The Trudeau government’s next budget will be make-or-break for Canadian women and their families.  Expectations are high – and so are the stakes.

Child care advocates, feminist and business organizations, social policy think tanks, economist and financial institutions all agree that child care is essential to support women’s labour force participation and Canada’s post-pandemic economic recovery. There is an unprecedented consensus that child care should be a priority in this year’s budget and significant investments are needed to have real impact.

Every school day morning around 8 am, my partner or I drop off our four-year-old at daycare. He loves his daycare...we love his daycare. He then attends school in the same building as he learns, plays, eats and rests throughout his day. As we rarely finish work before 5pm, like many households, having reliable school-based daycare is the difference between us working full time jobs and having a well looked after, happy kid or not being able to participate in the workforce at all.

“Seamless Day” programs, as they are colloquially called, combine all-day classroom instruction with before and after-school care — a structure working parents and caregivers have come to rely on. In 2011, Ontario began a three year phase-in of all-day kindergarten along with before-and-after-school programs where there was sufficient demand for the service. The model paved the way for young children to experience child care within their school setting, sharing the same school classroom. This provided the opportunity for children to have familiar surroundings, with the same staff and classmates -- unlike previous models with a school day book-ended by child care, where children go back and forth between two distinct programs run by different adults.

But the current “seamless day” model is not without its faults. 

In school boards across Ontario, before-and-after care program structures vary. Despite being mandated by the Wynne-led Ontario government, the program was not funded or fully-integrated into the public school system. Although they were required to offer the program, school boards were permitted to contract with third-party operators, mostly existing child care centres, to deliver the program. Parents were expected to pay full-cost, expensive fees that were beyond the reach of most families. And many gendered jobs in the sector remained poorly-paid, hard-to-fill, part-time positions. This was not the universal model envisioned or promised.

In the context of COVID-19, the fight for a fully-integrated, school-board-operated, seamless day, is essential. As the Province slowly opens up for business and school is set to resume, parents are scrambling to figure out what child care options are available to them - options that allow them to work while keeping their children and families as safe as possible.  

The Provincial government, education officials and school boards should encourage return-to- school plans with  ‘seamless day' programs and common “cohorts” to reduce the number of contacts a child has with different adults and children throughout the day. Coordinated planning between child care and schools would contribute to reducing exposure to COVID-19 infections and potential outbreaks. 

In Toronto, the parts of the city that have been hit hardest by COVID are low-income, racialized and immigrant communities. These findings should encourage the provincial government to ensure that child care and back-to-school plans factor in this reality, and respond with the necessary capital and program investments to neighbourhoods hardest hit by the pandemic. Creating new, directly-delivered extended-day programs in schools in these priority areas could help mitigate the very real, and elevated risk these communities face.   

A seamless day program, delivered by school boards, would also address the gendered, decent work gap in the child care sector. A fully-integrated model could replace fragmented, part-time employment with full-time unionized jobs with one employer. This model would also reduce precarious work in multiple workplaces -- the primary driver of COVID-19 outbreaks in long term care and other care settings across the country. 

“In Toronto, working-class racialized and immigrant communities are hit hardest by COVID. Government plans must factor this and invest in limiting exposure to high-risk groups. ‘Seamless’ school-based childcare is one solution.”

The Elementary Teachers of Toronto, Canada’s largest teacher’s union, along with education unions across the country continue to demand smaller class sizes and physical distancing; cohorting requirements for teachers and education workers as well as students; ventilation standards with respect to COVID-19; busing standards with respect to COVID-19; and flexibility for school boards to reopen when health and safety standards have been met. Early childhood educators, school bus drivers, occasional teachers, lunch supervisors and other essential workers must be fairly compensated with decent pay and benefits for the important role they play in creating safe learning environments for our children and families during this period of uncertainty.

Without affordable, accessible daycare that is aligned with properly funded school environments this September, we will unfortunately continue to see needless suffering in communities around our province and country. 

A safe return to school should mean a seamless day for our children and their families. My son and my family have had the wonderful experience of a seamless day and I continue to fight so that all children and parents - initially focussing in communities where BIPOC families are located - can experience the security and benefits it brings to every family.

The COVID pandemic has brought to light many of the inequities of our education and child care systems. No better time than the present to address the need for seamless day learning. There a variety of ways you can get involved and show your support for seamless days and other important improvement to our education and daycare systems:

Send a letter to your MPP: www.buildingbetterschools.ca

Sign a petition for smaller class sizes: https://www.change.org/p/ontario-demands-better-reduce-class-sizes-to-keep-schools-and-communities-safe

Check out the tools and actions provided by Ontario Education Workers United: OWEU

Join the Ontario Parent Action Network:  linktr.ee/safeseptember

Join Fix Our Schools: fixourschools.ca

Education workers are encouraged to download our School action toolkit here: https://linktr.ee/oewu?fbclid=iwar0f5_cxc4h9tzi_da7mnv4vbe1q5pp_gj14poe39yddcaxgidrzpnar5bc

Nigel Barriffe is an executive officer with the Elementary Teachers of Toronto, President of the Urban Alliance on Race Relations, Board member of the Canadian Anti-Hate Network and organizer with Ontario Education Workers United. His efforts have been recognized through a number of community service awards including the 2011 Urban Heroes Award and the 2012 JS Woordsworth Award. He holds a Master’s degree from the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education.

