Mr. Speaker, I will be splitting my time with the hon. member for Oak Ridges--Markham.
I will not be supporting the motion before us today. I believe very strongly that our children deserve a better start in life. At least 70% of women in families in Canada work. They work because they have to and they work because they choose to; I do not think it matters why they work. The important thing is that 70% of women in this country do work. I say that only because this issue of child care goes along with the issue of poverty. Child care is a major issue for women who work, especially single parents.
I want to broaden the debate, though, because this is not just about child care. It is not just about childminding. It is not about babysitting. We are not talking about babysitting. We are not talking about looking after children to make sure they are safe. Of course we are talking about children being safe, but also we are talking about the developmental issues. I believe that every child, regardless of whether the parent is working or not, needs to have at least half a day of early education experience.
I am not talking only about assisting families where parents both work or assisting single parent families that need early education and child care in order to be able to work. I am talking about giving all children, regardless of whether the parents work or not, the best start in life. This is extremely important.
It is not about babysitting. It is about early education. It is about providing a quality program, a developmental program, universally inclusive, for everybody, accessible to every child. This is about providing an environment in which every child is encouraged to learn and feel safe. We cannot provide a professional developmental program, a quality program, without having professional staff, and those professional staff need to be well paid and well trained. I believe, of course, that the system should be a not for profit system and should be publicly administered.
I should point out that our caucus has been getting ready for our next convention, coming up in March. We were allowed to prioritize five resolutions for presentation to the national convention and one of those resolutions deals with early education and child care. This shows the importance that our party and our government place on this issue. We also reiterate very clearly in the resolution the importance of the quad principles: quality, universality, accessibility and developmental focus.
We also reiterate in the resolution the importance of a publicly administered, not for profit sector. We remind the Government of Canada to negotiate a requirement that provinces and territories maintain or increase their own child care funding. Because the last time that we negotiated something, in the year 2000, was $2.2 billion with the Province of Ontario, and the Government of Ontario ratcheted back off the table money that it was putting into child care and then opened up new little centres, calling them early education and early learning centres, and put its logo on them. It did this with moneys transferred from the Government of Canada. Children suffered because early education spaces were actually reduced in that province. We do not want that to happen again.
Also in our resolution, we ask the Government of Canada to maintain its current federal funding commitments under the early childhood development and multilateral framework agreements which we already have and were established in the last budget. We are talking about establishing a real commitment to early education for every child across this country.
All our experience shows very clearly that development of the brain or what some people call the wiring of the brain starts at a very early age. Many people have read the Fraser Mustard and McCain report which indicated that brain development starts from the time a child is born. From zero to three years of age, brain development is very rapid. From three to six years of age, it is extremely rapid. By the time the child reaches six years of age, which is when they would generally start grade one, it levels off somewhat, so in a sense we are investing a tremendous amount of money in elementary school, and I am not suggesting that we should not.
In this country we have decided that elementary school is compulsory, that it must be professionally delivered by professional teachers, and that it must have a proper curriculum. Why is it that we are not prepared to give the same advantage to younger children when they are at the most critical time of development in their lives, the early years, which are much earlier than elementary school years? I find it totally astounding that these many years later we are still talking about doing it through tax cuts and whatever instead of looking at the importance of every child.
I am on the finance committee. I hear about the productivity problems that Canada has. I hear about all kinds of things. Members should know that early education goes to the issue of productivity because every child would have the best start. I spoke to the Governor of the Bank of Canada, Mr. Dodge, who made a statement to the finance committee. He said that if he had one dollar left to invest, and one dollar only, and he had to choose, he would invest that dollar in early education. That was said by the Governor of the Bank of Canada, so members need not tell me that this is something we have somehow dreamed up overnight.
The OECD has chastised Canada for being so far behind. Let me tell members about what the OECD countries do and then see whether people here think they somehow have it all wrong, because there are a lot of them. In Europe in general, access rates to publicly run services are high for children aged three years to six years. About 98% of all children receive free full-day places in Belgium and France, about 96% in Italy, and about 85% in Denmark, Germany, Spain, Sweden and the U.K. Many of the same countries also provide highly subsidized places for children from one to three years of age. They have an actual target: to reach 90% of all children aged three years to six years and from zero to three years as well.
I cannot believe that everyone here is saying that Germany, Spain, Sweden, the U.K. and Denmark are somehow off the mark and have it all wrong. Quite frankly, I think we have it wrong and it is about time that we got it right.
The OECD makes some pretty strong recommendations and suggestions to our country with respect to this issue. For instance, six recommendations deal with the aspect of quality: in particular, to link accreditation of services to essential structural requirements, such as adequate funding, sufficient numbers of qualified staff, favourable child/staff ratios, enriched learning environments and resources, and the achievement of quality targets. These are very strong and very good recommendations. I believe that this is very important.
The best examples I have seen in Toronto, where good early education and child care really work, is where child care centres are attached to elementary schools. I have visited a couple of them. Where they are attached to an elementary school, the fantastic thing is that the child has a continuum, the same place to go to, and the parents have a local place to leave their children, the same place where they leave their elder children.
In one instance, the kindergarten teacher comes in to teach in the child care, the kindergarten, in a more formal way for the first half of the morning, and in the afternoon it is more creative, with the early development teachers. The point is that in one case I know of a child was having some difficulty but it was identified early on. Before the child gets to grade 1, grade 2 or grade 3 and is lost in the system, the assistance is given very early on. This creates a seamless approach.
I would say that the challenge we have is not one of whether or not we should provide it, but one of making sure that we actually meet the needs of the different families across the country. Families have different needs, such as families in rural Canada, families who work part time, shift workers, our aboriginal communities and so on. That is where our challenge is; it is not so much in whether or not we do this but in making sure that when we in fact do it every child is included and we do not lose.
This is why we introduced parental leave for all parents as well as what I was very involved with, which was increasing the child benefit for families to ensure that there is proper income for families. This is the last piece that I am convinced we have a moral duty to provide to our children, the last piece to make sure that they have the best possible start in life.