Canadian families are emerging tentatively from the cocoon of lockdown, quarantine, home schooling, remote working, and temporary income support—and are asking what comes next. While governments responded swiftly to support workers, families, and businesses as the pandemic began to take its toll, the response also exposed the stagnant inadequacy Canada’s social infrastructure.

Ideas on Education and Childcare during COVID

Those with young and school-aged children are caught in an anxiety-inducing parent trap. Parents are having sleepless nights fearing for their jobs while also being worried about the health and well-being of their kids. But we argue that it shouldn’t be this way. Solving the Parent Trap is a policy series on transforming childcare and education featuring ideas from Janet Davis, Nigel Barriffe, Marit Stiles, Beyhan Fahardi and Maria Dobrinskaya and edited by Katrina Miller and Brittany Andrew-Amofah.

On June 22, the BC Legislature reconvened and Premier Christy Clark tabled a curious Throne Speech which bore little resemblance to the platform her BC Liberal party ran on just weeks before.

The best line of the Trudeau government’s first day— widely reported and praised in the international media—was the new PM’s.

As an early childhood researcher newly arrived from Finland, the current Canadian debate about universal childcare has been somewhat baffling.

In Finland, universal early childhood education and childcare (ECEC) means that if a child's parents want her/him to attend, the municipality in which they live is obliged to provide them with a place irrespective of the parents’ work/life situation. 

My grandmother used to tell me that "nothing worth doing ever comes easy."

Well, a national, quality, affordable child care program is unquestionably worth doing. And come easy it won't.

It is pretty clear that in the often fractious environment of Canadian federalism, Canadians do better when multi-levels of government and political parties work together to put people’s well-being first.

This goes for all sorts of things — environmental protection, trade, securities regulation, infrastructure. Nowhere is it clearer than in the social policy arena of health, welfare and social provision.  

Many economists, particularly those that are male, find it difficult to understand the public interest in providing funding to child care. 

Recent tensions in relationships between provincial governments and teachers, especially in British Columbia and Ontario, deserve to be understood in a wider context. Good labour relations in education and positive working relationships between provincial governments and teacher unions are a critical ingredient in the relative success of our public education system.

Canada's education system is generally recognized to deliver good results compared to most other countries. 

After enduring well over a decade of broken promises, the prospects for publicly-funded child care in Canada looked good in the autumn of 2005.

The Paul Martin government proposed to create thousands of new day-care spaces and had also negotiated deals with most provinces and territories to turn a patch-work of often poor-quality services into a system of early learning and child care with national standards.