone. With high inflation, fee caps and expansion restrictions on private centres, her centre is financially handicapped. She has had to make the heartbreaking decision to close a business that she built, because she can't take the financial risk of signing a new lease or investing further into expanding her centre with the unknown of a cost control framework looming. She writes that she is worried that the $10-a-day goal will be at the cost of quality care for children.

These are the decisions facing operators on the ground right now, who are deciding to walk away from something they have proudly created because they can no longer carry the financial burden or because they simply can't agree with the reduced quality of care to bring the costs down.

Thank you so much for your time and consideration.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bobby Morrissey]

Thank you, Ms. Churcher.

We'll go to Dr. Mathieu for five minutes, please.

[Dr. Sophie Mathieu, Senior Program Specialist, Vanier Institute of the Family]

Thank you.

My name is Sophie Mathieu. I have a doctorate in sociology and I specialize in the study of family policy in Quebec. I work at the Vanier Institute of the Family as a senior program specialist and I am a member of the National Advisory Council on Early Learning and Child Care. However, my comments today do not reflect the Council's position, and will echo some of Mr. Fortin's observations.

As you know, Quebec created a network of low-cost child care services at the turn of the millennium, and so...

[The Chair, Liberal, Bobby Morrissey]

Dr. Mathieu, there's a bit of an issue with the quality of the interpretation. Could you slow down, please?

[Dr. Sophie Mathieu]

Right, I will speak a little slower.

Quebec has a rich history of 25 years of lessons, successes and challenges in connection with its child care services. In Quebec, there is virtually no further debate about the wisdom of offering low-cost child care. Nonetheless, the network faces other challenges that are well documented, such as the shortage of spaces, the quality of care, and problems recruiting and retaining staff. Since these problems have been well documented already, today I want to talk about three lessons from Quebec's experience in connection with its child care services network that are less well known.

The first lesson to note is that not all child care services are daycares.

In the Fall Economic Statement 2020, Chrystia Freeland said: "Just as Saskatchewan once showed Canada the way on health care..., Quebec can show us the way on child care." The deputy prime minister wanted to draw on the Quebec model for creating a national child care network. In its original form, the Quebec model is not a system in which most services are offered in daycares; rather, as Mr. Fortin said, services are offered in CPEs, early childhood centres. It is important to understand that "daycares" and "CPEs" are not synonyms, because they do not refer to the same type of child care.

By definition, a daycare is a private for-profit business. Daycares are therefore not central to the Quebec model. I would note, as a brief aside, that there are two types of daycares in Quebec: those that offer subsidized spaces at the same price as the spaces offered in the CPEs, and unsubsidized centres that offer spaces at the market rate, which is well above $10 per day. All CPEs, on the other hand, are created within the social economy and are not operated for profit. By definition, a CPE may therefore not be a daycare.

The difference between a CPE and a daycare is not just semantic, nor is it ideological. As Mr. Fortin said, daycares in Quebec offer lower quality services, as compared to CPEs, even though, overall, Quebec cannot boast that it offers high quality child care services to a majority of children. At the beginning of the 2000s, a study showed that only 27 per cent of child care facilities offered a level of quality ranging from good to excellent; that proportion rose to 35 per cent in CPEs but fell to 14 per cent in daycares.

The second lesson to note is that even when a majority of spaces are offered at low cost, less well-off families have lower access to high quality child care.

Here again, I will somewhat echo what Mr. Fortin has already said. In Quebec, we know that 36 per cent of children under the age of four do not have access to regulated child care, and yet we know very little about these children and the systemic, economic and cultural barriers that impede the families' access to child care.

Nonetheless, the 2020-2021 report of the Auditor General of Quebec to the National Assembly offers some information about the disparities in access to high quality child care for families in Montreal. For example, in the Park-Extension and Saint-Michel neighbourhoods and in the borough of Montreal North, which are extremely disadvantaged, a much higher number of spaces offered is available in daycares than in CPEs. In Westmount, on the other hand, a particularly wealthy Montreal neighbourhood, more spaces are available in CPEs. In simple terms, poor families have greater access to commercial daycares that offer lower quality services, while richer families have have better access to CPEs at present.

The third and final lesson to note is that the positive effect of child care on the economic activity of mothers in Quebec has to be considered in context.

Creating a child care services network was widely and rightly justified by reference to the importance of supporting women's participation in the labour market and the need to achieve equality between the sexes.

While the effect of child care services on mothers' participation in the labour market is undeniable—I am the mother of three children myself and I could not have pursued my doctoral studies and my career if I had not been able to rely on low-cost child care—it must be pointed out that Quebec has a coherent family policy that consists of more than offering low-cost child care.

Since 2006, Quebec has had its own parental benefits program, the Québec Parental Insurance Plan, which offers more accessible and more generous benefits than those offered everywhere else in Canada. The high rate of participation by mothers in the labour market is therefore a result of an institutional context that goes beyond the availability of child care, even though child care is essential.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bobby Morrissey]

Thank you, Ms. Mathieu.

I would ask you to conclude any comment that you have in your answers to questions.

[Dr. Sophie Mathieu]

Of course. I will conclude my presentation by saying that I can answer questions in French or English. If you want to get the full text of my remarks, you can go to my website, sophiemathieu.ca.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bobby Morrissey]

Thank you, Doctor. You can submit your written text to the committee for full consideration, as well as cover any material in answers to questions, which I'm sure you'll get.

