We have a very good natural experiment here in Canada, because Quebec has made very significant financial investments in subsidizing child care. I'm sure my colleagues from CLC can speak to this as well, but there are a couple of take home lessons, I find, from the Quebec example.
One is that if you simply look at the cost of running child care—paying your rent and your overhead, paying child care workers a living wage, which by and large we do not at the moment, and meeting your safety regulations—you have to charge parents more than they can afford, essentially.
We thus have to have government subsidies. The math just doesn't add up unless we provide government subsidies. The market will not fix this, because you can't make ends meet as a child care organization and not charge people exorbitant fees.
The other lesson I would take from the Quebec model is that it needs to be universal. I know that people say that's not fair. We've had this discussion even within Quebec. Should people with high incomes not be paying more? The answer is that they do pay more. They pay more when they pay their taxes.
Also, if we don't have universally accessible child care, what happens is that we create a whole lot of paperwork, which is very expensive; also, the poorest Canadians will not be able to access that child care, because they won't have a regular home address, they won't be able to provide all the receipts, and they won't have all of the paperwork they need to access to go through the income testing.