Proceedings of the Standing Senate Committee on
Social Affairs, Science and Technology
Issue 24 - Evidence - June 6, 2007
OTTAWA, Wednesday, June 6, 2007
The Standing Senate Committee on Social Affairs, Science and Technology met this day at 4:08 p.m. to study the state of early learning and child care in Canada in view of the OECD report Starting Strong II: Early Childhood Education and Care, released on September 21-22, 2006, rating Canada last among 14 countries in spending on early learning and child care programs.
Senator Jim Munson (Acting Chairman) in the chair.
[English]
The Acting Chairman: Thank you very much. Good afternoon. Welcome to our visitors from across the country.
At 5:15, the bell will ring for 15 minutes, and we vote at around 5:30. Let us see where we are at around 5 p.m. or so with your presentations. If we have enough senators, we could come back for another half hour. This is an extremely important subject, and you have come from various distances to be here.
In September 2006, the education committee of the Paris-based Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, OECD, released a report entitled Starting Strong II: Early Childhood Education and Care. This report outlined the progress made by 20 countries in responding to key aspects of successful early childhood education and care policy and offered examples of new policy initiatives adopted in these areas.
This report rated Canada last among 14 countries for spending on early learning and child care programs, stating:
. . . national and provincial policy for the early education and care of young children in Canada is still in its initial stages. . . . and coverage is low compared to other OECD countries.
Concern was raised in the Senate about this conclusion and about the general state of early childhood education and care in Canada. After debate, it was agreed that our committee would examine these issues.
Today, we are very pleased to have three witnesses. We have Professor Martha Friendly, Coordinator, Childcare Resource and Research Unit, University of Toronto. Before moving to Canada in 1971, Professor Friendly became involved in early childhood education as a researcher studying the American Head Start program at Educational Testing Service in Princeton, New Jersey. In Canada, she has worked on child care research at the Social Planning Council of Metropolitan Toronto and then the University of Toronto's Child in the City program. She founded and is currently coordinator of the Childcare Resource and Research Unit at the University of Toronto.
Professor Douglas Willms is from the University of New Brunswick. He is Director of the Canadian Research Institute for Social Policy, a multidisciplinary organization dedicated to conducting policy research aimed at improving the education and care of Canadian children and youth. He has published nearly 200 research articles and monographs pertaining to youth literacy, children's health, and the accountability of schooling systems and the assessment of national reforms. Dr. Willms and his colleagues designed Tell Them from Me, an evaluation system for the continuous monitoring of school climate that provides information that can be used directly by superintendents, principals and teachers to help meet the needs of vulnerable youth.
Professor Kevin Milligan is from the University of British Columbia. In addition to his duties in the Department of Economics at UBC, he is a fellow of the C.D. Howe Institute. He is the author of numerous research papers, including several on child tax credits and other child benefit programs. Together with Michael Baker and Jonathan Gruber, he wrote What Can We Learn from Quebec's Universal Child Care Program?
Kevin Milligan, Professor, Department of Economics, University of British Columbia: Thank you for inviting me to appear before the committee. I have been asked to speak about some recent research on the Quebec experience with universal subsidized child care. I appreciate the chance to share the results of my research and to help ensure the results are interpreted correctly.
I am part of a research team along with Michael Baker of the University of Toronto and Jonathan Gruber of MIT, who has written a paper examining the impact of the $5 per day child care program in the province of Quebec. As you may know, this program started in 1997 with 4 year-olds and progressively extended eligibility to all children aged 4 and under by the year 2000.
In our work, we employ a Statistics Canada microdata survey that includes detailed information on tens of thousands of Canadian families, covering the period from 1994 to 2002. Our approach involves comparing children in Quebec to those in the rest of Canada before and after the introduction of the program. Our research offers findings in the three areas of child care choices, maternal labour supply and family outcomes.
First, let me describe our results on child care use. We found a large increase in child care use in Quebec following the introduction of the program, about 15 percentage points. Most of this new child care use came from families who previously had one parent at home and now have two parents working with the child in care.
Next, we find an increase in maternal labour supply among mothers of children aged 0 to 4 years of about 8 percentage points in Quebec compared to the rest of Canada. The responsiveness to the change in price to the subsidy that we observed is in line with the international evidence.
An important consideration here is that this extra work not only generates more income for the family but also more tax revenue for the government. In our calculations, we estimate that income tax revenue increased enough to cover approximately 40 per cent of the cost of the subsidy. One way to think about this is the dollars spent on child care subsidies are 60-cent dollars rather than 100-cent dollars.
Finally, we turn to child and family outcomes. We observed deterioration in most of the measures available to us in the survey. Children's behaviour becomes more aggressive and they suffer more anxiety, and are more hyperactive. A measure of social and motor development gets worse. Children's health as assessed by the parent gets worse. Parenting becomes hostile and less consistent. Finally, the reported quality of the relationship between the parents worsens.
For most of these results, these impacts appear only in Quebec after the program was introduced and in families with children aged 0 to 4 years but not families in Quebec with older children. This provides a strong link between these outcomes we observed and the child care program.
Some of these results have been controversial. For this reason, I would like to offer several comments and qualifications that should help bring some clarity to the controversy.
First, there is strong resonance for our findings on child behaviour in existing empirical evidence on child care. In the past five years, several authors using differently data sets from different countries have found similar results about the behavioural outcomes.
Second, our methodology mixes together the impact of two distinct changes in Quebec families. First, there is a large increase in the number of both parents working. Second, there is a large switch into non-parental child care.
With our methodology, we cannot distinguish between these two factors. Therefore, the changes in family and child outcomes may be related to the extra stress in the home of having two working parents, or it may be related to the mode of child care.
Third, while the outcomes for almost all of our measures worsen, we did not examine the degree to which this leads to a change in the proportion of children surpassing dangerous thresholds for these outcome variables. For this reason, care should be taken in interpreting the degree to which the changes in outcomes we uncovered actually hurt the long- run prospects of children.
Fourth, our work does not explicitly account for the quality of child care. Instead, our measures tell us what happens on average across child care of all quality levels. While we report that several indicators of quality increased after the reform in Quebec, other researchers have found that quality in Quebec's program has not met the desired levels in some circumstances.
What we do learn in our study is what happens when a province introduces a program at the quality level observed in Quebec during this time period, which is not a model program but an actual real-world program.
Fifth, we cannot include measures of cognitive development or early school test scores in our study because of the design of our data set. While a large body of evidence suggests a positive relationship between child care attendance and cognitive outcomes, we are unable to test that in the context of the Quebec child care program.
I conclude this submission with three comments of slightly broader scope. First, the evidence for improved outcomes for children from disadvantaged families is, generally speaking, empirically sound. However, evidence for the impact on more advantaged families is scant. We view this as one of the primary contributions of our research. There is no reason to expect that disadvantaged and advantaged families would react similarly.
