I will begin.
I want to begin by thanking you from the bottom of my heart. Being invited to testify before a committee like yours always stirs up special emotions in me, as several people in my family have been members of the House of Commons over the past 135 years.
Here is my list of questions and answers.
Number one: how does the child care system impact women's economic security? The answer is that the affordability of child care is a crucial consideration for the mother who has to decide whether she will return to work after she has had a new child.
The lower the cost of child care, the greater the interest of the mother in working during the period until the entry of child into kindergarten, and having a job then improves her economic security in many ways. I will name three: one, it gives her an independent source of income; two, it makes her career less discontinuous, which accelerates her acquisition of experience and raises her wages; and, three, perhaps new to you, but extremely important nowadays, it allows her to better face the financial consequences of the risk of separation, which is very high nowadays. The probability that a separation will occur within 10 years after a first union is currently in excess of 50% in Canada.
Number two: why is it important to focus on the Quebec low-fee universal child care system that was started in 1997? The answer is that the cost of child care varies enormously between cities and regions of Canada. It ranges from 5% of women's average earning power in Quebec to 35% in Ontario. On average, the Quebec system makes regulated child care five times more affordable than in other provinces. The consequence is that child care utilization and the labour force participation of mothers are very much higher in that province than elsewhere.
This is making a major contribution to the economic security of Quebec women. In 2014 there were regulated child care spaces for 60% of children from zero to four years in Quebec, but for only 28% of children in other provinces. Furthermore, from 1998 to 2014, the labour force participation rate of mothers of young children zoomed by 13 percentage points from 66% to 79% in Quebec, but outside the province, it increased by only four points on average.
Number three: how do we know that the increase in labour force participation of Quebec mothers has been caused by the low-fee universal child care system of that province? Causality has been carefully identified by teams of researchers from UQAM, which is my own university, and the University of Toronto, MIT, UBC, and Queen's. Their studies have been refereed and published in reputable scientific journals internationally. Their evidence is compelling and unanimous that, relative to other parts of the country, the increase in the labour force participation rate of mothers in Quebec was to a large extent an outcome of its low-fee universal child care system.
Crucially, the UQAM team—my colleagues, not me—showed that Quebec mothers participated more in the labour force not only when their children were very young but also later, when the kids had entered school. In other words, if you continue to work after you have your child, you have more of a chance to continue after that. Based on these results, my Université de Sherbrooke colleagues and I estimated that in 2008 there were 70,000 more Quebec mothers in employment than there would have been otherwise.
Number four: isn't pulling mothers away from home bad for child development?
There's no question that the family is and should remain the bedrock on which child education is built.
However, in a world where already more than 70% of Canadian mothers of very young children work, the question is not whether this is acceptable in theory, but what to do in practice, given that this is a reality we have to cope with. How do we ensure that the 70% majority of young children whose mothers work in Canada get the high-quality child care they need to complement the care they receive at home? This is the question.
Why is it preferable to run a low-fee universal system instead of simply enriching the existing traditional system outside of Quebec with higher quality and better targeted child care? The answer is because a low-fee universal system is more effective and less costly than the traditional, purely targeted system providing child care.
First, more than two-thirds of all vulnerable children come from middle- and higher-income families. Only a universal system can effectively catch all of them.
Second, the Quebec experiment has shown that the low-fee universal system can attract so many more mothers into the labour force that the additional taxes collected by the two levels of government, in total, come to exceed the additional subsidies that the province has to pay over what the targeted system would otherwise cost. There is a net fiscal dividend that can then be used to improve the quality of child care and respond to the special needs of disadvantaged children. There is no net cost to taxpayers. The traditional system cannot perform this financial trick. There is no revenue, just the cost, and it must be financed by higher taxes.
Does this mean that the Quebec child care system is near perfection? Not at all. It is far from perfect. Far too few children receive education and care of good to excellent quality, and far too few disadvantaged children access the good part of the system and have their special needs attended to. The network of high-quality, non-profit early childhood centres, the CPE in Quebec, does a very good job, but in order to economize on costs, the provincial government over the years has used its tax and subsidy policies to push parents away from the high-performance CPE and entice them towards low-quality private garderies.
Not surprisingly, with the distribution of children in care thus skewed toward low-quality providers, studies—by all those guys from Toronto, UBC, UQAM, and Queen's—have shown that the Quebec system as a whole does not seem to have improved child development. The main failure of the Quebec system is not that it is a universal low-fee system, but that it has badly managed quality. The main challenge now for the provincial government is to correct this policy error.
I end with my recommendation. The government, in my view, should quickly make good on its 2015 platform promise to deliver “affordable, high-quality, flexible, and fully inclusive child care for Canadian families”. Specifically, it should push forward the national early childhood education and care agenda by introducing a Canada child care act. Under this act there would be an annual financial contribution made by the government to provinces and territories on the condition that their educational child care programs be low fee and universal in design. That would contribute mightily to building a solid educational infrastructure in Canada.