Straight Goods
by Ginette Petitpas-Taylor [Ginette Petitpas-Taylor, of Moncton, is Chairperson of the New Brunswick Advisory Council on the Status of Women.]

EXCERPT

It sounds like a joke, but some people are getting extremely rich providing child care services.

To New Brunswickers who have ever purchased or provided childcare — even those who have owned one of this province’s many for-profit daycares — that sounds incredible, even suspicious. How could you ever make a real profit, let alone get rich?

[If for-profit services to children made sense, we would let businesses organize our education system.]

How large corporations are doing it is by cutting costs and (according to some studies) cutting corners, and by subsidy milking — concentrating on regions where governments provide subsidies.

Many governments have immunized themselves against the practice. They say children’s interests don’t mix with profit making and so, they limit expansion of childcare services to the non-profit sector.

After all, if for-profit services to children made sense, we would let businesses organize our education system.

Apart from “How can you make a profit in that business?”, the more important question for a community and a government to answer is: “Do we want child care services whose first priority is to the shareholder, not the child?”