Hon. Frances Lankin: I apologize, but I have to ask my question in English —

[English]

— because I’m not sufficiently fluent to do all this in French.

I agree with what you just said about the fact that section 35 requires more of the government than this particular amendment being put forward. I have another very significant concern, and I hope you — particularly because of your legal background — may be able to either assuage my concerns or agree that this is a concern.

The amendment that comes forward — and we’ve heard over and over, and I’m not sure why people are insisting on another amendment that accomplishes the same thing and even less; limits it. It is already in the legislation, and we’re looking to put another version of that in legislation.

My concern is that if anything does end up before the courts, the courts will be obligated to look at both of the clauses and understand whether this clause from the amendment, in fact, narrows the other reference to section 35. We are all agreeing that we want this to happen and we want this government or a future government to take — and I wish that the former Harper government and the former years of the Trudeau government had taken — more care with respect to consultation. Do you share the concern that having two competing clauses that speak to the same issue necessitates those in the judicial field to weigh what the importance is and to understand and second-guess why this Senate put forward two similar amendments that potentially are not accomplishing the same thing at the end, as was the point you made in your speech?

[Translation]

Hon. Frances Lankin: Senator Prosper, I appreciate your intervention and hearing your voice on the disappointment with the way in which governments have not lived up to their obligation to consult on behalf of Indigenous peoples.

You are a lawyer. I’m not a lawyer. I’m a trade union negotiator, among other things over the years involving contract language and requirements, and as a former Ontario legislator, I’ve been involved in drafting, writing and amending legislation.

My problem with your argument is that saying it 2, 3, 10 or 20 times in a piece of legislation doesn’t compel any government to live up to their obligations. We have seen this over the years. Section 35 has been around a long time. The obligations are there. In this case, they even wrote that into the bill already. This is a duplication, and it’s a narrower amendment than what the section 35 rights are. I would think you would agree that courts look to all of the provisions and how they work together and what the intent was of the legislature in doing this, and it can create problems.

Please tell me why saying it two, three or four times in one bill is going to help us correct this and avoid a government abrogating a responsibility? It will end up in court anyway, whether or not this amendment is put in place.

Hon. Frances Lankin: Thank you, Senator Arnot. I appreciate the knowledge and experience you bring to this, both legal and in terms of working with and supporting First Nations in your province and beyond.

First of all, we can all have different opinions. In my opinion, there is a potential downside, but putting that aside — and by the way, I agree with Senator Patterson on a lot of what he has said regarding what has not been done to include Innu people. I have no complaints about what he has said.

What I want to ask you and the others who have made this point is this: What makes you think that adding this amendment will be preventive in any way? If a government is not going to follow the Constitution, the Interpretation Act, their own legislation or a minister’s letter that says, “I messed up and we’re fixing it now,” how does this amendment ensure that the government will do it and that First Nations people won’t end up having to litigate it anyway? This does not preclude further litigation if they don’t live up to their already multiple stated obligations.

This bill is important, and I know that there are many amendments coming. Think about what we’re doing in one place or the other. Where are we attempting to make the situation better by repeating something that has already been ensured across laws? It does nothing to address the basic concerns that I’m in agreement about and which Senator Patterson has put forward.

Hon. Frances Lankin: Honourable senators, I am so excited to speak to this bill. This is a passion of mine and has been for many years. Before I start, I want to very much thank Senator Moodie for her excellent job as sponsor of this bill. Boy, I’ll tell you, it’s been a long time coming.

I also want to say congratulations to Senator Cormier and others who fought fiercely and passionately for the amendment that was passed yesterday. I had informed Senator Cormier and Senator Poirier before that I would be voting against it. I think you know, from the passion I seem to have found to articulate to you what I believe are the legislative, legal and order of law parameters, that I feel strongly about the issue of federal-provincial jurisdiction.

I did vote against it, but I took the time, with the help of Louise Mercier in my office, to pull the Canada-Ontario agreement. We heard much about this, but nobody entered it into the record, and I want to do that.