Second, in most of the research on child care, the magnitude of the impact of child care choices, for better or worse, is not strongly different from the magnitude of the impact of mother's education or other family background variables. It is therefore important to keep in mind that, while child care policy is important, it should not be thought of as a silver bullet. It is only one aspect of the child's environment. More basic policy — such as ensuring high school completion — may have impacts on children's outcomes that are at least as large.
Finally, child care facilitates the earning of income, allows parents to engage in fulfilling careers, and may help children's cognitive development. If there are some negative behavioural consequences of child care use for some young children, then no one should conclude on this basis alone that non-parental child care is the wrong decision for families. Instead, if there are costs and benefits involved, public policy should recognize that well-informed parents could reasonably make different choices and therefore policy should encourage a diversity of care types. Whatever path is chosen for a federal child care policy, Canadian children benefit most from a careful consideration of the evidence.
Martha Friendly, Coordinator, Childcare Resource and Research Unit, University of Toronto: The Childcare Resource and Research Unit is no longer at the University of Toronto. It is not your mistake; it is a recent change.
I think I sent a long version of my presentation, so I will talk about some of the high points. I was fairly involved with the OECD study of early learning and child care. I am one of the authors of the Canada background report commissioned by the federal government. I was also a reviewer and was part of the OECD team in Austria, so I am familiar with the process. I would like to review what we have learned about Canada from what I think is the most comparative study of early learning and child care to date. I then want to talk about what we have learned about best practices in policy from the OECD study. I will talk about five best practices and policy. I will start with a quick tour of why this is important.
First, it is clear that early learning and child care is important because learning begins at birth, because young children learn through play and because development in the early years forms a platform for future success. We also know that early childhood education programs have an important role in how children develop.
We also know that Canadian parents from all social groups seek early learning and child care opportunities so their children can get the best start in life. We also know that how a particular early learning and child care program helps children get the best start in life is quite determined by its characteristics. The research shows that it is the quality of the program that makes the difference that is critical in determining whether it is good for children or it is not. I think Mr. Milligan has made that point in his presentation.
We also know from research that the quality of Canadian child care programs is generally poor to mediocre. I have referred to a great deal of research. We know that most Canadian children do not attend any kind of organized early learning and child care programs until they are five years old, when they go to kindergarten. There are places in the child care system for less than 20 per cent of the children even today. We also know that most mothers of young children in Canada are the in the paid labour force. This number has increased steadily for three decades. In 2005, almost 70 per cent of Canadian mothers whose youngest children was less than three years were working outside the home and 76 per cent with a youngest child three to five years of age. We have many mothers in the labour force.
I want to say a few words about the OECD study. First, it is important to note that it grew out of a meeting of the education ministers of the OECD in 1996. It is very significant that it was conducted by the education section of the OECD. They were convinced that early learning and child care is the foundation of lifelong learning. They recommended conducting a thematic review which is something the OECD does. It is a big study. By the time that the eight-year study was completed, 20 countries had been reviewed. Each country included a background report that was submitted by the country, which contained a great deal of information about the context and the provision of ELCC. The country was then visited by an international expert team for several weeks. They went across the country. I did this in Austria; they did this in Canada. They met with officials and community groups; they visited many early learning and child care programs and then prepared a country note presenting an analysis and situation of the particular country's early learning and child care issues within their framework, which was very extensive. I will refer you to these reports if you are interested in looking at them.
The two Canadian reports were published at the same time in 2004. I do not think I can overstate the importance of this research. There are about 50-odd reports. It is the largest body of comparative policy research in this field. It is an impressive body of empirical and comparative policy research. I want to emphasize that the study provides an opportunity not only to compare how well Canada is doing but also it offers a unique opportunity to draw conclusions about policy practices, about what works, and about what works less well.
The four people who came to Canada were extremely expert. There was a senior government official from Flanders in Belgium who was a specialist in her field; an academic social researcher from the U.K; a Finnish early childhood program specialist; and the person from the OECD in Paris, the convenor of the study, who is a developmental psychologist. They were quite shocked at what they saw in Canada.
The experts mentioned the day care conditions in the report. Let me read you their comments:
Rooms were barren places, often poorly lit, with relatively few resources to interest young children and little evidence of children's own work. Child care workers seemed to feel that children were vulnerable, and in consequence, they tended to be overprotective and interventionist.
From the perspective of the review team, child care premises in Canada seemed poor, partly a reflection of many makeshift arrangements in low-rent buildings. In addition, materials and resources were often conventional and of doubtful learning quality.
They said,
. . . quality has been undermined by the struggle to survive on inadequate subsidies. The structural underpinnings of quality have been neglected, in particular, sufficient funding and adequate profiling and training of staff.
The experts commented that children were inhibited from unloading their energy and stretching the limits of their imagination and creativity.
I know that Senator Pépin knows this well because she was a member of the special committee on child care. This is 25 years later.
They said that there had been no significant expansion of the system in Canada over the past decade and they compared Canada to other countries very unfavourably. Here are some of their key concerns: Long waiting lists in community services, general stagnation in quality, low public expenditure rates per child, a market-determined fee structure that resulted in high parental costs; inefficient subsidy system; and generalized under funding in the child care sector. They said that this had an impact on everything, including physical environments, data collection, planning, administration, training, the whole gamut. They documented this. It is an excellent report to which I refer people.
I passed out a summary of some of the highlights of the Canada report; you can find it on-line if you want to do so. Reports that corroborate these experts' findings would fill a cart. This is not new.
Last September, the final report to this eight-year thematic review was published at a conference in Italy, where some of the best early learning and child care programs in the world were found. I was at that conference. This really illustrated the gap between Canada and the other countries. You have heard the figures. Senator Munson mentioned that Canada is the lowest spender. There were 14 OECD countries with sufficient data to show the spending. The OECD data and reports showed that Canada is a wealthy country with the fourth highest GDP per capita; a country with the highest child poverty rate — not news to anyone; and a country with a high rate of mothers of young children working outside the home. We are among the higher countries in that. They went on to say that Canada is a low spender in social programs — lower than all but four countries; a low spender on all child and family programs, including income programs such as the national child benefit as well as services, maternity leave, and so on; and a not generous provider of paid maternal and parental leave. We were in the lower third of what they calculate as effective parental leave, which is a combination of duration — where we are pretty good; and pay — where we are low. It keeps some parents out of maternity and parental leave.
They found that we are a country where the cost for early learning and child care programs in the child care sector are quite high — there are only three countries where there are higher costs to parents — and a country where most children do not attend an early learning and child care program that they do not attend until they are age five. This compares to six countries in which most children attend by age three. In France or Belgium and Italy, almost all children go to a full-day, publicly funded, early learning and child care program by the time they are three years of age. In other countries, most attend by age four. You can find these figures in the document I passed out called ``Early learning and child care: How does Canada measure up?''
