Labour Market Matters - November 2012

With the move by women into the paid labour force over the last four decades, and the increasing need to have more than one income to raise a family, parents and employers are increasingly calling on governments to support high-quality non-parental care for young children. Without a doubt, Quebec is the leader among Canadian provinces in developing policies to transform their early childhood education and care system. Specifically, in 1997, Quebec revised its family policy away to include a significant increase in the number of licensed child care places available to children living in the province, and access to child care at a rate of $5 per day (increased to $7 per day in 2004) for parents with children aged 0-4. Surveys of Quebec residents continuously demonstrate that these policies are enormously popular. These responses have led to universal publically funded child care occupying a growing place on political agendas in the rest of Canada. In a paper entitled “New Evidence on the Impacts of Access to and Attending Universal Childcare in Canada†(CLSRN Working Paper no. 105), CLSRN affiliates Michael J. Kottelenberg and Steven F. Lehrer (both of Queen’s University) evaluate the impacts of the introduction of universal childcare in Quebec and find that the results reported in earlier work demonstrating that access to subsidized child care actually had negative impacts on individual developmental, behavioural, and health measures do not vanish in more recent years when suppliers gained experience providing child care in the new policy environment. Several expansions of universal early childhood programs have occurred across Canada in recent years. Expenditures on the Federal Universal Child Care Benefit are estimated to be near $2.6 billion in 2010/11. In British Columbia, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, P.E.I., and Quebec, full-day kindergarten has been made available to 5-year-olds, and to 4- and 5-year-olds in Ontario. A universal, public child care and early education program for children starting from birth was introduced in Quebec in the 1990s. Justifications for universal early childhood programs include better socialization of children, better educational outcomes, and better socio-economic outcomes in the future. In a paper entitled “Universal early childhood interventions: what is the evidence base?†* CLSRN affiliate Michael Baker (University of Toronto) argues that the case for universal early childhood interventions does not have a strong foundation in evidence. In his analysis, Baker reviews programs that target children who are infants, toddlers, and preschoolers. * This paper was also released as CLSRN Working Paper no. 86