Thank you.
I speak to you today as the interim CEO of the Canadian Child Care Federation, an organization representing child care affiliates and members from across Canada. It is Canada's largest national non-profit charitable organization supporting child care in research and policy.
Since 1983 we have been giving voice to the knowledge, practice and passion of early learning professionals and practitioners across Canada.
I know my time before the committee today is limited. The federation has submitted a detailed written submission on recommendations for your committee's study on Bill C-35, an act respecting early learning and child care in Canada. Today I would like to focus on a key point.
The current child care landscape in Canada is a mix of private, public and not-for-profit operators. The government has made it clear that all new growth in child care should be primarily in the not-for-profit and public sector. The federation strongly endorses publicly managed child care.
All regulated child care services must be organized, funded and delivered in a way that puts the best interests of children and families first. This should be the core requirement for all services that receive public funding. Child care is a public good that brings significant benefits to all of society in much the same way that our more developed public education and public health systems do.
We are in the early days of this rollout. This is a huge transformational change in that it will take time to collect data, build a system, and ensure recruitment and retention strategies for early childhood educators. Our ECEs are the backbone of this system.
The federation welcomes a transformational change. Why? It is because today early childhood education in Canada is an uneven patchwork. It is unavailable in many communities; wait-lists are long; the quality of programs is uneven; and for many parents, quality licensed child care remains unaffordable and not accessible.
We would further recommend that within Bill C-35, funding be explicitly described as annualized and tied to the licensed, regulated system of child care, which includes centre-based and home child care. We applaud the government for their commitment to a national plan. Let me be clear: The federation believes in and supports Bill C-35.
We recommend that there be deeper consideration and directions in two areas—workforce development and quality for children.
Let me speak to workforce, our ECEs.
The success of the new plan is possible only with a well-trained, valued and compensated early childhood educator workforce. This includes educators working in centre-based and licensed home child care, a critical and often poorly understood part of the child care system. We would like to see strong language in the bill that promotes sustained investment in a national strategy for the recruitment, education and retention of the early childhood educators workforce.
We need to establish national standards for competitive wages and national education and credentialing standards for ECEs. We also need foreign credential recognition that supports high-quality programs and accelerates the entry of newcomers who are trusted and able to work in Canada.
I would like to highlight three more very important points.
One, the federation believes in the critical importance of language in the proposed act to ensure accountability through the annual federal public report on progress.
Two, the federation would like the act to clearly stipulate that there be Canadian-based early learning and child care research across a range of disciplines and methodologies. We need research into many areas, including early learning and child care for immigrant children, for children with special needs, for children from official minority language communities and for indigenous children.
Three, we support the National Advisory Council on Early Learning and Child Care and enshrining this advisory body into law.
Thank you for the opportunity to speak to you today about Bill C-35. The Canadian Child Care Federation fully supports this critical piece of legislation. We believe in the goal of the federal government to provide a Canada-wide quality and affordable early learning and child care system. The federation and all the early childhood professionals and practitioners we speak for look forward to continuing to do the work together with our government partners to realize the transformative system for children and families.
Thank you for your time.