These are very good questions.
I would say that I am aware that the NDP, I believe in the mid- or late 2000s, proposed a private member's bill that essentially speaks to this, creating a child care act with a similarity to the principles of the Canada Health Act.
I think legislation is a really important expression of how we protect and value particular policy areas. I know that Quebec also has a legislative enshrinement and it also speaks about the rights of children to particular kinds of care. There are a lot of reasons to do that.
I also have wondered about the kind of invisibility of child care in our federal spending packages. We have the Canada social transfer. We have the Canada health transfer. Child care, historically, was delivered through the social transfer, and it now comes through bilateral negotiations with provinces.
Would it make a difference, also, to give it that kind of visibility and have a Canada child care transfer in addition to a legislative schema that could give it the kind of visibility that would also protect it, at least symbolically? That's something to think about.
I know that so many child care deliverers in regulated home bases and in centres have struggled mightily in the pandemic. I think that, moving forward, we need to look at those three legs of the stool and think about how we fund services so that we can address areas like fee caps so that parents aren't paying as much; so that we can address funding of the workforce, which is wages, one of the key drivers of costs in child care; and also—