Evidence of meeting #5 for Status of Women in the 43rd Parliament, 2nd Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was quebec.
A recording is available from Parliament.
12:05 p.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Marilyn Gladu
That is a great segue into our next panel.
I want to thank the witnesses on this panel. You are awesome.
We are going to switch gears now, and we are going to go to our next panel.
The first witness we have on the next panel is from the Canadian Childcare Network, Kate Tennier.
We also have, from Cardus, Andrea Mrozek.
Each of you will have five minutes to make your remarks and then we'll go to our round of questioning.
Kate, go ahead for five minutes, please.
12:05 p.m.
Kate Tennier Advocate, Canadian Childcare Network
I want to start by saying that I really hear what Ms. David is saying. I started a neighbourhood association—
12:05 p.m.
The Clerk
I apologize, Ms. Tennier, but if I may interject, could you put your mike down a little bit? It seems to be up high and we're not able to catch your sound.
12:05 p.m.
Advocate, Canadian Childcare Network
I have a bit of an issue. I wear hearing aids and I'm getting feedback. I can't hear myself. I'm going to try again.
I concur with something Ms. David was saying. I started a neighbourhood association several years ago focusing on small businesses. Two of our most popular business owners are women married to each other. What hurt them the most in the pandemic was that they were not able to afford to pay their staff. It was women helping women. That's something I can certainly see.
I'm addressing my comments to the Liberals, who are once again trying to bring in a national child care system for Canadians, a system that is as wrong now as it was last year and the year before that. I instead stand for strengthening our Canadian child care network currently in existence, in which parents have successfully been choosing their own care for the past 40 years.
The studies you are being presented by your hand-picked advisers in favour of such a system are based on research from years ago that never supported the claims they make. Renowned think tanks, such as the EPPI-Centre at the University of London, state, “Politicians and policy-makers should stop basing the case for expanding early years provision on old, inaccurate and decontextualized data about long-term economic benefits.” The recognized leading expert on child care cost-benefit analysis, Nobel laureate James Heckman, says, “I get the impression that early childhood advocates feel the need to put forward an appearance of unanimity, which in reality is an illusion. We need programmes openly competing with each other.”
Why are you proposing this program? I ask because so many of your reasons are hugely problematic. You say you want to help low-income women in particular. Do you really want to provide child care for these women just so they can go out and work minimum wage jobs for grocery chains that refuse to offer enough full-time work and have eliminated COVID pay, even though they saw profits rise during the pandemic?
12:10 p.m.
The Clerk
I'm sorry to interject, but could you perhaps bring your mike a bit farther away from your mouth? We're getting a popping sound. We're trying to improve that, because we lost interpretation at that point.
12:10 p.m.
Advocate, Canadian Childcare Network
Okay.
Do you really want to offer low-income women child care so they can be underpaid workers in long-term care homes? I'm asking you to look them in the eye and say, “Yep, we think it's more important that you work in these conditions and for that pay than to spend a few precious years looking after your own children.”
This is not progress, and I'm very progressive. Until you can assure that the work these mothers are doing provides dignity and a living wage, all you're doing is providing a corporate subsidy to businesses that profit off their labour.
12:10 p.m.
The Clerk
We've lost interpretation again.
Could we try to move the mike a bit down and a bit farther away?
Could we suspend, please?
12:10 p.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Marilyn Gladu
Yes, let's suspend while we fix this. I apologize to committee members and other witnesses.
12:10 p.m.
Advocate, Canadian Childcare Network
I really want to make this work. I did the testing last week. Do you want me to move it up or down?
12:15 p.m.
The Clerk
Let's move the mike up, please, closer to your nose, and a bit farther out. There's a popping sound causing audio shock to our interpreters.
12:15 p.m.
Advocate, Canadian Childcare Network
I'm going to take my hearing aids off. It could be due to that, so just give me one second.
12:15 p.m.
The Clerk
Sure.
12:15 p.m.
Conservative
12:15 p.m.
Advocate, Canadian Childcare Network
No, no, I'm going to continue. I will be one second, okay?
12:15 p.m.
Advocate, Canadian Childcare Network
Let's see if this helps. I'm just going to keep going.
You say in the throne speech that labour is on board and that you want to create more jobs. You can't honestly be willing to use two- and three-year-olds, i.e., put them in an unproven system just to create jobs for adults, whether it's to build day cares or have people work in them. You say that you want to advance women's equality.
Sweden, where 91% of young kids are in day care, has one of the highest rates of gender workplace segregation in the world. Researcher Patricia Morgan writes that, 20 years after universal child care was implemented there, Sweden had a more “gender-segregated workforce” than “the U.S.A., U.K. and Germany”. “Indeed, it is more gender-segregated than Asian countries like China, Hong Kong and India.”
Even 30 years after the program was introduced, the OECD stated that “pay differences remain significant and are not narrowing.”
This phenomena of a pink ghetto workforce—extensively written about internationally but never mentioned by universal advocates here—is a result of forcing all families to have both parents in the paid workforce, leaving mothers to take on lesser jobs.
