Women in Canada wear many hats. Often they are mothers, they are partners, and they are workers. Quality child care supports women in these multiple roles. It supports the 72% of women who are in the paid labour force, it supports women who are studying or doing job training, and it supports women who work in the home and want early learning and education opportunities for their children.
Quality child care is an essential component to women's ongoing economic security. First, it helps women to balance work and family.
There continues to be a gendered wage gap. Women earn only about 73% of what men earn. Part of that equation is the fact that women must take time off work for family responsibilities much more often than men.
Quality child care can help to address poverty for women and their children by improving opportunities for jobs and training. This is especially true for the more than 50% of female lone parents who are poor or those women and children who are economically trapped in abusive relationships, but quality child care strengthens the economic independence of all women.
Here in Canada we must ask ourselves how we value children, how we value mothering and traditional women's work, and how we value women's equality. Child care workers earn 45% less than other occupations, on average. This statistic is emblematic of the continued undervaluation of traditional women's work in Canada, such as child care.
Internationally speaking, this and other statistics on child care put Canada far behind the curve. According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, Canada ranks last out of 14 countries in public spending on child care programs as a percentage of gross domestic product and last again in terms of access for three- to six-year-olds to quality child care programs, this time out of 20 countries.
Indeed, child care in most of Canada, outside of Quebec, is a patchwork of generally underfunded services that are neither affordable nor available to the majority of Canadians and typically pay low wages to the child care workforce. There are not enough spaces to meet the demand of families, fees are high, and quality is inconsistent at best.
Quebec is the exception to this observation, as its $7-per-day child care system provides 43% of Canada's regulated child care spaces, even though the province has only 23% of Canada's children under 13 years of age. Furthermore, since the 1997 introduction of its family policy, including universal child care services, Quebec has been the only province to show consistent declines in its child poverty rate.
Child care pays for itself over time, as demonstrated in Quebec, where research showed there was a 40% return on the investment of child care services in the first year.
Unfortunately, the cancellation of the agreements in principle on early learning and child care, the bilateral agreements, signalled an abandonment of a federal commitment to system building for child care in provinces and territories. These agreements have been replaced with $250 million in annual federal transfers to provinces and territories, with no clear spending guidelines. This translates to a $950 million reduction, almost 80%, from the commitment made by the previous federal government for 2007.
While the current federal government has instead implemented modest income supports for families, this action does not address the reality that in most of Canada quality child care services are either prohibitively expensive or simply cannot be found.