Prentice – universal child care system

Well, describing a universally accessible publicly funded child care system in actually pretty straightforward because we can use the international examples of countries that already do it.  We would go to Sweden or Denmark or any of the other Nordic countries.  Possibly to France or even to Germany and we would look at how they organize child care.  And we would find that services are universally available to all children and families who need it, irrespective of parental labour force participation, delivered almost universally by the municipal level, available at low or free costs depending on family income, by highly trained caregivers meeting really good regulations.  It’s very far from what we have in North America. 

The value of such a universal child care program is multiple.  It’s terrific for children who get a wonderful start for the many reasons that we know that children benefit from good quality ECE.  We don’t know how to quantify it yet – the gains for women in terms of gender rights and equality rights but it’s very good for women because we know that absence of child care affects women more than men, mothers more than fathers.  We know it would go a long way in Canada to helping employers.  Business leaders will tell you that they conservatively estimate work/family disruptions to cost the Canadian economy about $4 billion a year in productivity.  And we know that it’s good for society in a general way which is despite kind of public perception that child care is just an expensive babysitting program, new economic evidence tells us that child care more than pays for itself.  We know this both from forecasts, hypothetical and based on research, but we also know it from Quebec’s experiment which has been doing this back since 1997 and providing child care to parents there for now $7 a day for almost a generation.