I want to turn to what I think is in some ways is the biggest asset of the OECD study. It is not only Canada is bad and how does Canada measure but, from my own point of view, one of the biggest assets is that it is a policy study. It presents a good deal of material about what we can learn about best policy practices in early learning and child care from the 20 countries involved in the study. It is a comparative analysis that highlights innovative approaches, policy options and the best policy practices. I emphasize throughout that it is important to consider that all countries are not the same. You do not take something off the shelf from another country. These things need to be adapted to different national contexts. Of course, Canada's approach has been quite inconsistent with the international trends in early learning and child care that are outlined in the report. I think Mr. Willms will talk about this.
I want to talk about five policy practices that emerge from the work of the OECD that Canada should really look at seriously in this area.
As an overarching point of view, they talk about it from the point of view of education for children and supports for families, and they are very aware it is not only an early childhood education program but a family support program in a variety of ways. They emphasize that it needs to be a system and that the marketplace does not deliver well. It is really an overarching prerequisite. Fundamental, high-quality programs are to be the norm rather than the exception, and also are to become widely and equitably available. As a parent who started several child care programs for my children, I always worry about the communities where there is not someone to start a child care program or there are only entrepreneurs to come along and start them.
The research shows that the common obstacles to quality and equitable access are structural weaknesses: the lack of adequate financing, poor staff-child ratios, poorly qualified and inadequately paid staff, and poorly developed and implemented educational theory. These characteristics are determined by public policy. I want to emphasize that we know that what it requires is a system. We would not provide public education through the marketplace. It does not really work. It works occasionally, but it does not work most of the time.
The second point they make, and they took this as a starting point for their study, is that the approach should be universal. I would like to take a little exception with the research on the implications of targeting early childhood education programs to the poor or children at risk. I believe it is a very flawed approach. I began my career working on the American Head Start program and it exemplifies a targeted program. The research has shown since then that, yes, it is true that good-quality early childhood education benefits low-income children more if they come from poorly resourced families, which they may not necessarily. It is also true that even for middle-class children, it is not good to be in a poor environment when you are in your early years. Most of our children are in some kind of poor environment because their mothers are in the labour force. Good evidence shows that all children benefit from high-quality early learning and child care programs. The Canadian research using the NLSCY shows clearly that not just low-income children are at risk but children across the entire income spectrum. In fact, middle income children are more at risk because there are more of them.
The OECD made a couple of excellent suggestions about balancing universality and targeting. This is important to keep in mind. They said that it is important to pay particular attention to children in need of special support. Within a universal approach, you can see this at work in other countries, but in Canada, what they were thinking about is the low-income children who were not in the programs, and certainly Aboriginal children whose circumstances really shocked them.
Let me just mention the three other policy practices, and I will not go into any detail on them, but we could if we needed to. A third policy practice is that early learning and child care should be through public or not-for-profit programs, not a business. There is a lot of research on this. We can talk about it afterwards.
I would like to identify the fact that the best policy practice and financing is not only about the amount of money, but how it is delivered. One of the things they said to Canada is that they recommended a move away from personal subsidy mechanisms towards operational funding for programs and entitlement for children. They mention that kind of funding is much more useful for governments to steer quality and equity. If the money is given to parents is either in the form of a voucher or payment or subsidy, as most of our system is funded, it becomes difficult for government to steer the program in the direction of quality and equity.
They also talk a great deal about integrating early childhood education and child care, which in Canada is very truncated into two different things. We know this well. It is true that in most countries there is some distinction, especially for very young children and babies. Early childhood education often begins at two and one-half years. Canada is one of the most ``siloed'' countries, and we have a lot to learn in this area.
Finally, they pointed out the importance of the employees. It is one of the most well known facts in Canada and has not been acted on adequately. If you want to improve early childhood education, you have to do these things as a package. There is a great deal of attention to be paid to the human resources. You cannot improve it as long as you have people who make low wages, little training and even less respect.
This is not all there is to it, but I am talking about how to flesh out a system. In summary, Canada has a very poor early learning and child care system. We are certainly not making the most of our human potential in young children. The comparative analysis provided by the OECD shows that Canada stacks up extremely poorly when compared to other industrialized countries. There is a lot of knowledge about the policy practices that can be called good or best practices.
In a funny way, Canada is in a good position because we are such a laggard. There is a great deal of information out there for us to use. The OECD report on Canada and the rest of this body of knowledge has been put on the shelf. I urge people who want to work in this and improve this area to pick it up and look at it as policy knowledge and to use it a great deal more. It is very valuable.
Douglas Willms, Professor, Canadian Research Institute for Social Policy, University of New Brunswick: Honourable senators, it is a pleasure to be here. It is a great honour to have this opportunity to speak with you.
I took it as quite a daunting task when I was invited to speak today because I was thinking how to summarize several years of research into five to seven minutes. I provided a set of four modules of PowerPoint slides that summarize or expand on what I am going to try to say.
I will skip over the first module because Ms. Friendly has done a superb job of talking about it, which was the OECD report. I want to add that one of the recommendations of the report was strengthening the present federal- provincial-territorial agreements as much as possible on child development and early learning and to build bridges between child care and kindergarten education, which is the last point that Ms. Friendly talked about.
I look at the elementary school, when kids start school, as a real focal point, and the elementary school can work backwards into the community as a community centre to establish good programs.
The third point in the report, which underlies everything that she said, is that we need to substantially increase public funding of services for young children.
The second module talks about how Canadian children aged zero to five years fare. Perhaps I can serve as a moderating role between what you have heard from the two previous speakers. I have worked with a number of Canadian data sets, but especially the National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth, NLSCY, which I call a national treasure, not only because several millions of dollars have been invested in collecting this data, but also because it provides a comprehensive database of how well Canadian children are doing.
When we wrote the book on vulnerable children five or six years ago, we determined that 28 per cent of children are vulnerable. People said that was way too high, that there was no way that one out of four Canadian children were vulnerable. There are different kinds of vulnerability. Vulnerability in the cognitive domain includes children entering school with poor vocabulary skills such that, unless there is some intervention on their behalf, they will be struggling readers throughout their school years. In addition, there are children suffering behavioural problems and children with physical and mental handicaps, et cetera.
A more conservative estimate might be 15 per cent, which would be roughly the percentage of children who enter school with cognitive difficulties. In Canada, that would amount to about 45,000 children entering school each year. Programs for each of those vulnerable children would cost about $500 per month, or $6,000 a year. That would amount to about $270 million per cohort. If you multiply that by five, that amounts to about $1.25 billion to address the needs of vulnerable children, just to start.
