We need to have a pan-Canadian system of early learning and care that kicks in at about 18 months, for all families that want or need to use it. It\u2019s not mandatory but that\u2019s where we need to create that as a viable option that recognizes two things: it supports parents to be in the labour market\u2014and we expect people to be there to earn their income and support their families\u2014and ensures kids get quality nurturing environments while their parents are doing that work. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
On the time side, parental leave is critical. Parental leave is a period that recognizes those first months where, you know, parents and children have so many new adaptive needs not something we have a lot of time to enjoy. And breastfeeding\u2019s going to be a big deal. And carving out time for fathers, not just to be family helpers, but to be engaged and primary caregivers. That means we need to carve out time for people to do that. And raising the parental leave system eligibility from about 12 months to 18 months, per birth, reserving the last six months primarily for dads, is critical and that\u2019s going to cost us in the order of about four-and-a-half billion dollars more. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
We\u2019d also have to recognize Canada has intolerable levels of family poverty and by international standards we\u2019re going to, we really are doing something that I don\u2019t think Canadians recognize. But other countries have all but eliminated it and we tolerate it at really high levels still. And so we need to spend in the order of about six-and-a-half billion dollars to make our welfare system more generous, and also to play with our tax system to make work pay, and\/or have employers make work pay by having higher minimum wages. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
There\u2019s one thing we already do relatively well in Canada. Because we have invested in our health care system\u2014and this is something we take such pride in. And so, after children are born, on a month-to-month basis, we need to get the health care system, and all the health care professionals organized in the health care system, to interact better with family resource programs\u2014things we call in British Columbia like Strong Starts, you have analogues to that all over the province\u2014a range of other non-medicalized professionals, and then collaborate and coordinate, so on a monthly basis interact with families with young kids, and start to help them monitor and screen when their children might be having developmental delays and pick that up way before they get to school, \u2018cause that\u2019s when it will be inexpensive to deal with, and then we can\u2014or less expensive at least\u2014and then we can support their families so that when they get to school, hopefully children will have caught up and if they haven\u2019t we\u2019ll be better ready to have them more seamlessly enter the school system where they can continue to thrive at their level as best as possible. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
We need to have a pan-Canadian system of early learning and care that kicks in at about 18 months, for all families that want or need to use it. It\u2019s not mandatory but that\u2019s where we need to create that as a viable option that recognizes two things: it supports parents to be in the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":39,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"template-text-only.php","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-1212","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1212","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/39"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1212"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1212\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1213,"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1212\/revisions\/1213"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1212"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}