44th Parl. 1st Sess.
June 6, 2023 10:00AM
Madam Speaker, I am pleased to be joining the debate. I am glad I caught your eye and was able to rise before my colleague from a different part of Quebec who wanted to speak as well.
Just to continue on something the member for Saanich—Gulf Islands said, I hope I will not be accused of using notes. I have not used notes in many years in this place. I am sure that if we ever moved to benches, that would probably help with the use of written notes and the prolonged speeches that are perhaps prepared by others. Many members like to prepare their speaking notes way ahead of time.
This is government legislation that some of my constituents have written to me about. As I remember, this usually comes up at election time. I always have a few constituents who are concerned about access to early childhood care, and they usually mix different types of things together.
When I was growing up, my mother was a single mom and used day homes quite a bit. We are talking about quality care for children, but that was the experience for a lot of us immigrants who were newcomers to Canada and did not have many choices. We made do with what we could find. I know the government, through these agreements it signed with the different provinces, is hoping to fill that space in between, but when I look at the summary of the bill, it states:
This enactment sets out the Government of Canada’s vision for a Canada-wide early learning and child care system. It also sets out the Government of Canada’s commitment to maintaining long-term funding relating to early learning and child care to be provided to the provinces and Indigenous peoples. Finally, it creates the National Advisory Council on Early Learning and Child Care.
I have never had parents tell me at the door that they were looking for an advisory body to oversee something nationally. What they are looking for is someone they trust to watch their kids, where the kids will learn something new. As a single dad, that is what I always look for when it comes to my kids. They are much older now. My oldest son, Maximilian, just graduated from junior high on Monday, and I have two other kids in the Catholic school board system in Calgary. However, there was a time when that would have been one of the options that I would be looking for, because I was always trying to find something where they could learn something related to not only STEM, math or language skills but also art, getting dirty, doing things with their hands, just some hands-on learning and interacting with other kids. That was always something I looked forward to for my kids to have.
As has been mentioned in the House before by other members, the system the government is implementing here is one-size-fits-all. One of the big sticking points for my home province of Alberta before signing the agreement with the federal government was that it wanted more private care options to be eligible for funding through the Alberta government. In my area, there are a lot of newcomers and immigrants. Because their credentials are not recognized, and they do not necessarily have family support here, they are running day homes.
I know that in one family in particular, and I will not mention their nationality because they would be able to figure out quickly who they are, the mom runs a day home and is an accomplished musician. She helps kids learn different musical instruments. Maybe that does not meet everybody's expectations, but it is quite popular as a choice. It is a private day home. Because of legislation like this, and the agreement the Alberta government signed, this day home is going to have a tough time making ends meet, because it will not be one of the eligible options on the table for consideration for funding.
Some articles have talked about the potential problems and risks of the facilities that are currently running, such as the uncertainty this might create; the operator's experience, including whether they have certification to perform standard first aid practices; years of operation; the number of children the centre can accept; the ratio of children to caregivers; age group; the minimum and maximum numbers of children under care; and protocols for sick children or employees.
We often talk about the quality of care. The member for Saanich—Gulf Islands talked about how important early childhood educators are and said that we should pay them better. However, if we are setting up a system where we are only paying them $10 and there is a cap, somebody has to pay. Then there is the question of who pays. In this case, it will be the federal government. Taxpayers will pay, because there is only one taxpayer at the end of the day.
In my pre-political life, when I was looking for other options that were out there, obviously, I leaned on extended family. That was always the first choice. If that choice was not available, then it was friends of the family who are so close they are essentially like family.
We all have those types of people in our lives with whom we would be happy to leave our children. Maybe parents want them to play with other children or be watched for a few hours while the parents are trying to get some work done. In many cases, they are trying to get to their shift, they are coming back late from a shift or they have irregular hours and are uncertain about how they will be able to watch their kids. As a dad with three kids, I have said this before, but it is difficult. I try to make sure I am back in Calgary whenever I possibly can be and it is my turn to watch over them.
I do have a Yiddish proverb, despite the fact that it is so late. I have Yiddish proverbs all the time, because there is always a good moment for them. I will say it in Yiddish, so I would ask members to bear with me on the pronunciation.
