Prentice - historical perspectives in Canada

So the reason that Canada doesn’t have a national integrated system of early learning and care is really a legacy of history.  Like many liberal countries, the liberal countries like Canada, the United States, Australia, New Zealand, the UK, we have this burden of history, which was that education started as a universal program somewhere around the beginning or the early days of the 20th century.  But child care got stuck in social welfare and by being stuck in social welfare, education went in one direction and care went in another.  And it was easy to do at the time because there were few working women and it seemed like only unfortunate families needed to use child care.  And although World War II changed a lot of things in Canada, it’s the only time we’ve ever had a national child care program, one of the first things the federal government did when the war was over was to cut the national agreements, leaving it back up again to provinces to operate or not operate child care programs as they saw fit. And in the era of a post-war baby boom and an era of rising income that looked like, for many middle class families, one salary would be enough.  You’d have dad at work and mom at home and your 2.3 kids and a dog in the suburbs and it really looked like child care wasn’t necessary. 

There were a lot of problems with that vision even at the time.   Many families didn’t fit that model.  Women have always worked.  There’s always been a need for child care. But it’s really been since the 1970’s when Canadian women started pouring in to higher education and in to the labour market that the pressures really built.  So for 30 or 40 years we’ve had very high rates of women’s employment and most women and families still having to struggle to put together child care because of this accident of history where we’ve just imagined that child care is a private responsibility and families will take care of it themselves.