The Childcare Resource and Research Unit (CRRU) have produced a discussion document looking at “how child care ‘accessibility’ fits with equitable access, affordability and the child care workforce – and how all these fit with the idea of a system of quality child care for all going forward.”

Martha Friendly, Executive Director of the Childcare Resource and Research Unit (CRRU) oversaw the project, produced the overview and collaborated on several sections.  The team included Jane Beach, an independent researcher on ELCC with recent hands-on experience studying ELCC in Norway; Sophia Mohamed, a research officer with CRRU; Laurel Rothman, a specialist on child and family poverty with experience working in the City of Toronto Planning Department; Rachel Vickerson, a research officer with CRRU, who looked particularly at the issue of non-standard hours; and Carol Ann Young, who was previously a Senior Social Planner with the City of Vancouver Social Policy and Projects department, and who explored land use planning and demand forecasting and other planning issues.

“One of the characteristics of Canada’s child care situation is that accessibility, defined as availability of a place, is limited.  As the numbers and waiting lists illustrate, spaces in regulated child care are in short supply.  This is especially true for some age groups, language and cultural groups, for some categories of parents such as non-standard hours’ workers, Indigenous Canadians, newcomers to Canada, and families living in some provinces, regions or neighbourhoods.  This is not a new situation; limited access due to the short supply of regulated child care has been identified as an issue since the Royal Commission on the Status of Women highlighted this in 1970.” The report notes that the approach to developing child care across Canada has not fundamentally changed in the past 40 years, despite initiatives at different times by various regulatory jurisdictions.  The report addresses the issue of accessibility “because – in contrast to the other issues identified as principles by the Government of Canada in the Multilateral Framework Agreement – Affordability, Quality and Inclusivity – there has not been cause-and-effect exploration of why the availability of child care has remained such a lasting long-term problem in Canada.”

“This paper examines the private creation of Canadian child care services in contrast to the more publicly managed approaches used in countries with further developed child care systems”, making the argument that “moving to a more publicly managed, planned and intentional model is necessary for addressing Canada’s child care dilemma, as the insufficient supply of early learning and child care services will remain a barrier to meeting families’ need for child care equitably, fairly and effectively, impeding Canada’s ability for a vigorous recovery from the pandemic.”  The paper argues strongly that “Canada’s current market model of child care provision is the key over-arching structural reason that a sufficient supply of the services families and children need has not developed; indeed, the market model is the wrong model for the purpose.”  The paper explores “the consequences of the market approach” and examines it in detail, “including how the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 has exacerbated and highlighted child care market failure and made more urgent the need for a more effective way of developing reliable, quality child care services as a high priority for economic rebuilding.”

“In the last decade or so, the view that to achieve the vision, principles and goals for ELCC shared in Canada, a more public approach to a child care system is needed has been widely endorsed.”  The document references the Shared Framework statement, https://childcarecanada.org/sites/default/files/sharedframework_jan2016.pdf  generally consistent with the government Frameworks, that “identifies a universal child care system as the starting point.  It emphasizes that ELCC is not a commodity but a public good and a human right, and that equity is a core value for ECEC policy and services.”

“Based on the evidence and the prevailing views about achieving accessible, affordable, high quality, inclusive early learning and child care, the following set of assumptions frame the work of this project:

·       An ELCC system should be universally accessible – services should be available, affordable and equitable;

·       An ELCC system should be publicly managed and treated as a public good, not a private responsibility, a commodity or a business opportunity;

·       An ELCC system should be publicly funded, that is, not reliant on user fees.  Public funding should encompass operational, supply-side funding and capital funding;

·       An ELCC system should be based on early childhood education and child care integrated in a ‘strong and equal partnership’;

·       An ELCC system should be supported by appropriate infrastructure such as data/research and legislation;

·       An ELCC system should be based on partnerships and collaborations among levels of government, community and other experts;

·       An ELCC system should be seen as complementary to and aligned with other family and social policy.

The report notes that the current situation in Canada is that, “whether or not child care services are available so parents can go to work and children can be well cared for mostly rests on whether private individuals initiate their creation, take it through the developmental process, maintain it, finance it, and sometimes decide when to shut it down.”  This can sometimes result in a situation where parents have as little as one day’s notice to make new arrangements for their children.  “Too often, what is now widely considered to be an essential community service is at the behest of private interests, which may be policy or mandate-related or associated with private financial needs or interests….Child care researcher Susan Prentice has called this a “popcorn model”.  She observes that much of Canadian child care “pops up” rather than being planned intentionally and systematically, and she notes the limited, unequal access that is the result.”  Across Canada, “developing child care provision has most often been treated as a private responsibility, with government playing a regulatory, supporting and occasionally facilitating role for the creators and managers of most Canadian child care services – large and small non-profit  ‘third sector’ groups and large or small entrepreneurs – rather than by ensuring through ongoing public processes that child care services are available where, when and for whom they are needed like schools, roads, electricity or sewers – part of the infrastructure.”