[Member spoke in Yiddish]
[English]
That means, “With a child in the house, all corners are full.” I am sure everybody has had this experience, especially with younger children. They have a knack for filling every single room they are in with stuff that they find, everywhere they go. I salute the people who accept kids in their homes from other families, who make the extra effort to try to teach them the life skills that they need. These things maybe do not earn them an A+ in school, but they include things like picking up after themselves, being kind to other people and teamwork, doing things in teams. They try to teach very simple things, such as basic cooking.
I mentioned this one family where the lady who was the main provider, the main caregiver, is a very accomplished musician. Providing these types of soft skills is quite useful for many people. I wanted to convey that Yiddish proverb, because it is something I think about with my kids, how they fill not just every corner in my house but every corner of my life as well.
Affordable care, which we have been talking about, is mostly a principle in this bill, because there are already agreements with all the provinces. What more could we do but talk about the principles and ideas behind the legislation that the government has put forward and that many of the members on this side of the House have already spoken in favour of? We support the bill, but we have concerns that we want to express on behalf of constituents.
There is going to be an increased demand for child care, but it is not going to solve the frontline problems with staff shortages, burnout and difficulty in accessing spaces. It does not really matter whether it is public, private or something in between, it is from coast to coast. Different provinces have different problems. When I look at those who choose to work in this field, in the next 10, 20 and 30 years, we will be facing a shortage of workers in general. It is going to be hard to convince people to retrain themselves to pursue this as a field.
When the Statistics Canada data is looked at, at the bachelor's level and above, there is essentially a job for every person who is looking for one. There are sectors where that is not the case and where it is hard to retrain someone, but at the high school level and below, there are a lot of vacancies. I do not think we consider early childhood education low skill. That is not a low-skill job. That is difficult. Put eight to 10 four-year-old or five-year-old kids in a room, and that is a full-time job. It is very difficult to get everybody on the same page, working in the same direction on the same tasks. That has to be remunerated a certain way. There has to be a total compensation package that attracts good people who want to work with children, who can be trusted to work with children and who have a skill set that lends itself very well to providing children with some of the early skills that they are going to need to succeed in school. That is important as well.
There is a high burnout rate in this area. Whenever there is a staff shortage, others are asked to do even more. This is just like the troubles we have in our school system with trying to find teachers in the early years; similar types of shortages will exist over here. Where are we going to find the people when we are already facing record shortages in multiple sectors across our economy?
To bring it back to newcomers to Canada, many will choose this as what I will call a temporary survival job, because that is really what a day home becomes. I spent my time growing up in day homes, but I know many other families depend on them, too. Many of these agreements cut those day homes out, and that is what I am concerned about. Although I support this bill, I think we should be debating the principle of the bill and the impact it will have on newcomers and others as well.
To bring it back to the Yiddish proverb, children do fill every corner of our homes and every corner of our lives. We can do better than what we have done before. This legislation, though, has faults in it that we should look at, and we should be debating the principles.
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Madam Speaker, to go back, the person who deserves great credit for negotiating the deal was the minister at the time in Alberta, Rebecca Schulz, who was re-elected in this past election. She deserves an incredible amount of credit for holding out until Alberta got a better deal.
The problem with what the member just laid out as the deal for affordable care operators, who basically run a dual system that is part private and part public, is that they are basically being told to keep two different ledgers. Staff cannot go in between the two systems, which is written right in the agreement. It is highly complex, and for those in this space, it is hard to figure out, as a facility owner-operator, what exactly they are supposed to do. The agreement is so complicated that many have already come out in public and said that it is too complicated and that they will have to pick one or the other. Either they will do all shift workers and nothing else or they will just have the standard nine-to-five child care.
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Madam Speaker, procedurally it was necessary in order to have this debate tonight, which is one of the things in Westminster parliaments. We sometimes have to put forward these types of motions in order to have a debate like this. That is my understanding of why it is on the Order Paper.
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Madam Speaker, no there is not, but it has given us an opportunity to talk about the principle of the bill and to share thoughts that constituents have shared with us. I think it is an accepted principle that we do what we must on behalf of our constituents, and in this case, it has given us an opportunity to talk about the content of the bill at any level of detail a member chooses.
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Madam Speaker, that is a good question, because we have seen the cost of living explode in this country, and the cost of groceries is way higher now.
I have not yet had residents in my riding come to me with direct stories about their grocery costs, but the Cardus Institute has done a lot of work looking at the different agreements, the quality of the agreements and the likely outcomes of them. I am sure that over the next six, 12 or 18 months, we will have more aggregated data demonstrating that, indeed, all these ancillary costs are going to be added onto all of these early childhood operators.
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