Canadian Policy
Our
Children's Future: Child Care Policy in Canada (Studies in Comparative
Polititcal Economy and Public Policy)
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Excerpts from the Introduction
Most young Canadian children
use non-parental care arrangements every week. The CanadianNational
Child Care Survey of 1988 found that 74% of all children in Canada who
are between
18 months old and 6 years of age are in regular non-parental care arrangements
This statistic should give all of us considerable pause — the
large majority of young children in Canada already use non-parental
care. Given this reality, the endless discussion about whether nonparental
care is optimal is beside the point. The key issues for policy makers
to ask and answer are "what kind of care could and should our children
receive?" and, especially, "what can and should governments
in Canada do to encourage the use of good quality child care?"
The world of young children
has changed dramatically in the past 30 years. First of all, most mothers
of young children now work in the paid labour force. In 1967, 17% of
mothers with preschool children were in the labour force. Today, over
two-thirds of these mothers are in the labour force. This phenomenal
growth trend does not appear to be slowing down.
Second, young women are more
career-oriented and education-oriented today than their mothers were.
A quick look at the proportion of undergraduates and graduates in virtually
any university program will confirm this. So, mothers today are more
likely to have a career and to be accustomed to working in full-time
employment than mothers were a generation ago.
Third, fertility rates have
fallen dramatically in the last 40 years. From an average of 4.0 children
per mother in the early 1960's, fertility has fallen to less than replacement
level (about 1.6 to 1.7 children per female). Many children do not have
siblings. For many of their early years, most Canadian children are
"only" children.
Fourth, the use of care by
non-relatives and, in particular, licensed or regulated forms of child
care and early education has grown dramatically. In 1967, only 2% of
preschool children having an employed mother used day care or nursery
school (about 7,000 children). By 1994-95, nearly 22% of preschool children
with a mother engaged in employment or studying used either a child
care centre, nursery school or a regulated family day care home (about
270,000 children). Over the same period, the number of children using
other forms of care by a nonrelative approximately tripled. Over 500,000
preschool children now use kindergarten for several hours a day at age
four or age five.
Fifth, most mothers stay at
home with their children for a little while after they are born, but
"stay-at-home motherhood" is more likely a transitory status
than it is a permanent life choice. Most first-time mothers are in the
labour force at the time of their first birth and the majority are eligible
for maternity benefits and parental benefits paid through Employment
Insurance. It is typical for parents to use nearly all the benefit weeks
to which they are entitled. A large number of mothers are therefore
at home with most of the first six months of life. Some union or nonunion
contracts provide extended benefits for up to a year or longer. The
large majority of mothers taking maternity leave return to the labour
force; in Statistics Canada's 1988 National Child Care Survey, 98% of
mothers currently on maternity leave indicated an intention to return,
sooner or later, to their previous employer.
Sixth, mothers who decide to stay at home with their children nearly always decide to use senior kindergarten and junior kindergarten services where they are available, and those with higher family incomes are increasingly likely to use nursery schools and other forms of non-parental care as well. As a result, many families with a mother at home use some form of early childhood care and education.
In sum, non-parental child
care is a reality for most young children most of the time; this is
often, but not always, associated with parental employment, and all
the evidence suggests these
trends will continue.
Despite the radical changes in children=s
lives over the last 30 years, and despite the very considerable use
of non-parental child care, most governments in Canada have done surprisingly
little to affect the quality, affordability and availability of early
childhood care services that families use.
Child Care Policies in Canada
Over time, a pastiche of child
care policies and programs in Canada has developed, introduced by different
levels of government, and designed to achieve diverse objectives. There
is no overarching vision of how child care ought to be provided and
what the goals of the system ought to be. There are five types of public
programs currently oriented towards providing early childhood education
services in Canada.
Kindergarten
Kindergarten is not typically
considered to be a program delivering child care services. In reality,
however, it is the only program (with the partial exception of child
care in Quebec) providing early childhood education and care that is
universally available, regardless of income, labour force status or
other criteria. Virtually all Canadian children who are between four
years eight months of age and five years eight months of age at the
beginning of September will attend kindergarten in the public school
system. In Ontario, most children who are a year younger than this will
attend junior kindergarten. Kindergarten is nearly always offered on
a part-time basis (whether in the morning, the afternoon, or on alternate
days). Several years ago, New Brunswick moved from having no public
kindergarten, to offering it on a full-day basis. In 1997, as part of
wholesale child care reform, Quebec began to provide full-day kindergarten
for five-year-olds within the school system.
