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Child-focused B.C. budget programs come cheap; Christy Clark’s ‘families first’ focus gets big portion of little government has to spend
B.C. Liberals to start pitching budget before election: Pre-election budget tabled Tuesday includes tax hikes
Premier attempts to emphasize her plan for families; Christy Clark is adding child care spaces but dismissing the $10 a day plan
BC Budget 2013: Childcare, Family Benefits Introduced; B.C. Finance Minister Mike de Jong tabled the province’s budget on Tuesday and introduced measures to benefit childcare, health and education.
B.C. trustees and teachers agree: It’s not an education budget
Time for B.C. to invest in $10 a day child care; Families squeezed between unaffordable housing and exorbitant child care
Child services funding is not meeting family’s needs
RIP Clyde Hertzman: 1953 – 2013
An Alternative ‘Families First’ Agenda: As Family Day approaches, policy ideas for Premier Clark to truly help BC parents.
The debate over for-profit child care heats up
by John Geddes, MACLEANS.ca
In debates over how to provide care—whether in hospitals, seniors’ residences or daycare centres—clashes along the border between not-for-profit and for-profit services are particularly ferocious.
For free-market types, it’s axiomatic that injecting competition into the system should boost choice and, as a result, quality and efficiency. For social democrats, it’s equally self-evident that profit-seeking providers are more likely to sacrifice standards, especially by hiring fewer and less-qualified staff, than the not-for-profits.
… Toronto-based Childcare Resource and Research Unit’s new report flagging, with some alarm, the rise of for-profit daycare. For-profit spaces grew to 28 per cent of those available in Canada in 2010, up from 20 per cent in 2004. …
My inclination, for what it’s worth, is that policy should support choice and variety in the pre-school years, while means-tested subsidies for care should flow to low-income parents. As well, I think research that raises concerns about daycare (like this report on less-than-stellar results from Quebec’s generous system) deserves close attention….
For instance, a study published last year in the Journal of European Social Policy usefully surveyed the cautionary experiences of Sweden, Britain and Australia, as all three countries moved toward more for-profit care in recent decades, with uneven results.
The paper, jointed authored by British, Swedish and Australian academics, is called “The marketisation of care: rationales and consequences in Nordic and liberal care regimes.” It looks at what happened after social-democratic Sweden extended taxpayer subsidies to for-profit child-care providers for the first time in 1991; the Brits used tax credits to spark a 70 per cent increase in for-profit child care between 2002 and 2010; and Australia introduced a voucher system that helped child-care businesses expand starting in the 1990s.
These are complex stories that followed very different paths. Still, the report points to a raft of findings that suggest market forces failed in all three countries to reliably boost quality. It cites three UK studies that rated not-for-profit child care run by local authorities better than for-profit providers, including a big 2007 study, which tracked 19,000 children born in 2000-2001, and concluded that the non-profits offered “higher quality provision in almost all dimensions measured.”
An Australian study rated non-profits top, independent for-profits second, and corporate for-profits at the bottom. In Sweden, staff qualifications, notably the number of pre-school teachers with university degrees, is lowest in for-profit child care centres….
Policy needs to follow the evidence….
Federal court rules employers must accommodate workers’ child-care needs
Childcare should cost $10/day, boards urge
Canada falling behind on poverty, inequality, says report; Conference Board report card gives Canada a B, ranked 7th out of 17 developed countries
Community services need stable funding to help vulnerable
The Learning Curve
The Economist Intelligence Unit / Pearson
Related Article:
New report compares education systems around the world
Report card, Janet Steffenhagen, Vancouver Sun
Jan 29, 2013
… The report concludes that there is no magic bullet for improving education, but there are lessons to be learned, such as the following (word for word from the report):
- Respect teachers
- Culture can be changed
- Parents are neither impediments to nor saviours of education
- Educate for the future, not just the present
The Economist story concludes with this:
“A big message is that national culture matters more than the structure of an education system. So the main lesson for policymakers may be to put education at the forefront of the story a nation tells about itself. Countries which do that with conviction and consistency can leapfrog the complacent. Outcomes can change rapidly: many students in the Asian “super league” countries have grandparents who are barely literate. Israel has also leapt up in maths and reading. Rankings and data do not tell the whole story. But they provide a useful spur.”