The paper also notes that coverage in Canada is uneven in multiple ways, with very uneven levels of coverage amongst provinces/territories - overall cover ranging from 16.6% in Saskatchewan to 41.9% of 0-5 year olds in Quebec in licensed centres, and varying significantly both between large cities and populations with lower population density, but also from neighbourhood to neighbourhood. “This consistent unevenness means that today, many or most rural, suburban communities and smaller towns can be described as “child care deserts”, with very few or even no child care centres or regulated family child care at all, as can some neighbourhoods in larger cities.”

The report comments that the COVID-19 pandemic has exposed new and critical implications for child care accessibility.  “For Canada, like other countries with fragile, weakly publicly supported early learning and child care provisions such as the United Kingdom, Australia and the United States, the pandemic has brought home to many new players the realization that child care is an essential service.  That is, accessible child care is required if mothers of young children are to participate in the workforce, and if they are unable to fully participate in the workforce, this is not only a problem for their family finances and career aspirations but it will impeded recovery of the economy from COVID-19.”

The report goes on to say that “it is not only the low level of public funding that keeps Canadian child care services fragile. The failure of governments to assume responsibility for ensuring access to child care by funding, creating and maintaining quality child care services is a pervasive issue.”  The pandemic situation has been chaotic “for service providers, parents and policy makers alike as financially weakened child care services have reopened at reduced capacity, the practical responsibility for determining which services will open, when and how remains the private decision and responsibility of voluntary groups and entrepreneurs….Without an established public management approach to recovering, maintaining and expanding child care provision, economic activity in Canada will continue to be impeded as parents but especially women cannot secure affordable quality child care so they can go to work.”  This has significant implications in terms of provision availability as parents attempt to return to work once the pandemic moves out of the critical phase, but it is not a new issue.  The report reinforces that child care in Canada has always followed a market model.

The report looks in detail at the history of child care in Norway leading to ELCC becoming a statutory right and notes that the levers used to reach this goal included:

·       A champion of ELCC within the national government, who achieved multi-part support for full provision and ensured support for allocation of necessary resources to achieve it;

·       Setting national goals to be met locally by municipal governments;

·       Significant national grants earmarked to child care;

·       Other financial measures to ensure municipalities had necessary resources to reach full affordable provision;

·       A strong regulatory framework to ensure equity of access and quality provision;

·       Ongoing data collection and analysis to monitor and assess progress, identify issues and adjust policies and regulations as necessary.

The current situation for families in Norway is that “Parents are entitled to a place in the community in which they live.  While there are slight variations across municipalities, parents submit an application to their municipality with a list of (typically) five preferred programs in March.  Priority is given to children with additional support needs and those involved with child welfare services.  If parents do not receive their first choice, they may remain on a waiting list for their preferred placement and take a place in their second choice in the meantime.”

The report notes that there is currently no federal role or legislation on planning for child care in Canada.  Provincial Acts govern planning in each territory and province including physical, social and economic planning, with “municipalities responsible for carrying out planning using a variety of tools and planning instruments including municipal plans, by-laws, zoning, permits and approvals”. Child care is not identified or alluded to in any of Canada’s provincial planning acts.  As examples, the report explores how land use planning is used to create child care services in Vancouver, BC; the role of service planning in enhancing child care accessibility in Ontario; and a systems-change approach to policy development to expand child care availability in PEI.

The report looks at the role of municipalities in child care provision.  “A key paper by Jenson and Mahon, which examines the balance of government roles and responsibilities with respect to child care notes:  ‘Until the 1960s, most public involvement in child care came from municipal authorities.  Then in 1966 the establishment of the shared-cost Canada Assistance Plan (CAP) brought both the federal and provincial governments into the field’.  They observe that at this time Canadian municipal level governments lost their status in children’s services….Nevertheless, the various roles of municipalities in ELCC have never been very well developed in Canada.  Prentice has noted that Canada has instead primarily relied on the ‘third sector; to ‘initiate and deliver child care, part of a long tradition of voluntary sector delivery of social and personal services’ in addition to relying on entrepreneurs to develop and deliver child care.”

The report states that “there is little doubt that the private initiatives Canada relies on to create child care services fail to meet the need.”  The report quotes an analysis commissioned by the City of Vancouver to explore public child care delivery in BC that used interviews with municipal stakeholders to identify their perception of potential benefits of public delivery of child care services as:

·       Publicly delivered services offer consistency and reliability service to the community;

·       Public delivery of quality programs facilitates trust;

·       Public delivery has financial advantages;

·       Public delivery facilitates greater control and ability to leverage space for community needs;

·       Public delivery facilitates staff integration and collaboration;

·       Childcare delivered at schools helps children transition into K-12 education;

·       Greater control and ability to leverage space for community needs;

·       Better wages and working conditions for ECEs as compared to the private and non-profit sectors;

·       Greater integration of ECEs into the public agency (vs. being outside the organization as a contractor).