We see a couple of paradoxes. The first is, in a way, trying to moderate Mr. Milligan's and Ms. Friendly's messages. The national longitudinal data followed cohort to cohort, shows that since the OECD report has come out all but two provinces have improved in their early childhood outcomes over the last 10 years. The exceptions are Saskatchewan and Quebec. In Saskatchewan it is in part because they have many more children from poor backgrounds. It is unclear exactly why this is in Quebec. I would not attribute it solely to the policy of a universal program.
When low-income countries move from a system of compulsory education up to grade 6 to a system of compulsory education to grade 8, they must develop curriculum very quickly for those extra two grades. They must hire staff and so on. It could be that in the long term the results in Quebec will improve. It may be that they staffed those programs quickly with staff that do not have the necessary training. There is a paradox there to which we ought to pay attention.
The other paradox is, although the OECD report clearly says that we are well behind in early childhood and care programs, our two provinces that participated at the Grade 3 and Grade 4 levels in the International Reading Literacy Study scored sixth highest out of 35 countries. In other words, we did very well.
In the Program for International Student Assessment, PISA, which is an assessment of 15-year-olds, we scored second in the world. Even the Canadians running the study were quite surprised, because for a long time we have been lagging behind countries like Sweden, Denmark and Norway, which were always held up as the great countries with great reading literacy. We have more or less maintained that position over the last few years. In some ways, it does not square. We must be doing something right that is associated with that.
That said, however, data from PISA indicates that, although we have relatively high scores and do not have a large gap between children from rich and poor families, we have an inordinately high percentage of children scoring at the lowest levels of literacy. To raise and level our achievement bar will require a concerted effort to bring up the scores of those most vulnerable children, who are not only children from poor families.
I will now move onto module 3 and start with the last slide.
I do not think about this in terms of one particular policy intervention being the cure-all. I do not think that the right question is whether we should have a universal early childhood and care program. I would urge the committee to think more broadly, that is, how we can best create a family-enabling society.
Children need good quality care from the moment they get up in the morning until the time that they go to bed. There are two ways to provide that care. One way is to strengthen families; the other way is to provide substitute care outside the family. The two can go together quite nicely, but if you have one without the other, you have missed a big part of the child's day.
I have listed five types of interventions. People have often dichotomized them in terms of targeted and universal interventions. I tried to extend this in a paper I prepared for UNESCO.
What are some strategies for raising and levelling the learning bar? We can consider five types of interventions. I am not saying that one type is better than the others. It really depends on the nature of the community and the society.
One kind of intervention is what I call socio-economic status-targeted interventions. These are interventions aimed solely at children from poor families and also aimed at improving a particular outcome. If we are worried about language scores, what kind of programs can we use to improve them?
That has the effect not of raising the bar uniformly but of curling it up the bottom end, because nothing is being done to strengthen the outcomes of children from non-poor families.
One program that has received much publicity in the United States is that of David Olds and his colleagues who have provided substantial evidence that home visitation programs for mothers in low socio-economic circumstances, combined with parent training and support, have long-lasting effects on a wide range of children's outcomes.
Early childhood education and care programs can be targeted to low socio-economic status families, and there is great support in the literature suggesting that children from poor families benefit substantially from early childhood education and care programs. The literature also says that these are most effective when combined with parent training and support. When you think about what happens to children from the time they get up in the morning until the time they go to bed, you must think in those terms.
You could say the same thing about childhood obesity. I have done a lot of work in this area. We have so many programs for kids now. As a parent of three young children, we are driving to programs all the time.
The research says parents are more engaged with their children now than they were 20 years ago. They are spending an hour more per day, both mothers and fathers. For a father that is a doubling the time spent with children; mothers have gone up about one-third. Where is that time coming from? It is not out of parents' TV time; it is coming out of their sleep. Parents are sleeping less than they did 20 years ago. Yet, we have a very high percentage of childhood obesity.
Again, what has changed over 20 years is the amount of exercise kids get from when they get up in the morning to when they go to bed at night. If I asked this audience who walked to school when they were children, I think most of you would have. When I ask how many of you drive your kids to school, most drive their kids to school.
Another kind of program is summer learning programs. If you look at the gap in achievement outcomes for kids as they are making their way through school, about one-half of the gap happens during the school year. The other one- half happens during the summer months. Kids from middle-class backgrounds continue to improve their scores while kids from poor backgrounds go down.
Another kind of intervention is compensatory interventions. Compensatory interventions are directed towards poor families but not directed at any particular outcome. They are not saying let us tackle the obesity or early language problem. They are trying to compensate for socio-economic disadvantage. Transfer payments to poor families and breakfast or free lunch programs are examples of compensatory programs. There is strong evidence that these programs do not have a substantial effect on raising and levelling the learning bar or the gradient. What happens is it moves those kids along the socio-economic continuum a little bit. Their outcomes will go up but there is not a substantial increase across the board.
This is not to be taken as saying Douglas Willms is saying not to give money to the poor; I am not saying that. Just do not expect it to have a substantial effect on increasing learning outcomes.
Another type of intervention is performance-targeted programs, which target identified kids who have already fallen off track. You can identify them with good screening tools and say these are kids that need some kind of concerted intervention. That kind of approach both raises the bar and levels it.
In Canada, given the way outcomes are distributed, in most communities we need a strong emphasis on performance-targeted interventions.
The fourth type is universal interventions, which are interventions aimed at all children uniformly, which could be a universal early childhood education and care program. One example I like to use is Sesame Street, which was designed as a universal intervention. Probably everyone in this room has seen Sesame Street. A universal intervention is not aimed so much at equity but at raising the bar for everyone. Given the distribution of outcomes in Canada, we can benefit from good, strong universal interventions in tandem with performance-targeted interventions. Another example of a universal intervention is Canada's parental leave policy, or one could call the money that young families get as a universal intervention, but it is in some sense designed as a compensatory intervention.
The last intervention, which is still relevant to early childhood education and care, is what I call inclusive interventions. Right now, we have about 7 per cent or 8 per cent of our schools in Canada where the average child in the school is living in poverty. In other words, we have created ghettos in some of our schools, where most of the children in the school come from families with low socio-economic status.
That is one of the dangers of what Ms. Friendly was saying, is that if you have targeted programs for poor children, then you end up concentrating poor children in poor settings. That can be problematic. Kids learn best from their peers. Not only that, when you have poor kids concentrated together, it is very hard for teachers to maintain high expectations, maintain parent support; all of those good things that make for a good quality school or setting.
