44th Parl. 1st Sess.
May 31, 2023 02:00PM
Madam Speaker, I rise today to address the amendments we brought forward on the Canada-wide early learning and child care system.
I addressed this many times going door to door in Calgary Centre. When we speak to people who are trying to access day care in Canada, we get an illustration of exactly what the myriad problems are that we encounter, as a society, in making sure we have this service available for Canadians. It is important that we have this service available for Canadians. I remember meeting somebody who had a three-year-old child, and she was also pregnant with her second child. She was looking at the options. She looked at how the various political parties were assessing what the solution would be. She also had friends who had day care operations in the neighbourhood, and they had different input than what she was getting from various political parties. Depending on where someone is, and the input they get on this subject, they have various degrees of understanding. They have various degrees of how they are going to access this system, how they are going to pay for the system and, effectively, how it is going to work.
One of the things in this bill that I was quite curious about was something the minister said when introducing it in December 2022. When introducing this bill, she said, and this struck me as odd, that the government must protect what we have built and make it harder for any future federal government to cancel or cut child care and undo all that we have achieved for children and families. That is interesting, because we live in a democracy, and every one of these policies we put forward in Parliament, which we hope to sustain, has to prove to be effective. At the end of the day, we are getting toward more effective policies. We try to get better with each iteration. To be stuck on something that might be difficult to amend, move forward with and progress in our society is not where we want to be. I was surprised by the minister's comments on that.
Going back to the woman I met who was assessing the child care, she also said that we need to make sure we adapt and continue to adapt, as a society, to the needs of the people who require child care.
I also looked at the issue of women's participation in society. This is the nub to me, because I belong to a generation of Canadians in which women traditionally took some seven years off, or sometimes it was nine years, as it was with my wife, to raise a family before going back into the workforce. This held them back in their career. These people are in the prime earning years of their lives and advancing their careers, and we can think about the choices they have to make because of the child care choices they have. Effectively, we see more executives at senior levels who are males because of the limitation on the years of experience women get when they choose to take that time off because of the limited options they have for child care. An effective child care system is going to advance a lot of social progress by making sure we have a balance of men and women at senior levels in both our private sector and our public sector organizations going forward. I think it is laudable goal. I think we need to achieve it.
One of the things I have always noticed about the government's bills is that they are long on narrative. We can put a big stamp in the window that says “free $10 day care”, yet, at the end of the day, we have to execute that plan. That means boots on the ground. That means understanding where the bottlenecks are and where the hurdles are that we have to get over in order to get that done. One of the big bottlenecks in the child care system, of course, is the access to labour. That continues to be one of the main problems we have in terms of accessing day care in Canada. Where is the labour going to come from? Right now, that labour does not exist. CUPE, the Canadian Union of Public Employees, actually came up with a stat that said there is one space for every three children who need it. That is not because of physical space, like the rooms and buildings, but that is because of the access to workers. The workers are the bottleneck. We must make sure we have enough workers in place and a sustainable system that allows those workers to deliver the services that society requires of them at an optimal level.
Those are not there, because, frankly, the financial incentives are not there to make that system work better and draw more people, more entrepreneurs, into a system that provides a great service for Canadians, one that is going to achieve these laudable goals I spoke about earlier in my speech: access to child care for everybody and access for women to re-enter the workforce and participate fully in executive ranks as they progress their careers, as their husbands have done for the last generation. This needs to be fixed. Making sure that bottleneck of the labour shortage gets addressed is key in addressing this. That is what I talk about when I say that execution is different from narrative.
Accessibility is, of course, number one. I have met many people through my career who were not as advantaged, financially, as many people in society. I recall the accessibility of day care. They would actually take public transit from one end of the city to the other in order to drop off their kids. They would take public transit back downtown, and this is in Calgary, where there is a good public transit system. That, in effect, is an hour at the beginning of their day and an hour at the end of their day, in order for them to take their kid somewhere safe and then get them at the end of the day and take them home. That is a big chunk of time out of one's day. That is because of what, I have learned in this process, are called day care deserts. There is no accessibility in certain areas where these people actually need this service, close to their work or close to their home. They have to go a long way out of their way in order to get the service they require.