Child care as a human right – UN Committee finds Canada shirks obligations under Rights of the Child
STRAIGHT GOODS
By Jody Dallaire, lives and works in Dieppe New Brunswick where she writes a weekly column on women’s equality issues and matters of social justice.
Childcare has been a political flashpoint in Canada for decades, especially since 2006, when the incoming Conservatives canceled the proposed national childcare program and substituted a monthly family payment of $100 per child. Human Resources Minister Diane Finley caught flack for explaining that the Conservatives oppose any program that would “ensure that parents are forced to have other people raise their children.”
Last October, the UN Committee on Rights of the Child called on Canada to provide free or affordable child care, as part of a report on its ten-year review of Canada’s efforts to comply with the Convention on Rights of the Child. The Committee found Canada lacking, because of new punitive young offenders measures, inadequate services for aboriginal children and other minorities, and insufficient commitment to childcare.
In fact, child care is a human right, say the Child Care Advocacy Association of Canada (CCAAC) and the Coalition of Child Care Advocates of British Columbia (CCABC). Both of these non-profit organizations have been working for more than 25 years to advance child care as the cornerstone of a progressive family policy. They promote child care services that are publicly-funded, inclusive, high-quality, affordable and publicly-owned and operated.
The UN Committee on the Rights of the Child slammed Canada’s lack of childcare policies and infrastructure.
Unfortunately, Canadian governments have not invested in a range of quality early learning and care programs for Canada’s children, although the case for doing so has been made time and time again.
Most Canadians support public child care. A poll conducted by polling firm Environics in October 2008 found that a strong majority of Canadians, 77 percent (86 percent in Atlantic Canada), believe that the lack of affordable child care is a serious issue. An even stronger majority, 83 percent of Canadians (88 per cent of Atlantic Canadians) believe that governments have an important role to play in helping parents to meet their child care needs.
Child care is a right for a number of reasons. First of all, the Canadian government has signed a number of international treaties that say it is a right, including the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) and related General Comment #7, the Convention to Eliminate Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) and the Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.
As part of its examination of how well Canada meets its treaty obligations under the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the committee also consulted with Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) to verify the accuracy of the information being provided by government. The CCAAC and the CCABC submitted a brief called A Tale of Two Canadas to the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child.
The UN Committee slammed Canada’s lack of childcare policies and infrastructure. “The Committee is concerned by the high cost of child-care,” said their report, “the lack of available places for children, the absence of uniform training requirements for all child-care staff and of standards of quality care. The Committee notes that early childhood care and education continues to be inadequate for children under four years of age and the Committee is concerned that the majority of early childhood care and education services are provided by private, for profit institutions, resulting in services being unaffordable for most families.”
Other report recommendations include:
- Adopt a national strategy to implement children’s rights, alleviate poverty and prevent violence.
- Address high levels of violence against aboriginal women and girls.
- Ensure child victims of violence have access to restraining orders and other means of protection.
- Help troubled parents take better care of their children instead of sending them into foster care.
- Ensure disabled children are not forced into segregated schooling.
- Monitor the use of drugs to treat mental conditions in children, to curtail over-medication.
- Eliminate user fees in public schools.
- Increase the availability of free or affordable daycare.
- Rehabilitate Omar Khadr.
- Stop detaining child refugee claimants.
- Act to prevent obesity among children.
Unfortunately, this is just the latest example of Canada’s bad reviews from the international community on its investment — or should I say its non-investment — in children and families. Other unfavourable reviews came from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and UNICEF.
The Harper government seems headed for more conflict with the international community over childcare. Regardless of its ideological leanings, the Canadian government is still obliged to meet its treaty obligations to its citizens under the international covenants that it has signed.