I'm hoping that this committee has spoken with some of the child care organizations, like Child Care Now and the Childcare Resource and Research Unit. We have a long relationship with these groups. The child care movement as a whole, along with its allies, has spent decades coming up with a plan and a very solid vision for child care in Canada, and there's a clear consensus about what needs to be done. They're also the best people to talk about what needs to happen in the short term to be able to address the crisis that really has been exacerbated by this pandemic. What's really challenging and shocking right now is that in a time when we need quality child care the most, we have child care facilities shutting down because they don't have the resources they need to be able to provide the care that parents are addressing.
This is very much an issue that needs to be focused on to ensure that child care facilities have the resources and don't rely overly on parent fees, because parents cannot afford them. You can't provide quality child care on parents' fees alone. You need to see this as a quality public service. So I do think that the plan to establish a secretariat that would move forward on both a recovery plan and put together the building blocks for a long-term sustainable system that we can rely on.... This is not going to be the last crisis of this nature, and so we really need to be able to establish disaster-proof social services and public services like child care.