CUPE

Canada’s first big-box child care corporation

Edleun Group Inc. is Canada’s first publicly traded child care corporation, which began trading on the TSX Venture Exchange in May 2010.

Quality, access and financing in for-profit child care have long been a concern in Canadian Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC). But until now, most Canadian child care businesses have remained relatively small, privately-owned operations. During the past ten or fifteen years, ECEC in other countries (Australia, the US and the UK) has become dominated by corporate big box child care operations with the capacity for aggressive growth.

These child care operations provide graphic illustrations of issues, which arise when large corporate child care businesses play a dominant role….

What we’ve learned

No jurisdiction in which child care is treated as a private business has a track record of equitable access or high quality while the countries in which early childhood education and care is widely accessible and meets benchmarks for quality are those that have adopted public management, public funding and public/not-for-profit operation as fundamental. Canada can learn much from comparative policy analysis about other jurisdictions’ negative experiences with big-box corporate child care. And there is substantial information about the public, not-for-profit options that benefit children and families, not shareholders.

Read the article in full at:
http://cupe.ca/child-care/edleun-inc-aggressive-pursuit-profits