Let me conclude by saying a bit about evaluation and research. I would not be true to my profession if I did not finish there. The NLSCY, National Longitudinal Study of Children and Youth, is a tremendous boon to researchers. It is a fantastic study, but in many ways is a blunt instrument. The data are collected biannually and the researchers do not get the data until usually two to three years later. There are very strict rules on how the data can be used, and they must be used in a certain research data centre and you have to make application to do it on a very specific project. Although it is great, it has its limitations.
What we need is more comprehensive monitoring at the provincial level, starting with children at birth. I think we can strengthen our age three-and-a-half year; in some provinces it is three years, in others three-and-a-half-year-olds. Frankly, we do not know how well we are doing.
Although I endorse most of the OECD recommendations, they were not based on direct assessment of data collected from children. They are talking about the processes that might lead to high outcomes, but they were not based on actual results of children.
UNICEF, and a big U.S. consortium, has really developed a consensus on what kinds of outcomes we should be dealing with. We need to look at children's general knowledge. I call it awareness of self and environment. It includes their behavioural and social development, cognitive development, language and physical development. We need tests that include objective items.
In some provinces children are being assessed when they enter kindergarten, but it is a subjective assessment. It asks teachers how well the kids fare with other kids their age. It is not an adequate measure for measuring growth. As kids move along, they might be in the bottom quartile amongst kids and remain there but still be making good progress. We need instruments that measure skills and say what skills kids have at age three and when they enter school. That needs to be done in a very transparent way that provides results at the community level and also back to the individual level.
Finally, we need to use those kinds of results with an explicit link to social and educational policy, and use it to provide a framework for evaluation and research.
Senator Cochrane: I am looking at the examples of compensatory programs, Dr. Willms. The reason that schools began a breakfast program was not just for poor children. The breakfast programs in the schools were for the poor, but other children went as well. I can remember my own grandchildren were dying to go to this breakfast program. There was a mixture of children. The whole objective of starting this program was to raise the level of the learning bar. You are telling that it did not raise that level?
Mr. Willms: There is evidence of one study in Jordan where breakfast programs did not have a positive effect. Generally, they do not have strong effects because they are not really focused on learning skills.
It is fundamental that kids can make the transition from learning to read to reading to learn. They have to make that transition at Grade 2 or Grade 3. If they do not make that transition most will end up being struggling readers all the way through school. We have to get them from birth up to the end of Grade 3 to that transition of learning to read to reading to learn.
That is why I am careful to say that breakfast programs and other compensatory programs are not bad programs because no child should suffer the indignity of living in poverty and kids should not come to school hungry. They are good programs in and of themselves but do not expect them to have strong effects on raising the level of the learning bar. Someone could say that if kids are hungry they will not learn as well; I accept that.
Senator Cochrane: That was the argument.
Mr. Willms: I accept all that and certainly, you do not want kids to go hungry so I will not say scrap all breakfast programs, but that intervention will not raise the level of the learning bar.
The Acting Chairman: Senator Trenholme Counsell is the reason why we are here; it was her inquiry in the Senate that brought you people to this table today.
Senator Trenholme Counsell: Honourable senators and distinguished guests, this is very important, and we aspire to have a very important report, a very comprehensive report. What have you presented to us today will certainly be part of it.
I believe I am free to say that if you have other material that you have not brought today, your unique research papers or anything that you feel that is applicable to the subject we are addressing, we would appreciate receiving it as well. We have had one meeting and we will certainly incorporate all of the material you brought to us today, but we would appreciate any other relevant material we would be able to use as we read and prepare our report.
I know Dr. Willms' work so well. This is a very comprehensive summary, Dr. Willms, of your work. Professor Friendly, I want to say — that is a good name for children, it is almost like a name for a television program — you have reassured us that the work of the OECD report is certainly substantive and important for Canadians to pay attention to. That was one reason why this question was asked: Is it a definitive report that we should study very carefully and take into consideration as we in Canada try to advance early childhood development and child care?
My second question is about quality. Professor Milligan, I am quite worried about the report, vis-à-vis Quebec, and I want to ask you two questions.
On page 5, you admitted that our work does not explicitly account for the quality of child care and I think, as parliamentarians, as legislators, as visionaries along with you, our goal is to have quality programs, whether it is educational programs or child care programs. I would like you to elaborate on that.
In addition, on page 6, I wonder if this is contradictory when you say, ``The evidence for improved outcomes for children from disadvantaged families is generally speaking, empirically sound.'' It seems that is a positive part of your report concerning the Quebec child care program.
First, we have genuine concerns about behavioural outcomes with children. Second, we have a very large question about cognitive outcomes with children, which I do not believe you measured. Third, I think an admission that quality above all that, yes, for disadvantaged families there are positive outcomes.
First, I would like to know whether Ms. Friendly believes we should rely on the OECD evidence.
Ms. Friendly: Concerning the OECD, this particular study looked at early learning and child care. It does not regard early learning and child care as a magic bullet. This relates to what Mr. Willms is saying. It is part of family and education policy. It is an important part, but they consider other pieces of family policy important as well. Even I would never say that this is all we should be doing in family policy.
In fact, concerning child poverty, I thought there was a very good part of Starting Strong II: Early Childhood Education and Care where they said that there are different ways to approach child poverty.
One way is to alleviate the effects of poverty, which is kind of the Head Start approach. Here are children living in poverty and we give them a program and we expect, somehow, the effects to be alleviated, but they are still poor. They actually make the point that poverty really needs to be approached through, what they call, upstream measures, by which they mean other policies like a child benefit, a housing policy or other things. I want to be clear that this particular thematic review was of early childhood education and care, but it is embedded in many other policies. That relates to what Mr. Willms is saying.
Should we take their word for it? Well, you never take anyone's word for anything in social science. Even a huge study is not the be-all and end-all; it is social science. When you accumulate work then you start thinking, maybe we think this.
It is very clear from the body of developmental psychology research that the quality of early childhood education and care programs are the important factor. There is a good review done by the National Academies of Science, which I referred to in my longer paper, where they say quality is one of the clearest known facts in developmental science; quality makes a difference. We know the quality of the child care program in Quebec is not great because we had a national study of quality that included Quebec. The quality was not great. They were working on the quality.
I have been doing a lot of work on the quality of child care programs; it is called Quality by design: What do we know about quality in early learning and child care, and what do we think? You do not just snap your fingers and say that you are going to have good quality; it is something that you have to work on and there are all kinds of structural factors that relate to it. One of the problems with the Quebec study was that the quality was not measured. The other thing is — and I have to say this because this has worried me since this study came out — that the analysis of the child outcome data in the study is of all children in Quebec who are in the NLSCY. At that particular time, I looked to see that 29 per cent of the children in Quebec, age 0 to 6 years, were in the child care program. Actually most of them were in regulated family child care, which has somewhat different effects than quality or non-quality centre-based child care.
I am not a data person, but I do know that the methodology of the data analysis, the difference of the differences approach, is a method used so you do not have selection factors.