Maternity Benefits
Maternity benefits are provided
to eligible mothers through the Employment Insurance scheme. In effect,
maternity is considered to be a legitimate cause of absence from work,
like unemployment or sickness, and therefore eligible for payment of
insurance benefits. One of the reasons for providing maternity benefits
through the Employment Insurance program (E.I.) is that payment of unemployment
benefits is constitutionally a federal responsibility; other maternity
issues, such as eligibility for maternity leave, fall under provincial
jurisdiction. However, because E.I. rules were designed to apply to
those seeking unemployment benefits, they also affect maternity benefit
claimants. For instance, there is a two-week waiting period for maternity
benefit (out of 17 weeks of leave, only the last 15 are paid). Intended
to discourage those who are unemployed for very short periods of time
from making claims for unemployment insurance, this rule is completely
inappropriate when applied to new mothers. Similarly, new
eligibility rules for unemployment insurance restrict eligibility for
maternity benefits in unfortunate ways.
It might be argued that maternity
benefit policy and child care policy are quite distinct and different
things. However, most new mothers do not medically require a full 15
or 17 weeks to recover from childbirth. Some of the time is designed
to allow mother and child to bond, the mother to continue breastfeeding,
and the mother to adjust the household arrangements to the arrival of
the new family member. The child care function of this leave is even
more obvious with the adjunct to maternity leave known as parental leave
(or child care leave). Parental leave is, since 1991, available to either
parent (with, however, an additional two-week waiting period if taken
by the father) for 10 weeks following maternity leave, also paid by
E.I.
Child Care Expense Deduction
The Income Tax Act has, since
1972, allowed families with child care expenses related to work to deduct
these expenses from taxable income before income tax rates are applied.
Logically, the income used to pay these expenses is not properly considered
to be part of discretionary income which should be subject to tax. Expenses
are claimable only if they are required to earn income, so they can
only be claimed by either a single parent who works or the lower-earning
parent in a two-parent family if both spouses are in the paid labour
force. A limit of $7,000 per child under 7 and $5,000 per child between
7 and 16 is intended to ensure that only the necessary level of child
care expenditures can be claimed. This does not cover the costs of licensed
child care for infants and toddlers in some parts of Canada.
Many observers argue that
the Child Care Expense Deduction reduces the cost of child care, but
this is a misleading observation. The Child Care Expense Deduction is
properly seen as part of the process of defining taxable income. We
allow families to deduct child care expenses from
income for the same reason that we allow a self-employed person to the
deduct the cost of renting office space - both are necessary expenses
of earning income. Put another way, it is only earned income net of
child care expenses that would be available for discretionary spending
by the family, hence it is only earned income net of child care expenses
that should be taxed.
Child Care Subsidies
Families with sufficiently
low incomes are eligible in all provinces and territories for child
care subsidies which may reduce the price of licensed child care to
zero or to a relatively small amount. Eligibility for child care subsidy
is determined partly by family income, but partly by social criteria
as well. For instance, most subsidies are only available to families
in which the parent(s) are employed or in training for employment. Subsidies
are generally also available when children have specific developmental
handicaps or when family functioning is impaired in specific ways. As
may be obvious from the description, the origins of child care subsidy
rules, and the primary functions of child care subsidy policies, are
strongly related to welfare and social assistance objectives. In most
provinces and territories, the income criteria ensure that only single
parent families will get full subsidy; child care subsidies are intended
to permit eligible parents to be employed, or train for employment,
in order not to establish long-term
dependence on public assistance. The punitive, small-minded features
of many social assistance programs are reproduced in child care subsidy
rules in many jurisdictions; these are purported to ensure that adequate
incentives to work exist for low-income parents. Approximately 163,000
children received subsidies for the use of regulated child care services
in 1998. Subsidies provide approximately 30% of revenues in an average
child care centre.
Operating Grants
Some provinces and territories
provide regular operating grants to licensed or regulated child care
facilities (centres and family homes). The purpose of these grants may
be to stabilize funding to these services and/or to enhance the wages
and benefits of low-paid staff in this primarily parent-funded service.
This operational funding for child care has been highly variable across
provinces/territories and across time within individual provinces/territories.
In 1998, operating and other grants from government provided approximately
18% of revenues of an average child care centre.
It may seem, to the casual
reader, as if the sum of kindergarten programs, maternity/parental benefits,
tax benefits, child care subsidies and operating grants is a considerable
amount of assistance to child care. However, in the case of child care
funding in Canada, the whole is less than the sum of its parts. In other
words, available assistance covers (some or many) new born children
until they are about six months of age, some children in poor families
whose parents meet strict eligibility criteria, some reduction of taxes
on income which is not truly disposable income in the first place, and
nearly all children for 2 1/2 hours per day once they reach age five.
This contrasts sharply with prevailing policies towards early childhood
care and education in many other countries in the world. In France,
Spain, Denmark, Sweden, Finland and many other European countries (and,
now, in Quebec), universal early education for 3-5 year-olds or 2-5
year-olds is the norm and low-cost publicly-subsidized arrangements
for large numbers of children younger than that is typically available.
Unfortunately, the countries with predominantly Anglo-Saxon heritages
(United States, Great Britain, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada) share
the very weak development of public support for early childhood care
and education. Although there are considerable differences among the
Anglo-Saxon countries, their similarities in child care policy outweigh
their differences.