Before I conclude with a couple of concrete recommendations, I want to take a minute to comment personally. I've been a policy researcher on early childhood education and child care even before I immigrated to Canada in 1971, and I'm very familiar with child care issues not only from my work as a policy researcher, but personally, as many women and family members are.
When I was a young working mother in the 1970s and 1980s, both my children went to excellent, non-profit child care. One of them was a parent co-op. But I'm now a grandmother of four-year-old twins, and they also have been in excellent municipal child care since they were babies. My daughter, who's a young academic, and her partner can afford the fees only because they are lucky enough to have a fee subsidy. Virtually nobody in Toronto can afford those fees for two children. Just to point out the luck piece, there are 18,000 children on the Toronto subsidy waiting list at any one time now. So you can see that the subsidy system does not work, and you can appreciate that this has made all the difference in my life, and it's making a difference in my daughter's life.
Since I was a day care parent 30-odd years ago, however, around the time that the Status of Women minister released the “Report of the Task Force on Child Care”, on International Women's Day in 1986, little about child care has fundamentally changed in Canada. It's still very hard to get a space, outside of Quebec it's exorbitantly expensive, and too often the quality isn't good enough to qualify as “high” or “educational”. What has changed, though, is that we we know much more about what governments need to do to change the status quo. Today there is so much more international and Canadian information about what should be done.
Based on all of this, here are my recommendations.
First, I echo what other people have said: the Government of Canada needs to act decisively to put in place its 2015 platform promise “to deliver affordable, high-quality, flexible, and fully inclusive child care for Canadian families”. The process of achieving a system that will deliver this will take many years. It will probably take a decade to put this in place, but it needs to begin now with a clear vision for the future. To make this happen, it needs to start with a robust policy framework that will be based on the best available evidence. It also needs to be supported that changing child care needs substantial, long-term, sustained funding that ramps up predictably over time to be at least the international benchmark of 1% of GDP.
Just to conclude, because I'm getting a signal—