Mr. Chair, I appreciate the comments and the question from the member for Beaches--East York. She has worked very long and very hard on this issue. We talked earlier about not a lot happening before the commitment that was made last year. It is voices like hers and others in the House that kept it very much alive and allowed this sort of thing to happen.
The question mentioned the range of programs and supports that the Government of Canada provides for children and parents. There is the Canada child tax benefit, the national child benefit supplement, maternity and parental benefits through employment insurance, the child disability benefit and the rapidly expanding understanding the early years initiative. This is the context into which to put the government's commitment of $5 billion over five years to support provincial and territorial efforts in early learning and child care.
At the centre of a child's life is their relationship with their parents. That has always been the case, it is the case and it always will be the case. The lives of parents and the lives of families can and do change over time. The challenge for a child to develop and learn to his or her fullest potential remains the same. Early learning and child care is not, was never intended to be and never will be the only answer to a child's development, just as elementary school and high school are not understood as the only answers to learning and education.
Simply put, early learning and child care is a tool, one of many, for a child's development and for parents to use as they see fit. We must never forget that for the great majority of Canadian parents early learning and child care is an important tool. Seventy per cent of parents with children under the age of six are both in the workforce.
The great majority of those kids are in child care of some form, but not in a form that is good enough. Only 20% are in regulated care and not in a form that reflects the importance of learning and development in a child's early years, not in a form that utilizes best the opportunities of all those hours of a day, days of a week, weeks of a year, years of a life, all the possibilities. With this time, is it an opportunity to be realized or an opportunity that will be missed?
We want parents to have real choice. We want them to have the chance to choose quality, to choose affordability and to choose availability. We did not build schools by putting money into parents' pockets and then asking them to get together if they wished to put some of that money into a pot to build a school or to hire teachers. We did not build hospitals or roads that way either. We decided that schools, hospitals and roads were important enough to enough people and were important enough to our present and future society that we put that public money directly toward them. That is what we are doing with early learning and child care.
At the same time, there is remarkable flexibility in an early learning and child care system; the scale is so small, the system so much still evolving. The Government of Canada comes to agreement with the provinces and territories on the principles, expectations, understandings and accountabilities. The provinces and territories decide on how best to meet those obligations, with the flexibility to find different answers for rural areas and big cities and with the flexibility to meet the circumstances of linguistic minorities, off hours or specific needs.
This is not an elementary school. This does not require a core of 150 students and millions of dollars for a building to make everything work. Nor is early learning and child care an all or nothing: something for eight hours a day, five days a week, 50 weeks a year or nothing. No, it is not all or nothing. Even most stay at home parents want some time in the week for their children to have other experiences with other kids in other places. Early learning and child care can be two mornings a week or a day a week for parents and kids as they see fit.
Nothing ever offers an answer for everything. The health care system does not. The education system does not. Even if we would like them to do more, doing what they do matters, and matters a lot. We are a lot better off because of them, and we will be a lot better off for an early learning and child care system in every province and every territory in this country.