There's one more crucial thing. You say that you want to provide quality care and education, especially for Canada's neediest kids. However, a memorandum on child care financing co-written by one of your advisers, Armine Yalnizyan, suggested that four- and five-year-olds across the country be given full-day kindergarten, which is not good. There never was a peer-reviewed body of research backing up its implementation in Ontario. There was, however, one indisputable fact: all four- and five-year-olds suddenly found themselves all day in ratios that were anywhere from two to 15 times worse than what they had been benefiting from outside of a half-day program. While ratios are not everything, they are essential.
As a primary specialist elementary teacher who mainly taught grade 1, I know from experience that almost all young kids benefit more from low ratios with a not perfect, but pretty good adult than from a large class taught by a professional like me.
12:15 p.m.
The Clerk
I apologize for intervening again. We have lost interpretation.
12:15 p.m.
Advocate, Canadian Childcare Network
Okay. I have one more paragraph, so I'm going to go ahead.
You will have to explain to all Canadians how grandmothers, neighbours, trusted friends, co-ops, nannies, Montessori schools, small French schools, all private—small and large—day cares, neighbourhood home care, nursery schools, tag-team parenting, and even parents themselves are all forms of care and early learning that will wither away once you redirect funding to a no-choice system. You need to be open and transparent about this to the Canadian people, open and transparent about this decidedly non-progressive move backward.
Thank you.
12:15 p.m.
Conservative
12:15 p.m.
Andrea Mrozek Senior Fellow, Cardus
Thank you very much, Chair Gladu. I hear that you have a book out, so thanks for advertising that multiple times.
Cardus is a not-for-profit think tank. Over the course of more than a decade, we've compiled peer-reviewed child care research and produced papers, including a recent collaborative effort called “A Positive Vision for Child Care Policy Across Canada”. We've also done polling of Canadians' child care preferences, among other things.
Today, I would like to comment on child care data and then look at solutions for families, both during and after a pandemic.
Child care is the care of a child, no matter who does it. Child care is not only a women's issue; it's also a family issue. We have, across Canada, a tremendous and beautiful diversity of care options available, care that is both done and chosen by families according to their own cultures, customs, traditions and work needs.
Statistics Canada data tell us that, prior to the pandemic, most parents do, in fact, find what they are looking for. Two-thirds of parents report no difficulty in finding a space or a child care arrangement. Only 3% of parents cite a shortage of spaces as a reason for not using non-parental child care.
Again, nationally, according to Statistics Canada, about 60% of children under six are in non-parental care. We don't know a lot about that 60%, whether they're in for five hours or 55 hours, but of those children, about half are in child care centres or in a preschool program. What this means is that if we consider all children in Canada under the age of six, both those in parental care and those in non-parental care, only 31% are currently in centre-based spaces or preschools.
Polls and surveys consistently show over years that parents do not prefer centre spaces for their children, so the obvious implication of this is that using public money to disproportionately fund spaces means that the vast majority of Canadian children receive no benefit.
Public funding for spaces is structurally opposed to equity for all families. This inequity, I would argue, is particularly bad in a pandemic. At a time when mothers—both those doing waged work and those not—are most needed and continue to need support in the home, money is flowing to spaces sitting empty because we are sheltering in place.
The data further suggest that it's not a lack of access to child care that is preventing mothers from returning to waged work. In Ontario, 93% of day cares were back in operation by the end of September, but in places like Brampton, for example, only 20% of those spaces are occupied. I have the data for Alberta. They reported that 94% of day cares were back in operation, with an enrolment rate of about 50%. This suggests that factors other than the availability of child care spaces are at play when considering how and when mothers return to waged work, particularly in and after a pandemic.
I think the federal government has many options to help families. I will suggest four today.
The first is arguably the most important: to start consulting more widely with truly diverse communities, parents and child development experts.
Gordon Neufeld is a treasure to Canada and a developmental psychologist who is based in Vancouver. He specializes in attachment. The various economists who have done peer-reviewed research on the issue of quality, in Quebec, in particular, Steven Lehrer, Milligan, Baker, Gruber, all of these people need to be involved and consulted.
The research and the voices that I am bringing here today do, in fact, represent a majority of Canadians. Most Canadians want flexibility in how we care for our very youngest so that families can do what works for them.
Second, I would suggest that we can enhance existing federal programs, such as the successful Canada child benefit.
Third, I might consider changes to make maternity and parental leave more flexible.
Finally, bilateral federal-provincial agreements and particularly agreements with our first nations should maximize freedom and flexibility so as to honour the unique heritage, culture, history and tradition of different cultures across Canada.
There is little evidence that expanded space provision will help mothers return to waged work after the pandemic.
There is evidence of an existing ecosystem of parental and non-parental child care in Canada that is neither properly understood nor accounted for, and it risks being steamrolled in a so-called universal system. The federal government should cherish and defend the beautiful choice and diversity, an intricate patchwork quilt of variety, that already exists in child care across Canada today.
12:20 p.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Marilyn Gladu
Thank you very much.
We're going to go to a round of questions, beginning with Ms. Jag Sahota.
Ms. Sahota, you have six minutes.
12:20 p.m.
Conservative
Jag Sahota Conservative Calgary Skyview, AB
Thank you, Madam Chair.
Thank you to the witnesses for being here and for the presentations on a very important topic.
My question is for both of you. You both talked about universal child care not working. That is something the Liberal government is looking at as a model of child care for the rest of Canada. Why doesn't the Quebec model work?
Maybe Kate could start.