There was a decision made that there would be no selection factors, that it include all the children in Quebec. It is interesting that of all the children in Quebec, there was no distinction made for the children who were in the child care program and who would have been affected by the program, unless you want to infer that somehow the child care program affected the air quality in Quebec or something like that.
I just want to put this forward that this is yet another study. There are many studies on the effects of different kinds of child care on children. Researchers use different methodologies. You can criticize them and discuss them, but some studies are carried forward as the most important. There is an interesting finding in this study. One might say: What was it about Quebec at that particular time? There were probably other things happening besides the child care policy.
If I were conducting the study — and I am not an economist, so I would not be conducting this particular study — I would look at the difference between the children in the child care program and the children not in the child care program, which data is in the NLSCY, by the way. One could look at this many ways. There is a huge body of research in this area. The OECD is a comprehensive policy study. That is why it is important. It is the only real comparative study, but there is much empirical research.
Mr. Milligan: I will try to be brief but also speak slowly; it is a challenge. I will see if I can square that circle. Thank you for the questions from the senator and also from Ms. Friendly.
First, regarding quality, I agree with everyone here. My interpretation of the research is certainly that quality of child care matters in terms of outcomes for children. From an economist's point of view, Ms. Friendly spoke about markets not working well for child care. I agree with her to a certain extent on that point. Markets work well when people are willing to pay for something that costs more and is worth more. Much expert evidence suggests that quality matters for children for their long-term development. What is interesting is that much of the economic evidence suggests that parents are not willing to pay more for a higher-quality program. Given the choice between a more expensive and a less expensive program, with different quality levels — the experts determine one to be higher quality than the other — parents do not seem to be willing to pay more and that is where the market system breaks down.
It is interesting to talk about quality to an economist. Expert opinion says that you should pay more for quality because there are great potential benefits, but parents are not willing to pay for it. There is a difference between expert opinion and what parents think. I do not know the right answer, but it is interesting to think about how to close that gap, to have parents recognize the importance of quality. That would be one way to go.
In the study I conducted, the question came up about how we accounted for quality. To be clear, when I said that we did not account for quality, I meant that we did not observe for every individual in our data set what the quality level was of the child care they attended, if they attended.
What this means is that we could not say that within Quebec, the problems, if there were problems, were in the high- quality or the low-quality child care centres. The methodology we used allows us to compare, on average, what happened in Quebec to what happened in other provinces. In our estimates, we embody the average quality level in Quebec. It is not that we are not looking at quality at all. To interpret our evidence, it says what happens on average if you had a certain quality level of child care in Quebec. As Ms. Friendly mentioned, perhaps there are some problems with the quality levels in Quebec. Actually, there is research by Christa Japel and co-authors that looks at that issue.
Finally, on the point of quality, as Professor Willms was saying, we acknowledge in our longer research paper that there is a potential explanation for our results, that what we are observing is the transition to a new program. As was mentioned, it is a hard task to build a universal child care program from scratch, and perhaps what we are seeing is a transition. A possible interpretation is that over the long run employees could get better at their jobs.
I mentioned that the empirical evidence seems clear that children from adverse backgrounds benefit from these kinds of interventions. I was referring not necessarily to my research but to the broad research that I have read and interpreted. In general, across the research, evidence for interventions for at-risk children is quite strong. What was unique about our study is that we saw that a lot would happen to not-at-risk children. In Quebec, the subsidies in place before the $5-a-day program was introduced were quite substantial. There was not actually a change in the price of child care for more-at-risk families, and a bigger change for middle-class families.
Regarding cognitive outcomes, to be clear about that, we were not able to study that in our data set, but evidence from other research suggests that school readiness and cognitive outcomes are better for children in early childhood programs.
The Acting Chairman: There is the bell, which will ring for 15 minutes. We will go over to the Senate and vote at 5:30. We should be back at 5:40, and we will have another 40 minutes for discussion. It is important to do that, and we appreciate your being here. Thank you.
The committee suspended.
The committee resumed.
The Acting Chairman: Welcome back, senators, and our distinguished guests. We have another 35 minutes. There are people who have to leave for voting again for a parliamentary association. You see how busy the Senate is.
Senator Cordy: Thank you to each of you for coming today. For those of us who remained in the work force, we remember what it was like. My whole life revolved around child care. At one time, my husband suggested that we buy another house and I said that we could not because our child care provider lived close to where we were and we did not have a guarantee that she would follow us to the new home. We based our decision on our day care provider. However, children do grow up.
One question I have involves research and looking for evidence to say that we need so many child care spaces. We have a great deal of anecdotal evidence. People tell me it is not the monthly expenses so much as the guarantee of a child care provider. Another couple told me that they had to turn down a promotion in Toronto because the waiting list for a child care provider was six months. They did not have any family members living in Toronto, so they had to turn down the promotion. These are realities of child care. Do we have data on supply and demand for child care spaces in Canada?
Ms. Friendly: There is really nothing that you could call data, unless you assume that the number of children who might need or demand child care includes all Canadian children. Then there probably are all kinds of shades in there.
As part of the bilateral agreements, the provinces were going to collaborate on many things and one of them was a plan for data for monitoring. There was money put aside for it; however, that was axed with the rest of it. I am the person who has collected that information from the provinces all these years, but the reason I am not at the University of Toronto anymore is because the funding is gone. There will not be even that kind of data.
This is a huge problem, because if we want to make policy or have a system we need basic data about exactly the kind of things to which you referred. We need data about the programs and their characteristics. We also need a program of research. Mr. Willms is talking about a research agenda.
This has been made as a recommendation for years, but even the kinds of studies that have been funded will not be funded anymore because the program has been changed and it is no longer funding research. The absence of basic research data and monitoring is an enormous problem for policy making. Anyone in the field would tell you that.
Mr. Willms: I agree that we do not have sufficient data. We do not have a national study on early childhood education and care. We have our National Longitudinal Study of Children and Youth, but that is something quite different. It does not look in enough detail at what kinds of programs children are in, nor does it look at the kind of supply-and-demand issues you are talking about.
Mr. Milligan: It would be rare to find a researcher who does not say we need more data, so I will join the crowd and say definitely more data would be good. Ms. Friendly has done a good job of pulling together policy-related data and other data through the years with her organization.
Relating to labour force participation of mostly mothers, one part of our study we should make clear is that the price of child care is a barrier to participation of mothers in the workplace. There has been an increase in participation by young mothers in Quebec since the introduction of the program.
Senator Cordy: One of the other challenges is recruiting and retaining child care staff. The fact is that we need good- quality child care workers. In order to retain the quality workers, we have to be willing to pay them and that is not happening. This is a major challenge. We must value child care workers and the work they do. In my opinion, when we start to value their work we will compensate them accordingly.