In recognizing that it’s a provincial jurisdiction, and in this case I’m talking about my province of Ontario, we looked at the Ontario agreement and the language that the federal government insisted on in the negotiations, which appears in this. I believe that whenever there has been an agreement signed thus far, the same language appears. I haven’t checked them all, so I’m not going to assert that, but that’s what I have been informed of.

Let me read to you, from the “objectives and areas of investment” section, so tying it to measurement and investment, the overarching objectives that have to be met. One of them is inclusivity, and it’s very clear here in the agreement: “Ontario commits to develop —” put in by the federal government and negotiated with the provincial, but the jurisdiction is provincial “— and fund —” with federal and provincial dollars “— a plan that supports access to licensed child care spaces for . . . .” And there are a lot of categories that we would imagine for inclusivity:

. . . for vulnerable children and children from diverse populations . . . children living in low income families, children with disabilities and children needing enhanced or individual supports, Indigenous children, Black and other racialized children, children of newcomers to Canada. . . .

The point I was making yesterday about these agreements was a very specific reference to the subject of our amendment yesterday: official language minorities. Later, it talks about what that means, but official language.

We know what that means: “Where possible, to report the annual public expenditures on child care programming dedicated to children from . . . .” these various groups, and let’s be straight-up — we have not had reporting requirements like this before in a whole range of programs where we seek to know whether we have made progress, but the numbers aren’t there. The federal government negotiated with the province by funding collaboratively and placing respect in their jurisdiction to reach these goals.

Specifically, with respect to the amendment yesterday, they commit to, and Ontario commits:

. . . to maintain or increase the current level of licensed child care spaces offering French-language programs and licensed spaces offering bilingual programs for children age 0 to 5 by fiscal year 2025 to 2026 and continue to meet or exceed the number of French child care spaces for children age 0 to 5 proportional to the population of French speaking people in Ontario by fiscal year 2025 to 2026 . . . .

It goes on.

The point I want to make is that these agreements we enter into when there are funding agreements in federal-provincial jurisdiction, we have not in the past had such explicit direction that could be monitored because there was no monitoring; there was no data. This promises to fix that, and I think we will be able to, at an appropriate time, measure the results that will also be in response to the amendment that was passed by this chamber yesterday, and we will be able to see the success — or not — and hold accountable the funding partner here.

There’s also a commitment, by the way, to appropriate development of these plans going forward with representatives of all of the diverse groups who should be involved in this, so the duty to consult, which doesn’t apply to all groups — morally, maybe — which doesn’t include the province, has been written into the federal-provincial agreement.

I want to go on with where we are — and my history. Some of my friends have looked at my history and said, “Can’t you keep a job?” I keep doing different things in my life, but they have all built up to an experience which has helped form my approach to things and my sense of my values.

My first job out of university in the early 1970s was as a director of a child care centre. It was a for-profit child care centre. I learned a lot and came out of that fully committed to universal access to non-profit, quality child care, and those aren’t buzz words. They make a difference.

I can tell you about the broken equipment that kids were injured on. I can tell you about the poor quality of meals. I can tell you about our getting a call from the Ministry of Social Services two days before an inspector showed up — every time an inspector was coming. What we had to go through to clean the place up and make it look great for those inspectors belies the problem, where profit is a motive to up the revenue, and it comes at the expense of our most precious assets — our kids. I very strongly believe that. To me, this bill doesn’t go far enough on that, but it does speak to the preference for that and to working with provinces to try to achieve that.

I was also — here is where I start to admit how old I am — a founding member of the Ontario Coalition for Better Child Care. I was a member of the Ontario Federation of Labour Women’s Committee. I was a representative on the coalition that came together to look at child care, and I was a representative for the Ontario Public Service Employees Union at that point in time.

We started our work — are you ready for this? — in 1981. We’ve been working for years on the issue, but this coalition, which led to the establishment of the Ontario Coalition for Better Child Care, was formed in 1981. We issued our report, which I’m going to talk about in a second, called Daycare — back in those days we called it “daycare,” not “child care.” We’ve graduated from older language. We’ve evolved and transitioned. The report was called, in 1986, Daycare Deadline 1990. Keep that in your mind.

