With the provincial government, we had positioned ourselves as a childcare development model in terms of the integration of services such as the development of educational centres or day care, preschools, play groups, resource centres and family and child support centres. This is what we were working on.
The province said that it was open to our model for intervention: it would even like to implement it throughout the province. We believe that learning and childcare go hand in hand.
Things came to a halt for us, but the province did not say that it was going to abandon this approach; it said that it would proceed progressively.
We feel that a progressive implementation is difficult, because there are only a limited number of years—the years of early childhood—to support children in their development. The community supports the parents with regard to development. The families do the work, but we also need to do the work.
We will certainly not stop promoting our early childhood development strategy, but if we had the federal government contribution that was promised in the agreement, we would be able to move forward much more quickly and we would be able to ensure a much more institutional and organized approach.