Mr. Milligan: One thing that is interesting about what Professor Willms is calling the ``Quebec paradox'' is that there is another paradox. As I understand it, the quality regulations became more stringent in Quebec with the introduction of the new family policy. For example, the proportion of staff required to have some kind of certification or diploma in early childhood education went from one-third of staff to two-thirds of staff. That is higher quality.
The wages of Quebec child care workers have gone up quite a bit relative to the rest of the country since the introduction of the program. They are paid more and are better trained, yet it seems that the quality has not done so well. I throw that out there to the other panellists. This seems like the core of the question.
Ms. Friendly: The first quality study was conducted before the training requirements were changed and the two other studies were conducted after the requirements were changed. I want to emphasize that to have good quality programs the early childhood educators are really important; they are at the core of the program. However, you do not get better quality by raising people's wages even a dollar an hour. The OECD is very good on discussing this where how you get quality in early childhood programs is much more of a process that has many components. You are right that the human resources are critical but it is not all there is to it.
Unless there is some kind of an approach to it, as long as they are out there, this is Mary's child care centre, and this is Julie's child care centre and whatever, it is not part of anything.
Think about what the school system would be like if schools were completely disembodied private entities struggling along by themselves. That is not how we manage the school systems. We are aware of many aspects of approaches to quality, which very much includes the child care workers, but you cannot pay them more money unless it is publicly funded. Parents do not have the money.
Senator Cochrane: In regards to that same topic, the recruiting and the retaining of staff, is this something that is unique to Canada or does the EU have the same concern?
Ms. Friendly: It varies. There are some countries where people who work in early childhood education are well-paid, well-educated and they do not leave, like in the system in France. In countries like the United States it is probably worse than it is in Canada, from the available data. It depends on who you are attracting. This is the most studied problem in child care.
There was a sector council set up as a result of a five-year study of the human resources and they are doing a lot of research. It is not that the answers to these problems are not known. Retention and recruitment is an enormous problem. In some provinces where they want to improve and expand, like Manitoba, for example, they cannot get people who meet their requirements. The Canadian requirements are not that high. They have been getting higher. Almost all of the provinces have been improving their training requirements. In and of itself, it is not enough to get the quality better and get people to come into the field and stay. Why would you if you are going to make the minimum wage?
Senator Cordy: You hit the nail on the head when you said it is more than just the salary. I was an elementary school teacher and it is more than just the salary. It is that you feel your career is valued, if there is a national action plan, call it whatever you will. I agree with comments and I am not sure that you realize you were making them but it is far more. It is all-encompassing but it is the value of what is going on.
Ms. Friendly: It is the value and what it is you are doing and who your co-workers are and all of those kinds of things. I would say we have too much of a policing mentality. We have a tendency to say that this one is really terrible quality child care. Yes, something should be done about it but that is a public policy question. Why do we have this very poor quality child care? Why do we have mediocre child care?
I was on a phone-in show the other night in Toronto and child care was the topic; what a surprise. It was about this Toronto Star exposé, which I used in my piece, which is terrible in a way. People were phoning in and almost all were in favour of public funding for child care. One guy said that the main barrier to having access to quality child care is government policy. That is true. The problem is government policy, either the policy that exists or the absence of it. I would say that is true at the provincial level generally and the federal level.
Senator Pépin: I am pleased to see you again Ms. Friendly as we have not seen each other or worked together for 25 years. I remember organizing the first National Conference on Child Care in Winnipeg in 1983 because Quebec had child care and I wanted all the other mothers and women across the country to organize and get child care services. To say that, my God, we have to start all over again.
I must admit that I am puzzled and concerned about your report, Mr. Milligan. I am concerned that the child care system in Quebec is so bad. I understand we can make errors, but your report speaks of increased violence in children placed in child care from zero to four years. You say that children's behaviour becomes more aggressive and they become more hyperactive. You say a measure of social and motor development gets worse and children's health, as assessed by the parents, gets worse.
I do not know when or in which region of Quebec you conducted the study. I have three granddaughters who went to child care centres in Quebec, all of them were under four years of age, and my God, they bloomed. They were so pleased and enjoyed the day care centre.
The cost at the day care centres has gone from $5 to $7 per day. What is the major problem? What should they correct? I must admit it is one of the worst reports I have ever seen. I am really worried about it.
Mr. Milligan: Thank you very much for the questions. First, our findings for day care services are not bad in Quebec relative to the rest of the country. After the introduction of the program for families of children who are eligible, things got worse in Quebec relative to the rest of the country. For example for some of the measures the rest of Canada may have been at some level and Quebec may have been at a better level but the gap closed. It may be that Quebec is still better than the rest of Canada but is not as adventurous as it was before. The gap between the rest of Canada and Quebec may have closed. I would not make a broad statement that Quebec is worse than the rest of Canada. It trended worse through the introduction of the program.
Second, it is important to emphasize that many measures became worse but we do not analyze whether people reached dangerous levels. For example, for some of these measures, if you reach a certain threshold, the child becomes at risk for health or future development problems. We do not look at that. We say it moved in the wrong direction. We cannot predict that there will be a big deterioration in the future.
You mentioned the example of the children in your family having done very well. I have some friends whose family is in Quebec and have said the same thing. I am not surprised by that at all. One point to keep in mind is that child care is only one part of a child's environment. It is not just the child care environment but also the family environment that matters. Children who have great interactive parents will do well.
My final point is on the behavioural deterioration. We did not expect it and we were troubled to find it as well. Unfortunately, there is quite a strong resonance for this in the international literature. Many studies in different countries using different data sets have also found these behaviour problems of increased aggression of young children who spend a long time away from their parents. This is emerging in the literature and is not unique to Quebec.
Senator Pépin: You say young children are becoming more aggressive because they are away from their parents. Maybe it depends on the people who are with them when they are young. Maybe they are having other personal difficulties, and we blame that on the system. After listening to the three of you, one of my priorities would be training and educating parents because it starts at home. Next, we need better child care centres and staff. When we say that children are sometimes more aggressive, I agree maybe they are not in the right centre, but maybe they have a family with problems and those problems are reflected in the children. When I look at that issue, I realize that we should be giving parenting courses to couples when they are about to have children. We cannot blame all of the problems on the day care centres.
Have other provinces developed strategies for small children? If other provinces have developed strategies, please tell the committee. If they have not, please tell us why. You say it is important to have a strategy for child care related to the development for small children.
Mr. Milligan: As I understand, no other province has moved in a similar comprehensive direction. The federal- provincial structure that was in place until 2006 has continued in different paths. I do not think any other province has moved in the direction that Quebec has taken.
Ms. Friendly: Quebec started to develop an early learning and child care system. It did not finish developing it; actually, some of the policies were undermined if not entirely reversed after there was an election. At that time, the funds were cut and many changes were made.
