A national child care program: Now is the time

Thirty years have passed since the Royal Commission on the Status of Women first recommended a national child care program in a landmark report (1). Since then, child development research has demonstrated decisively that early childhood education is a developmental benefit for all children – regardless of whether a mother is in the paid workforce – and the labour force participation of mothers has risen to almost 70%. In the past decade, however, not only has Canada failed to develop the national child care program highlighted by the Royal Commission, but the country has also moved further away than ever from the kind of nationwide, equitable early childhood program envisioned in the 1980s. In the 1990s, early childhood advocates began experimenting with new names for programs that had been called day care in the 1970s, and child care in the 1980s and 1990s. The fixation with finding the right name –‘early childhood development services’ or ‘early childhood education and child care’ – was driven by the desire to move away from what has been in Canada an array of separate ideas. Thus, at various times, child care and early childhood education have been perceived to be women's issues, ‘employability’ tools to enable low income mothers to leave welfare rolls, services to ensure that all children enter school ‘ready to learn’, a preventive ‘head start’ solution for low income children and family support services. Early childhood services in Canada, like those in Europe, have their origins in the 19th century in two kinds of programs: charitable services organized to care for the children of indigent women, and kindergartens and infant schools that were the precursors of today's early childhood education programs. Unlike Canada, however, most nations in continental Europe recognized that ‘care’ and ‘education’ could, and should, be combined to meet the needs of children and families at a time when even middle class women entered the workforce in rising numbers in the mid 20th century. By the 1990s, even Europe's less affluent and more traditional nations (such as Spain, which brought early childhood services under new national education legislation in 1990) accepted universal, publicly funded, blended care and education services that Canadians still only dream about. Even today, virtually all Canadian services for preschool children continue either to be targeted to at-risk or needy children, are inaccessible to modest- and middle-income families because user fees are too high, or are not sensitive to the needs of parents in the labour force. Without a national policy, in most of Canada these services have been developed so incoherently that, although each region has a tangle of programs, only a small minority of children has access to the services that they need or that their parents want. Data from 1998 show that in six provinces, regulated child care spaces are available to fewer than 10% of children from birth to 12 years of age, while a solid majority of mothers are in the paid labour force in every jurisdiction (2). Service incoherence means that public resources are squandered. In contrast, continental European nations publicly fund blended early childhood education and child care services for all children. While each of Canada's three attempts at a national child care program failed to produce a solution in the past 30 years, France, Denmark, Sweden, Italy, Spain, Belgium, Finland, and others, introduced developmental early childhood services for all older preschoolers from about 2½ years of age, as well as fairly broad coverage for infants and toddlers. The services operate within a context of family policy, with well paid maternity and parental leaves, generous child benefits and comprehensive children's health services. Thus, readily available models show that child care and early childhood education can be seamless and universal. Considerable support has grown for the perception that child care and early childhood education delivered through high quality, blended services have the following multiple benefits: school readiness, family support, poverty reduction, economic self-reliance, women's equality, social cohesion, work and family balance, and healthy child development (3). Ironically, however, while support for universal, blended care and education services has grown among experts and the public, the reality is that the environment for children and families has become even more fragmented than it was when the Royal Commission presented its report in 1970 (4). Solid evidence backs the idea that social determinants have significant implications for life-long mental and physical health. The evidence is extremely persuasive, especially because interest in reducing health care costs has grown in the 1990s. Many factors affect whether children develop into healthy, competent adults, including innate or genetic characteristics, prenatal conditions, the physical environment, nutrition, family attributes and interaction, the community, schools, civil society, and the socioeconomic environment. The above factors affect each other; they combine in complicated ways to produce children who are confident, content, competent and resilient, or, conversely, they produce children who lack these attributes. Thus, adequate income, good nutrition, a healthy environment and decent housing, as well as early childhood services affect a child both directly and indirectly through his or her primary environment – the family. Care and education outside of the family is only one factor, but it is agreed to be an important, even central, factor affecting child development. With this in mind, the 1997 report of the National Forum on Health emphasized the importance of nonmedical interventions to enhance health and well-being (5). Recognizing the value of “investing in children first, particularly at an early age, and in supporting families with children”, the Forum recommended establishing developmental child care services for all children, and proposed that “governments give priority to ensuring that families have access to such services during early childhood” (5). The National Forum on Health is but one of many studies, organizations and experts that has urgently called upon Canadian governments to begin, finally, to develop the kind of national public policy for early childhood education and child care services that is commonplace in other countries. This year, the conditions for creating such a policy may be better than they have been for some time. Not only is the convergence of expert and public opinion growing stronger, but the crisis created by anxiety over government deficits and the national debt has diminished as governments report hefty surpluses. At the same time, the provinces and the federal government have reached agreements that will make it hard to justify inaction on early childhood education and child care. A framework for action on early childhood services is provided by the National Children's Agenda (NCA), which was adopted by nine provinces and the federal government in May 1999. The NCA is the sole public activity to come from the new Canadian model of federalism, the Social Union Framework Agreement (SUFA). SUFA is Canada's newly-minted framework for social policy development, which was signed by nine provinces and the federal government in February 1999. SUFA and the NCA give the provinces an enhanced role in new social programs because the federal government has adopted a role that is much more limited than the process that produced Medicare several decades ago. Within this context, governments commit to work together to improve the situation of all children; the federal government has further articulated this goal through efforts to negotiate a plan for early childhood development by December 2000. A federal, provincial and territorial working group has been established to carry out this work. Now it is time for federal and provincial governments with vision, political will and a public commitment to children to forge a workable, collaborative framework to implement provincial early childhood programs within a well-designed national strategy. This strategy should include the following: federal commitment to multi-year spending for early childhood services; a plan for blending the essential building blocks for early childhood services –early childhood education, child care and parenting support – into a coherent service delivery system in each province and territory; federal-provincial consultation about national guiding principles. The best available knowledge about practices in child development and family policy suggests that the principles should include universality, public accountability and high quality; the use of existing program and financial resources as a foundation for each province's program; provincial design, management and implementation of early childhood programs, allowing provincial programs to be organized in a variety of ways; participation of nongovernmental experts and advocates; recognition of the key role of players at the local level – community-based organizations, local governments and school boards that could deliver services and develop innovative models; research, evaluation, data collection and analysis, and public reporting to ensure public accountability; and a guiding framework based on the principles and practices laid out in the SUFA. Early childhood services challenge federal and provincial governments to demonstrate that the new model of federalism that they have constructed can work in the interests of Canadians. The evidence is clear, the public support is present and the commitments of governments have been made. If the political will is present, it may be possible to forge a made-in-Canada strategy to ensure that all children can go to early childhood education, that all parents have access to ‘child care’ if they need it and that all families can receive support for their role as parents from one inclusive, coordinated service. This is not only the smart thing to do, but it is also the right thing to do. A descriptive analysis of early childhood services in each province and territory is found in Early Childhood Care and Education: Provinces and Territories 1998 (2).

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