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, Maria Dobrinskaya and is edited by Katrina Miller and Brittany Andrew-Amofah.

The federal government’s response to the economic crisis needs to focus on supporting people as they try to return to work, and central to that for millions of households in Canada is childcare. But investing in childcare is not only critical for parents, but it’s also essential for our entire economy, and the best uses of both federal and provincial stimulus funding to encourage economic recovery, in the post-CERB-Canada (a term coined by Garima Talwar Kapoor, Director of Policy and Research at Maytree Foundation) that we now find ourselves in. Boosting child care will create service sector jobs, respond to both demand and supply-side shocks, and ensure parents, particularly women, are able to reenter the labour market. 

The COVID-19 induced economic recession is unique. While the Great Recession hit men, blue-collar workers and manufacturing particularly hard, the recent decline in economic activity has been felt primarily by women and the service sector. Across the country, women’s participation in the labour force is at its lowest levels in three decades. One and a half million women in Canada lost their jobs in the first two months of the pandemic. As of June, employment for women sits at 89.2% of its pre-COVID levels while a similar figure for men has jumped to 92.3%. 

Further, disruptions in education and child care systems have created a cascading effect preventing many parents from working at all. This is deepening the economic damage of the recession, introducing a strong supply-side effect, and setting us back decades with respect to gender in the workplace and women’s economic empowerment. 

“Child care provision is an optimal vehicle for stimulus spending by all levels of government.”

In the case of British Columbia, though the child care sector remained operational throughout the COVID emergency, there were already year-long queues in some communities prior to the crisis. Now, during COVID, the supply of available positions has declined meaningfully, with many parents, who are still employed, being forced to work at half productivity while trying to manage child care or unable to return to work at all.  As such, rapid investment in the childcare sector has the unique ability to allow people to return to work, directly employ individuals in the sector, and improve outcomes for children.

Following the mobilizing and successful momentum of the $10aDay childcare campaign, and the election in 2017 of a new government who had committed to implementing universal childcare, BC launched a childcare program in 2018. For this reason, the province is well-positioned to accelerate its long-run plan to substantially increase the supply of child care spaces. As such, some of the best uses of the province’s stimulus fund would be:

• To utilize temporarily empty public spaces for child care. While this will be challenging with respect to meeting requirements for licensed care, it’s a worthwhile effort given the immediate need for physical space. 
  
  
• To create more publicly owned facilities for child care provision.  In particular, appending new child care facilities to existing public buildings can be particularly cost-effective. 
  
  
• To expand staffing in licensed care to rapidly increase the number of available child care spaces in the province. This could occur through a combination of increased wages and temporarily relaxed qualifications with requirements and/or incentives to receive appropriate training during or after the crisis, and active attempts to recruit out of the license-not-required sector.

In the short run, this will assist B.C. in returning to its previous level of child care supply. Over the long run, this increased capacity can be maintained as the province permanently on-boards more staff on the path to universality.  Further, while empty existing public spaces can be used for child care provision today, the capital plan can be utilized to expand publicly owned child care infrastructure for the post-crisis period.

While such programming does have substantial short-run costs, it has been well documented that there are large fiscal returns to universal child care over the long run. Given this, it’s important to note that childcare stimulus funding should not solely be the responsibility of provincial governments — but should also be a line item in the upcoming federal budget and laid out in the government’s Fall Throne Speech. 

Caregivers, mainly women, have been most impacted by the economic crisis resulting from the pandemic. It is essential that governments be creative in stimulus spending to focus on service sector recovery; with a rapid expansion in child care provision being the best available policy for an economic shock that impacts both the supply and demand side. 

Investing in childcare is critical to ensuring a  strong recovery and creating the foundations for inclusive economic growth into the future.

Maria Dobrinskaya is the BC Director, overseeing the work of the Broadbent Institute in British Columbia. A creative political strategist and effective communicator, Maria is committed to expanding the political arena and increasing the access and involvement we can all have with our governments. Maria's article is an adaptation of The Broadbent Institute’s submission to B.C.Government’s Economic Recovery Consultation.

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, Maria Dobrinskaya and is edited by Katrina Miller and Brittany Andrew-Amofah.

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.

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.

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.

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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.