Statistically it's absolutely clear. For about five years now the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the OECD, has repeatedly pointed out that Canada is the most efficient in the industrialized countries in terms of providing adequate levels of child care, and this pertains directly to a key driver of the economy as a whole. Canada is facing a demographic shortage of human workers who are trained and know how to do the work they're supposed to do. The problem is that women, who are so heavily concentrated in part-time and fragmented work, cannot literally find any more hours in the day if they still have that invisible unpaid work that they have to do, which consists of very large components of care work. A smart economic strategy would be to turn infrastructure and other emergency funding into the national creation of child care resources similar to those in Quebec, so that women can intensify their labour activity and increase productivity right here in Canada without having to put pressure on people to just give everything up and have babies.
On March 29th, 2010. See this statement in context.