Certainly we live in a tremendous, varied federation that has really dense urban centres and vast, more rural areas.
On your first question about a system model, of course, in any area of social policy, we want to have benchmarks. We want to have tracking. We want to be paying attention to how we are assessing, reassessing and striving, and nowhere is this more important than when we think about our smallest humans.
We often use language of accountability, which tends to be used more in relation to the financial side of the ledger. If we're talking about accountability for spending and investments, we also have to transform that a little bit to think about those kinds of shared goals, shared benchmarks, shared access to child care services, affordability of services, expansion of services and the attention of those services to the kind of communities they are serving.
One thing is very interesting, and my colleague Susan Prentice has written about it in Manitoba. Child care is a really big labour market booster and economic development mechanism for rural communities—this is also true of long-term care—so there are some economic development strategies that really are well served by child care.
We have to think about developing a national strategy and also think about really high-quality, home-based child care delivery that's regulated and that can attend to the transportation issues, needs and choices of those in rural communities.