We have to revisit this and think about who is most affected by this. It is not people of means; it is people without means. The people who are looking for those spaces are in the more marginalized sectors of society, the more marginalized economic sectors.
The ability to access this, of course, if one is of means, is going to be better than if one is not of means. We continue to have deserts of day care. We continue to have an accessibility problem all the way through. The sister of a very good friend of mine was in the same boat. She was a day care provider and she took public transit from south Edmonton to north Edmonton every day in order to deliver the service, again, because of the day care desert. There was no day care available in the very south end of Edmonton where she lived. She was one of the day care providers, and her skills were supportable only in the north part of Edmonton at that point in time. That, again, is a one-hour commute, half an hour at each end of the day. That is a long time to add on to what one is putting in every day.
There is an issue about inclusivity. We have to make sure that this inclusivity is not just for the public and non-profit sector but also includes those people who are putting together day care spaces in our communities and getting rid of the so-called day care deserts so that we can actually have publicly funded $10-a-day day care available in the communities where it is needed, set up by the entrepreneurs who are actually willing to train the people, get the funding and get the system up and running so they can serve the clientele that lives close to where they want to provide the services. These are all types of child care we are talking about here. This is backed up, of course, through the testimony at committee, by the Association of Day Care Operators of Ontario.
I think most Canadians are trying to access this day care, which is a benefit. This is going to be a low cost. We want to make sure we get this into people's hands but it is not going to be available. This is an accessibility problem. It has to be addressed first and foremost in this bill. We have to get the boots in the ground and make sure we have the ability to get people into positions before we start pretending we are delivering a service, or say we are delivering service, and not being able to execute.
Having something in the store window and being able to deliver to people are two entirely different things. That is the issue here. We have to make sure we have a system that works for the people we intend to serve via that new system.
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Madam Speaker, there was a lot packed in there, and I think we addressed that a bit.
We talked about my home province of Alberta. It is a growing province. If we think about 1,800 day care spaces in a province that has had a migration influx of 50,000 people over the last year, we are talking about a need that is largely unmet. I referred in my speech to day care deserts. At the end of the day, 61% of those accessing day care in Alberta are in a day care desert.
We have problems and hurdles to overcome in order to deliver this to people. That is one of the reasons we want to make sure the bill we are talking about today addresses the concern of how it is going to meet the needs of Canadians.
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Madam Speaker, that is an excellent question. Indeed, my colleagues on the committee informed me that they put forward these amendments to make sure there were caveats built into the system for the adjustments to labour that we talked about.
Colleagues should think about it from a supply and demand perspective. If there is no incentive to get into this business, for example through the provision of a service that is going to make sense for people, we are not going to have people entering it as a career or setting up a day care. That is why we are trying to expand access. It is to make sure it is available to all people and that the impetus is there, that motivation, to provide the labour and allow people to make a choice about what labour they are going to have so they see themselves fulfilling this career for the rest of their lives. That has to be part of this, because otherwise we are just putting words on paper one more time. Let us get something executable.
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Madam Speaker, I thank my colleague for that question. I have always been impressed with his economic analysis of these matters. He and I share a view on this about how we motivate people in society to get into where the gaps are. There has to be an incentive, which we talked about, from both a labour perspective and a space perspective. In the day care deserts, we have to make sure there is a motivation to provide that. That is why it is not only the not-for-profits and the public that are going to work here. It will have to be available for all the people who want to provide these spaces in the established day care deserts. There is a reason they are being served by other people right now, and they are jammed, so let us get those impetuses out of the way, those hurdles cleared and those bottlenecks broken. Let us get on with it.
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