Child Care Now’s Executive Director addresses federal cabinet retreat
The Liberal Party held its annual Cabinet retreat in Halifax, Nova Scotia from August 25 to 27, 2024 to discuss government priorities, strategies, and policy decisions for the upcoming parliamentary session.
Morna Ballantyne, Executive Director of Child Care Now, was invited to be part of an expert panel on fairness for all generations. Ballantyne provided an analysis of the progress and challenges in the implementation of the Canada-wide early learning and child care program since 2021, and made recommendations on how the federal government can further strengthen and sustain the system.
Ballantyne acknowledged the Government of Canada’s historic investment in establishing a primarily not-for-profit Canada-wide early learning and child care system, and gave evidence on how this investment has been used to make licensed child care affordable for hundreds of thousands of families. She told the federal Cabinet that federal intervention was key to stabilizing the child care sector, which had been devastated by the global COVID-19 pandemic.
She noted that the Canada-wide early learning and child care system has brought about a transformative shift across the country in how early learning and child care programs are funded. She said that because service providers no longer rely on parent fees to cover operational costs, and instead receive direct public funding, it is now possible to improve the quality of programs without making access to programs unaffordable for families. However, she said that improving quality will require significant increases in public funding for compensation for early childhood educators and other staff.
Ballantyne said the federal program has made it possible to increase the number of licensed child care centre-based spaces by 82,000 between 2019 and 2023. While that growth is significant it is not sufficient to address the strong demand for $10aDay child care. This gap in supply has given rise to concerns about equitable access to the now heavily publicly funded child care system.
Ballantyne said the federal government should focus now on creating net growth of public and not-for-profit child care. She made four recommendations to the federal government:
- Accelerate. Don’t step back, don’t hesitate, instead accelerate. Make expansion a focus when negotiating the next five-year CWELCC funding agreements in the same way fee reductions were made the focus of the first five years. And conclude as many of those next agreements as possible well before the expiry of the old ones, and before the next federal election.
- Get more centres built. Use the $1 billion expansion loan program announced in the last budget to support rapid not-for-profit and public expansion. Favour modular construction on public lands. Give priority to initiatives that will increase the capacity of public and non-profit organizations to build and operate robust high-quality programs outside of the loan program. And, at the same time, use your federal housing initiatives, and every other federally supported infrastructure program, to build and operate more not-for-profit and public child care, especially in high-need areas, and on public lands.
- Develop a realistic financial plan and roadmap for expanding child care services over the next ten years. Communities, populations who don’t have child care need to see themselves on that map. And make sure to include in the roadmap pathways to increase the supply of qualified early childhood educators in sync with the expansion of physical infrastructure. There is no point building new centres that can’t be staffed.
- Embark on an all-out effort to build and demonstrate broad popular support and enthusiasm for the child care plan. This requires a comprehensive communications strategy, beyond media events and announcements. It means coordinating efforts with leaders of economic sectors, and with the many segments of civil society who passionately support the program. People of all generations can be persuaded that your child care initiative is crucially important, and voters need to know what our country stands to lose if the progress we’ve made is halted and reversed.
Image credit: Saffron Blaze, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.