Thank you for allowing me to participate. I speak in favour of the bill.
In 2007, $600 million will be transferred to the provinces and territories for early childhood services, with little accountability. Even the agreed to reporting for the $350 million that's now being transferred under the multilateral framework agreement is not being met. Further, there's a signal from the federal government that reporting will not be in force for the $250 million. Moreover, funding for research and monitoring has been eliminated, preventing anyone else from keeping track of where the funding is going.
Public opinion indicates that Canadians are prepared to pay to support the early learning and care of young children, but they want assurances that their money is going to the intended purposes. Funding of $600 million is not enough to meet the needs of Canadian children and families, but it is enough to meet the demands that there be accountability for where the funding goes.
I'm going to focus on one area of the bill. I know you'll be hearing from others on it, but I will touch on the differences that the research shows between quality in not-for-profit programs and quality in for-profit programs. There has been considerable research in Canada and the United States on this issue. I'm going to confine my remarks to Canadian studies.
There has been a study from the city of Toronto, and two studies that have come out of Quebec. What we're seeing is a pattern that's remarkably uniform. Across the board there is more likely to be higher quality in not-for-profit programs than in for-profit programs. This is with the caveat that there are, of course, excellent for-profits--and I've been in them--and there are very poor not-for-profit programs. But we're talking about across the board.
The first data I will share with you is from You Bet I Care!. That looked at child care both in centre-based and family care centres in one territory and six provinces. Across the board it found about an 8% difference in quality between not-for-profit and for-profit programs. Some of the criteria are based on the differences in revenue per child, which accounts for some of the differences in quality. But the big issues were the differences in the educational level of the director, the number of trained early childhood educators in the program, the differences in child-to-staff ratio and the differences in group size. What this study found, in general, is that the not-for-profit programs were putting larger parts of their budget into staffing.
When we look at a major study that was done in Quebec in 2003, again we find that the not-for-profits are on the higher end of the quality spectrum. In this case there was a 22% difference between the CPEs and the for-profit programs. The findings are consistent: the not-for-profit programs pay a higher proportion of their wage bill to trained staff than the commercial operators; the wages are higher; and the teachers are more likely to have a college education, more likely to have taken part in regular professional development training, and they have more experience than teachers in the for-profit system.
The City of Toronto is relatively interesting. Outside of the province of Quebec, it operates the largest child care system in the country. They have their own active monitoring system. Again, their findings are that the non-profits are much more likely to put their revenues into hiring teachers who are better trained and to pay them higher wages.
Just a point that we come back to again and again, when we look at other research we find that the difference in child care is the staff. You have good staff. You have trained staff. You have staff who aren't overworked and who are reasonably compensated. That makes the difference between a good quality program and a poor quality program.
Another Quebec study is a longitudinal study on child development, which collected data on children who were two and a half to five years old in a number of non-parental care settings, both regulated and non-regulated. It found in general that quality was higher in the CPEs than in the for-profit programs.
One thing I would like to stress is that across the board, although these studies are finding a difference, overall they are finding that the quality of programs is not enough to support the developmental outcomes of children. This is why those of us in the field are after you a lot for more funding for child care, not only for more child care, but also to improve the quality of the care that is in the field.
Why should we care about the quality? Why isn't it something that parents on their own should monitor? Well, first and foremost, these are public dollars, and it's a question of accountability. And there is now a critical mass of research from a number of fields, including the neuro and behavioural sciences, and from social scientists and economists, documenting that the early years are critical to human development; it's these years between conception and age five that set patterns for health, education, and behaviour. They have a lot to do with the quality of our future population, and will in turn impact on diversity, productivity, and the quality of our democracy.
We know that 25% of five-year-olds start school without being prepared to be there; and there is a very strong relationship between school readiness and the likelihood a child will complete high school. We all pay when kids don't complete high school. Some 9% of Canada's adult population leaves school without a high school diploma. We find them scoring at the bottom levels in international literacy testing, and although they are a small percentage of the population, they draw on 35% of social transfers.
Child care is a woman's field, but unfortunately I have to quote from the guys when I argue for its benefits. Let me pull out some names: David Dodge and Tom d'Aquino, have both come out publicly in support of more investments in child care. This isn't because they're soft guys, but because they see the benefits of it.
In 2000, Dr. James Heckman won the Nobel Prize for his work on cost-benefits of investing in early childhood education. He found an eight-to-one return, higher than investments in any other stage of human capital. The World Bank is telling its members that if they want to invest wisely in human development, the years to do it are between zero and six.
Canada has a lot of catching up to do. This bill will merely ensure that the small investments we have made are used wisely.