Hi. Thanks for having me here, and thank you for having such a lovely, constructive and good-natured committee.
I'm with the Association of Day Care Operators of Ontario, which represents independent, licensed child care programs, both commercial and not-for-profit programs. I've been working with child care organizations since 1993, so the aspect of women's economic empowerment that I know best is child care and, more specifically, child care entrepreneurship.
It's to the detriment of all women that child care entrepreneurs are being targeted for extinction through the nationalization of Canada's child care sector. I'm here today to ask for your help in ensuring that child care entrepreneurs have a future in Canada for generations to come.
There are a few reasons it's important. The vast majority of child care entrepreneurs are women; child care is one of the only sectors of the economy in which women have always been fairly represented in terms of business ownership and management; and child care entrepreneurs not only provide a vital service for families but also serve as role models and mentors for other women and for the children in their care.
Let me tell you a bit about child care entrepreneurs.
They don't all run licensed child care centres. Many start out as unlicensed home-based child care providers, and they're often home with their own young children at the time. Some have their ECE credentials already, and some get them later on.
Second, child care entrepreneurs rarely go into business with the goal of making a lot of money. It's not surprising, because whether you're running a licensed child care centre or a microenterprise in your own home, taking care of children is an awful lot of work.
Often, the primary motivator for child care entrepreneurs is that they want to offer the kind of care they wish they could have found for their own children. A lot of them also say that they had a lightbulb moment when they witnessed the difficulties that large institutional providers have in supporting children facing challenges. They thought, wow, there has to be a better way.
Not all child care entrepreneurs start businesses, though: Some create independent not-for-profits. Entrepreneurs might be a group of parents from a faith-based, cultural or linguistic community who want their children's early years education to reinforce certain traditions.
My final point about child care entrepreneurs is that they not only laid the foundation upon which almost all of Canada's existing child care services are based, but they continue to lead the way in terms of innovation and flexibility. They're not preoccupied with creating a national system. They're just engaged in meeting an ever-changing array of family needs each and every day.
Right now, the question many of Canada's child care entrepreneurs are asking is whether they have a place in Canada's national child care program or a future in child care at all.
They're pleased to see the government recognize the important role child care plays in ensuring equal workforce opportunities for women, and they're pleased to see a commitment to consistent funding for families who might otherwise struggle to pay for care, but Canada's child care entrepreneurs have spent much of the last three years listening to their government characterize their life's work as having so little value that the government wants to limit the expansion of their services.
Bill C-35 expressed this, albeit in softer language, but most of the federal-provincial agreements spell it out very specifically. Further, the report filed by the Senate committee that examined Bill C-35 concluded with the recommendation that the government “focus on providing funding to create a high quality public early learning and child care system”.
Just to sum up, we have a sector of the economy that was largely created by women. It's essential to women's equality in the workforce. It's one of the only economic sectors in the country where women are fairly represented as owners and managers, and it's being not only undervalued by government but targeted for replacement by a government-run system.
Child care entrepreneurs know from experience how expensive and slow to build this new system will be, that it will require higher taxes to sustain and that there's no guarantee of a better result. When we look at Quebec, 25 years in, the province is still struggling with wait-lists, staffing and quality challenges, which are supposedly the reason the growth of private licensed child care in Canada has to be stopped. In the meantime, the demand for licensed child care across the country is skyrocketing.
I come to you today in all sincerity and with respect to say that there has to be a better way, and I'm asking the committee to help us find it.
Thank you.