Thank you so much.
Good afternoon, and thanks to the committee for this opportunity.
I bring greetings from Niagara, Ontario, the traditional territory of the Haudenosaunee and Anishinabe peoples. This territory is covered by the Upper Canada Treaties and is within the land protected by the Dish With One Spoon wampum agreement.
In addition to offering gratitude and recognition for the land, I have taken in pandemic to also acknowledging care. Many in this virtual room have someone just off-screen who requires care, attention and support, or are able to be here because someone else is providing care, attention and support. Care work—its glories, challenges, limits and consequences—has been starkly revealed in the pandemic, and how we understand and support it is our subject today.
My name is Kate Bezanson. I'm an associate professor of sociology and associate dean of social sciences at Brock University. My areas of expertise are in social and family policy, constitutional law, political economy and social reproduction, or what is sometimes also called “care” or “care work”.
As you have heard from colleagues testifying to this and the gendered impacts of COVID meetings, there is a deep and usually gendered connection between care responsibilities and labour market attachment, advancement, outcomes and risks of poverty. In Canada, outside of Quebec, we largely have a dual-earner/female-carer model of reconciling work and care. Our relatively weak and uncoordinated pre-pandemic family policy contributed to the care vulnerabilities we see in the pandemic.
To address Canada's very first she-cession, among the most important policy tools is building a national system of early childhood education and care, and coordinating it with revisions to maternity and parental leaves. I hope that we can talk about both, and of course about social reproduction and care generally, but I'll focus on child care, given the time constraints.
There is a strong consensus that child care is the magic lever to address Canada's care crisis, to avert a gender-regressive economic recovery, to spur sustained economic growth and to enhance gender equality. This consensus extends more widely than ever before, with chambers of commerce, banks, civil society and international organizations calling for investments in child care.
Earlier this week, the Governor of the Bank of Canada indicated that investing in child care was a step to avert what he termed “economic scarring from the pandemic”. The federal government has affirmed its commitment to long-term, Canada-wide system building, and that the time to do so is now.
Getting the outcomes that will support economic recovery and yield the promised economic and gender equality returns rests on, of course, a number of variables, including, first, addressing what I call “postal code social policy”; and second, committing to good policy design.
Canada faces the prospect of uneven labour market engagement capacity in which women in provinces and territories that currently have more mature child care systems can more readily recover, while others may falter or regress. This postal code social policy means that where Canadians live will be a determining factor in how and to what extent they and their respective economies recover. The economic consequences of this unevenness touch all levels of government, and the political risks of inaction on child care are shared across jurisdictions. Simply, if women's labour market position does not recover, the economy can't rebound, and that immense risk doesn't respect borders.
Of course, design matters to outcomes. Federal investments in child care, absent a vision for system building, can contribute to inaccessible, unaffordable, variable quality and inequality-enhancing child care delivery at provincial and territorial levels, using fiscal room on weak policy choices and extending child care patchworks.
The approach that should be followed can be summarized in a handy three-word mantra: fund the services. Federal funding should be directly provided to provinces and territories where the investment will grow and develop a quality child care system. There are no shortcuts. While there are competing visions of family policy—and family policy is politically fraught terrain—system development does not include cash for care, tax credits or vouchers that stimulate a low-wage, female, precarious child care labour market.
In every crisis, Canada has reimagined its federation. Pandemic federalism has demonstrated a renewed understanding of the fragility and resiliency of our federation and its shared values. Building strong and comprehensive family policy ensures a future that is better insulated against social and economic shocks. The federal government has indicated it's ready to fund what is required to build a system, and broad multisectoral support for a national child care system has never before been so robust. The time is, indeed, now.