The current structure of child care in Canada is that “the community-based voluntary sector is the dominant player in Canada’s mixed child care economy today but this is a fairly recent development.  Charitable and religious organizations were the first to develop child care-like services in Canada in the mid-19th century.  After World War II and through the 1950s and 60s, full time child care and part time nursery schools – especially for-profits – grew.”  The introduction of the Canada Assistance Plan (CAP) in 1966, with federal-provincial cost-sharing provisions, strengthened development of non-profit child care. “CAP and another federal program of the 1960s and 1970s, Local Initiative Projects, which enabled creation of many parent- and community-initiated non-profit child care programs, laid the groundwork for today’s large non-profit child care sector…. Today non-profit child care is the main mode of delivery in Canada as a whole by far:  64% of centre-based spaces although for-profit provision has been increasing.”

The report notes that there is a continuing role for the non-profit sector in a publicly delivered system, as evidenced in the current model in Quebec, but “sustained, substantial and predictable public funding is necessary to enable programs to plan and implement high quality services on an on-going basis while keeping parent fees at reasonable or low rates.  Public funds should cover the bulk of operational costs, as they do in Quebec’s non-profit centres de la petite enfance (CPE) sector, with affordable parent fees supplementing these operating funds.”

The report cites four current examples from across the country illustrating how “achieving a ‘critical mass’ in terms of size and human resources in a non-profit child care organization has made it possible to establish quality child care services where none had previously existed, to create good jobs in small communities and to sustain operational elements such as development of quality pedagogy, in-service training and professional development”, contributing to quality improvement.

The report comments that, currently, “None of Canada’s province/territories has adopted policy to ensure access to child care of any kind, including non-standard hours care….Providing non-standard hours care presents service providers with a number of hurdles without adequate government support” including: financing, staffing, administration and flexibility.  Recent Canadian research on non-standard hours child care shows that “additional funding and support, whether from unions, employer or public government funding is key to their creation and sustainability.  Successful centres are also often part of larger organizations or agencies and have experienced leadership teams.”  The report uses as examples two existing programs, the Eastern Kings Early Childhood Academy in PEI and the YMCA of Greater Toronto’s emergency child care program during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The report highlights three examples of needs assessment and demand forecasting: the City of Toronto’s approach to assessing demand, which includes ability to pay/affordability in the calculation; BC’s collaboration with the Union of BC Municipalities (UBCM) to develop needs assessments with the aim of creating more child care availability; and use of the City of Vancouver’s demand forecasting calculation tool considering the impact of urban development on demand for child care.

The report states that the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted, “For the Canadian economy, child care is now recognized as a necessity, not a luxury.  Going forward over the next few years as Canada moves from the acute phase of the pandemic to recovery and to reconstructing the economy, reliable child care services to support women’s equality, parents’ employment and children’s well-being will be critical.  Paradoxically, the precariousness of relying on a child care supply funded by parent fees and located and maintained by individual, private initiative has also been exposed by the pandemic….Consequently, there has emerged in Canada, and elsewhere, a greater imperative than ever before for finding more effective ways of creating and maintaining child care services than has been the case in Canada to date:

·       The report recommends, as an alternative to the status quo of privatized child care development, a more proactive, publicly managed, planned, intentional and integrated approach based on greater public responsibility for the availability, characteristics and distribution of regulated child care.

·       Recommended tools to develop child care in a planned, intentional way as part of a more proactive, publicly managed, integrated process include, but are not limited to: land use and service planning, public service delivery, strengthened not-for-profit delivery and locally initiated municipal roles, as well as possibilities such as a model that locates responsibility for developing and maintaining child care services with a quasi-public local body (as described by a 2016 Manitoba Commission on Early Learning and Child Care), and the possible greater use of public building, and public land, for locating child care facilities.

The report recommends “that each province and territory develop a multi-year early learning and child care plan for expansion of public and not-for-profit child care using a variety of public management tools.  Additionally, to further its Throne Speech commitments and in the context of the Multilateral Framework on Early Learning and Child Care, a key role for the federal government would be to induce and assist with these plans by building them into federal/provincial/territorial agreements. With their key responsibilities for program design, licensing, regulation and funding, provinces/territories – collaborating with the ELCC community, local governments and others – are the appropriate entities to develop this path toward a more publicly managed ELCC system for all across Canada.  Provinces/territories can utilize various tools and resources to create expansion plans to meet the needs of their communities, children and families and align with the overall direction for Canada.”