Hello, I'm Martha Friendly. I'm the executive director of the Childcare Resource and Research Unit, CRRU. I think you have my written brief, which I submitted to the clerk. I'm just going to speak for five minutes, and it's going to be a small summary of that.
CRRU is a small child care and family policy research institute. It began at the University of Toronto in 1982, and it's been an independent non-profit organization since 2007.
I have been a policy researcher in child care for almost 50 years. I've written many papers, reports, popular articles and several books. I've worked on child care internationally. I've been a member of various government expert groups.
One of the main ideas that has guided CRRU's work is the idea that good policy-making needs a solid foundation of good evidence. That's been one of our guiding principles.
Since the earliest days, CRRU has urged governments at all levels to work together to establish an early learning and child care system based on the premise that child care is a public good. Thus, we've applauded the introduction of the Canada-wide early learning and child care plan, CWELCC, but we continue to point out ways that it's implementation can be strengthened.
We all know that quality child care for all is essential in a 21st century society, but how it's set up and designed is especially and critically important. Why? It's because a well-designed child care system can meet multiple goals at the same time. However, a child care market with child care deserts or poor-quality services does not deliver the same results.
Bill C‑35 is a key component as Canada begins to build its child care system. Legislation is important for setting out the high-level goals, aspirations, principles and objectives that we need to transform Canada's piecemeal child care market into a high-quality system, that is, a public good and part of our community infrastructure.
As a dedicated researcher, I find that the federal government's overall policy approach to child care is generally consistent with the best available evidence. That being said, though, I want to make several recommendations aimed at strengthening Bill C‑35, and the rest of my comments are going to be about the recommendations that I'm going to make.
The first thing that I want to recommend is strengthening the language that sets out the division. The importance of early learning and child care for children, women, gender equality, families and the economy is quite well represented in the legislation's preamble. However, the Government of Canada's vision in paragraph 5(a) is inconsistently tentative. Thus, I suggest amending paragraph 5(a) to read, “the Government of Canada's vision for a Canada-wide universal, high-quality early learning and child care system that is envisioned as a public good,” which, I think, would strengthen and make it more consistent with the principles in the preamble.
The second recommendation I want to make is to strengthen the rights-based language, which I was very pleased to see in the preamble, linking the new system to international human rights conventions, such as the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, CEDAW and the social development goals. Therefore, I suggest amending paragraph 6(a) slightly to declare the Government of Canada's obligation “to support and ensure establishment and maintenance of a Canada-wide child care system”. This would be consistent with the federal government's role as the responsible state party identified in the Convention on the Rights of the Child and in the comments of UN committees reviewing Canada's compliance.
The third recommendation I want to make has already had a lot of discussion. I want to support the federal approach limiting for-profit care with regard to expansion while permitting existing for-profit child care to receive public funding on the same basis as not-for-profits, which is the government's approach at this particular point.
The legislation touches on this in paragraph 7(1)(a). I suggest strengthening this clause for at least two reasons. The first reason is that, as we've already discussed, there is abundant research showing negative associations between for-profit ownership and key quality indicators, including the number of qualified staff, their wages, working conditions and support, staff turnover and morale, and that observed what we call “process quality”.
I actually—