Thank you.
I'd like to thank you for this opportunity to present today. My colleague Katie Arnup and l represent the Child Care Advocacy Association of Canada. The CCAAC is dedicated to promoting publicly funded, inclusive, quality, public, and non-profit child care in Canada. Our organization is a non-profit, membership-based, and regionally representative organization. We have been advocating for better child care for the past 25 years.
I want to start on a personal note about my own experience as a parent and early childhood educator from working for over 20 years with toddlers and infants in a licensed non-profit child care centre here in the city of Ottawa. I have provided care and education to hundreds of young children, so I can speak first-hand about what is needed to ensure that they are given what they need to thrive and grow while their parents work or study.
Thirty-two years ago I was a young parent struggling, along with my partner, to provide for our young son. We, like many families living on modest incomes—and I can tell you that a child care worker's wage is very modest—struggled to find affordable child care that we could feel good about, that in using it we could feel we were being good parents and that our son was receiving the kind of care that would support him while we were working to put a roof over our heads and food on our table.
I also sat on the board of directors of my son's day care centre. I know how difficult it is for community-based child care centres to keep up their facilities, meet the daily needs of children, and recruit and retain a well-skilled and professional workforce, all on a shoestring budget. I have witnessed the desperation of countless parents needing access to affordable child care so they can work and provide for their children. I can tell you stories about parents dropping to their knees to implore the centre's director to give them a space so they can take an available job opportunity. l can tell you stories about young sole-support moms wanting to get off social assistance but being unable to find child care they could afford when they themselves worked for slightly above minimum wage.
These stories stretch back 30 years and continue to this day. This is wrong: Canadian children and families should not have to endure this in our country. The generation raising kids today is squeezed for time at home. They are squeezed for income because of the downward pressure on wages and the rising cost of housing and basic amenities. They are squeezed for services like early learning and child care that will help them to better balance raising children and earning a living.
Canadian women with young children have pursued higher education and joined the paid labour force in ever-increasing numbers over the past three decades. The majority of young families cannot survive on one income in today's economy. By 2009, the labour force participation rate of women with preschool children was 77%, a higher rate than in most European countries.
Canada's child care lags far behind not only western European countries but in some ways also Anglo-American countries. The most recent UNICEF report card, using 10 indicators of child care access and quality, ranked Canada at the bottom of the 25 wealthiest nations. While child care availability has crept up marginally over the decades, fundamentally the Canadian situation isn't any better than it was in the 1980s when a smaller proportion of women with young children were in the paid labour force.
What, you may ask, does this have to do with improving the economic prospects of girls? The reality is that the responsibility of bearing and caring for children continues to rest largely on women. Today's girls are tomorrow's mothers, and some of them will be tomorrow's child care providers.
If Canada is going to support a new generation of young girls and women to meet the new realities of the Canadian economy, one that requires their participation in the paid workforce, then Canada must make access to high-quality affordable child care a priority.
There is no turning back the clock. Women's contribution to family income is vital. Women's contribution to the Canadian economy is vital. Child care not only supports those women and families, but it makes good economic sense as well. We have seen the reports from Quebec that demonstrate that government investment in child care not only pays for itself, but brings in additional tax revenues by increasing women's labour-market participation.
I am here today to ask you to act in our interests and in our country's interest. It's time we took action on child care.
Thank you.