We'll now begin with Madame Ferreri for six minutes.

[Michelle Ferreri, Conservative, Peterborough—Kawartha, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you to all the witnesses here. It's great testimony that will help us ensure that we are putting forth the best possible solutions for the welfare of our children.

Krystal, if I may call you that, I want to touch on something that we've heard from the minister repeatedly. If you were watching the exchange prior to this, I was really trying to push to have the language of the bill changed to include these independently owned businesses and licensed home day cares. The minister has said that the licensed private day cares are included in the bill. She's pretty adamant about that.

How do you reconcile that? If they're included, why is there such suffering in your industry of these women entrepreneur home-based child cares?

[Krystal Churcher]

I think there's a little bit of confusion about some of the language. My understanding is that home-based day cares, which in Alberta we call “day homes”, are being included under this agreement as a non-profit model. That's very confusing and misleading to me, because those are very much a for-profit model. They are women who usually stay at home. You're allowed to have a certain number of children in your home. You want to be licensed. I want 100% to support licensed, regulated, quality care.

That is separate from, let's say, what my centre offers. I am a private child care operator. I have a commercial space that I lease. I operate under the exact same regulations and standards as those of a non-profit business model. We follow all the same guidelines. The only thing different is our business model.

They are two separate things. I do believe that a home-based day home would be a for-profit business model as well. I find it very misleading to be included in a non-profit structure. As for-profit private child care centres, we are not able to expand and do not have access for our families in our care in the same way that a non-profit business model does under this agreement.

I wholeheartedly think that if you are supporting family accessibility to child care spaces and you want to help alleviate some of the wait-lists and the demand that we're seeing, then it should include all licensed child care providers.

[Michelle Ferreri, Conservative, Peterborough—Kawartha, ON]

Thank you for that feedback. I think that sets the record straight in terms of changing that language to include “all licensed”, which aligns with the pillars of ensuring that.

I'll come back to you if I have time, Krystal, but I'd now like to go to Dr. Mathieu, if I may.

What would you like to be called—“Dr. Mathieu” or “Sophie”?

[Dr. Sophie Mathieu]

Sophie is fine.

[Michelle Ferreri, Conservative, Peterborough—Kawartha, ON]

Thank you.

What can we learn, or what would you like to see changed in the bill, if you recommend any changes, to strengthen it to ensure that...? Quebec has set a standard, and we do have the data, which I think is wonderful. We can look into the future and say, “Hey, this is what happened in Quebec.” Also, it gives us a great opportunity to tighten up when unintended consequences or gaps happen in the system for accessing quality licensed child care.

Is there anything you'd like to see worded differently in the bill that would ensure access and inclusivity?

[Dr. Sophie Mathieu]

Of course, but there are things in Quebec that haven't been resolved after 25 years. One thing is that access to child care is not a right, not even in Quebec. It doesn't seem to be a right in the bill either. If we want to really be serious about child care, we need to think about the fact that we would never tell a parent that their child cannot access grade 1 because there is not enough space in their elementary school. To have access to child care as a right is something that hasn't been accomplished in Quebec yet, but that's something that we dream of for Quebec and obviously for the other provinces, Only if it becomes a right can we then make sure that it's inclusive and that we can work on issues like quality and others that you have identified.

[Michelle Ferreri, Conservative, Peterborough—Kawartha, ON]

Thank you for that. That's interesting feedback from what you guys have seen.

As my follow-up question, how do you ensure access if the gap to access is closed off? We've heard from Krystal about meeting the demand. There's a massive wait-list. There's massive demand. As I said earlier when I was interviewing the minister, I have mothers and fathers phoning me and saying, “I'm not going to have any more children. We can't have any more children. We can't afford it. We don't have any child care.”

In principle, I understand what this bill wants to accomplish, but I feel like it's falling short on how it's going to do that. Do you have a specific recommendation, Sophie, on how to improve access? I know you've said “a right”. Is there anything else tangible we could put into the legislation?

[Dr. Sophie Mathieu]

That's a very difficult one.

I would have to come back to you. That's something I've been thinking about. Maybe Pierre has more ideas, but that's something that—

[Michelle Ferreri, Conservative, Peterborough—Kawartha, ON]

I see he has his hand up, but I don't know how much time I have.

Pierre, do you want to jump in there?

[The Chair, Liberal, Bobby Morrissey]

You have 20 seconds, Monsieur Fortin.

[Pierre Fortin]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

It is very important to understand clearly that in our system here in Quebec, private daycares compete not on quality, but on price. To keep the price at $40 per day per child, a lot of things have to be left out, and, in general, it is the quality that declines. I don't see daycares offering to have parents pay $50 rather than $40 to get better quality services: the parents would say "whatever", and would choose another daycare that keeps its price at $40.

The problem with child care services is that they are not a tangible good, like frozen Brussels sprouts or like cars. The consequences associated with the quality of the services will be seen in children in a much longer term. As a result, it is difficult. It would be possible to keep the private daycares in the system, on the condition that the authorities impose strict quality criteria and monitor compliance with the criteria very closely.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bobby Morrissey]

Thank you.

[Pierre Fortin]

However, a majority of daycare advocates favour the CPEs.