I want to talk for a moment about some of the recommendations that came out of that report. For any of you who are interested in that report for a historical review and to see the relevance today, our office will gladly provide you the link to it. You can find it online.

I mentioned that we started this work as a coalition with labour, community partners and others in 1981. Reading from the report, there are a number of recommendations. I won’t go through them all. Let me just highlight that they are divided into — our province of Ontario, for example — what Ontario must do, what the federal government must do and what the roles of municipalities, labour and management are. There are numerous recommendations under each of these. Within the “what Ontario must do” category is a number of things, including — by the way, we were looking for implementation then of a $5-per-day space subsidy, right, which would do nothing today. Had they done it then, we would be in a lot better situation — implementing that immediately and move for the rest of the recommendation implementations by 1986.

On what the federal government must do, okay, please understand the relevance of the bill before us. They must create a national child care act to demonstrate a federal government commitment to the philosophy of universal child care as a public service that should be implemented. The act would replace the Canada Assistance Plan as it relates to daycare services and provides funding on a universal basis.

You remember how many years ago that was. You know what we’re doing today with this bill. I sometimes wonder.

There is a really interesting section on the role of municipalities and labour and management, and I want to pay tribute to those in the trade union movement who stepped ahead, before the Ontario government, before the federal government, and created workplace-based child care programs. One of the first was what was then — it might have even been the United Auto Workers, or UAW, and then the Canadian Auto Workers, or CAW, and now Unifor, and their particular focus was auto plants and the shift workers and the impossible situation of parents working shifts in terms of getting the appropriate care for their kids. They stepped forward. Many other trade unions did, in public the sector, in what we call the MUSH sector in Ontario — municipalities, universities, school boards and hospitals. Many of those workplaces have them now.

The unions came forward with that. Management helped make it come to fruition, and there was also incredible support from many municipalities who have played a role and who have expanded on their own, out of municipal tax dollars, the provision of these programs which really should be at the provincial and federal level, which we’re achieving now. I pay tribute to all those people who were the early leaders in that situation.

There also are so many organizations to say thank you to for the work that they have done continuously for so many years. I read the submission from Dr. Gordon Cleveland, who is now a retired associate professor of the University of Toronto, a specialist in the analysis of child care and base costs, and he and his team are the ones that came up with the statistics you might remember from years ago, that every dollar invested into child care saves $7 — that was back then; it’s more now — in terms of costs of social services, supports for families in poverty, a whole range of things.

He, by the way, back in the 1980s, I think it was, was the key adviser on child care to prime minister Brian Mulroney. So let’s not think that this is a partisan approach. We may have differences of how to deliver it, right? That’s fair enough. That’s about implementation. But I believe every senator here, and to a certain degree, other than other reasons to perhaps oppose it in the House of Commons, every one of us wants the best for kids and the best education, and we recognize that. I’m looking at Senator Seidman because I’ve listened to many of her speeches. We recognize what these investments will mean and how important they are.

To all of you from Quebec, I thank you for the leadership that you and your province have shown over the years, because we have been lobbying to follow Quebec for many, many years.

Organizations like the Ontario Nonprofit Network — I think of the YWCA and the years that they have invested in trying to bring about these improvements. Campaign 2000, Martha Friendly — there are so many people, like former lieutenant governor Margaret Norrie McCain. She, through her time in leadership that continued over all of these years, has continued to invest and support and lend her voice to getting to where we are today, so I am thrilled about that.

I don’t want to take long. We’ve got a lot to do tonight, but let me say this is a historic moment for this country. It is a historic moment for all of us as legislators to be here and to participate in this, and it is a historic moment — forgive me for personalizing this — for me personally because I have been working on this issue since at least the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Now, looking at that, in 1981 we started the process of writing this report. We consulted all across the province. In 1986 we issued our report. We wanted this done by 1990. It’s now 2023, so it’s 33 years later. Let’s pass it, make it law and make a difference for the kids in this country. Thank you very much.