Just to put this in perspective, Canada is the lowest spender in the OECD. Quebec's spending at that time was almost 60 per cent of the public spending on early learning and child care, which included kindergarten. I was at a conference in Trois-Rivières and compared Quebec to the OECD countries and Quebec is up about one-third of the way, but it is not great. Quebec is not great in the world; it is just good in Canada. The Quebec program is only the beginning of a program. It actually brought more kids into the system and raised the standard somewhat. We do not know whether the quality has improved because nobody has measured the quality since then. The number of available spaces slowed down in Quebec in the last couple of years, while the increase in spending slowed down as well.
I would say that no other province has gone anywhere near what Quebec has done; however, Quebec is not the be-all and end-all. It is not a perfect system. We are not talking about northern Italy, Belgium, Sweden or even Spain. It was a good model for Canada. They did some things that are very important that no one else did, but the program is not finished.
The quality was one important issue in Quebec that the government set out to try to address, but that process ended; it was derailed.
Senator Pépin: I have read that sometimes politics changes things.
We all realize the importance of the caregivers. We have training for teachers and for nurses. Why not have training for the staff who are working in child care centres?
Ms. Friendly: We do have training. In general, there is training, but it is not enough. There is training at the community college level or the CEGEP level in Quebec, but the level is generally not high enough. There are pretty good training programs, but if you look at the provincial training requirements, not enough people are required to have enough training. For example, we do not have graduate programs. Someone wrote to me from Australia about coming to Canada to complete a graduate training program. We really do not have any.
Every level in the system is inadequate, starting with the staff. It is not that we do not have training. These colleges and CEGEPs do some training, but they do not do enough.
The Acting Chairman: I have one question and then I will go to Senator Cochrane and Senator Trenholme Counsell for follow-up questions.
Professor Willms, in Vulnerable Children: Findings from Canada's National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth, you identify the need for communities to build the infrastructure for a family-enabling society. What are the components of a family-enabling society?
Mr. Willms: Four important factors seem to drive early childhood outcomes. One factor is family functioning; that is, how well the family works together as a cohesive unit. That has to do with how the mother and father are getting along and the strength of the family unit. The second factor one is maternal depression. There would probably be paternal depression as well, but we did not measure it. About 15 per cent of Canadian mothers suffer from postpartum depression; in many cases, the depression can last for three or four years; essentially the entire early childhood period. The third factor is parenting style, which is not just the love and responsiveness of parents, but how they guide their children. The parents teach their children society's social agenda so that kids get to know the boundaries and the consequences of going outside of them. That is coupled with a loving parental style. The last aspect is engagement; that is, the extent to which parents are engaged with their children. Engagement includes various types of activities but reading, literacy activities, is by far the most important of them all and it affects children from a very early age.
How can we strengthen those four factors? What kinds of programs would be in place to help mothers who are suffering from depression? Looking at Fredericton, New Brunswick, how could we increase parental engagement by 15 minutes a day? That would have a huge impact by comparison with some other reforms. Those are hard things to do. It happens not just from top-down government policy, which can provide the enabling conditions but it needs to come from families, from community agencies, from volunteer agencies, and so on, that create that kind of society. It is not just a matter of overlaying parenting programs or mental health programs to treat depressed mothers. It is more basic and must happen at a grassroots level.
That is where I think research can be one contributor. The message on reading to the child, for example, has been out there now for five or 10 years. It has been appreciated by many parents, as has the research on early childhood obesity. Parents are paying more attention to the foods their children are eating. It is a mix of public awareness, some government policy, work by volunteer agencies, and so on, that create that kind of a society.
The Acting Chairman: That is important for our report.
Professor Milligan, you talked about the aggressive nature of the children in the survey. What choices do parents have if kids are getting impressive yet parents have to work?
Mr. Milligan: I would stress the interpretation of the aggression results. Child care is one aspect of the children's environment, but other aspects such as parental education and other background characteristics have important impacts. Things that affect the family environment and the engagement of the parents would have an impact on that aggressiveness as well.
Senator Cochrane: Dr. Friendly, you mentioned that why you are not in the Toronto area now is that your research money has run out. Am I right?
Ms. Friendly: The Childcare Resource and Research Unit is a little policy institute that was funded by the federal government since 1985; it no longer exists. Several foundations have contributed to keeping it going. It had a resource library that has closed. This is not just me, it is an illustration. All the money that supported the research and development, and most of the research that we might have cited, has ended. We were talking about child care volunteer organizations that have lost their funding also.
It is a research issue but there is also a civil society issue here about how these things actually work. I went around and got a couple of foundations to give me some short-term money. I have my things set up, but it will not last. It has to do with whether or not we want to know about this issue. What I was doing should have been amplified by other people. We wrote a report to Statistics Canada outlining the data that they should be collecting, not just leaving to me as a volunteer at the University of Toronto to get the idea to do this. Those things are not on the agenda. This is an enormous problem. If you look at the OECD study, they came to the conclusion that you need to have research data assessment. This is important. It is not just researchers. I will retire in the next several years. I think these things are really important to be carried on, not just by an individual but by the society. That is why I am no longer at the University of Toronto.
Senator Cochrane: They are not focusing their attention in another direction; the money is not there for research.
Ms. Friendly: I do not think there are many other avenues in Canada. I think it will be thin. This is affecting other non-popular areas also. Child care is not a popular issue right now. With some people it is, but with others it is not. That is why there is no money.
Mr. Willms: The great bulk of research money in this country goes to medical research. It is very difficult to convince people that 2 per cent of that money might go into research on children. I wander door-to-door in my neighbourhood canvassing for the Heart and Stroke Foundation or the Kidney Foundation and people quickly shell out $20, $50 or $100. I wonder if I went around asking for money for early childhood and care, something other than a body part, would it be difficult to canvass for that?
Senator Cochrane: You are right. There are so many causes. I support homeless people, and I support the groups that are trying to build houses for the homeless. There are so many demands on society today.
Dr. Milligan, you did say that parents are not willing to pay more for quality childcare. When did you conduct your research?
Mr. Milligan: I am citing research not my own but by an economist named David Blau who produced a number of studies looking at the relationship between quality and the price people are willing to pay. This is based in the U.S. It is interesting that for child care centres that were rated using normally accepted scales of quality, it seems that they had a hard time charging a higher price. As an economist, I have to think markets work well, but I also understand that they only work well in certain circumstances. Markets do not work well when people are not willing to pay more for something of quality. In that case, no one is willing to provide quality, and you end up in a bad situation.
Senator Cochrane: Have you done research in Canada on this subject?
Mr. Milligan: I have not myself, no.
Mr. Willms: Although we do not have the same kind of comprehensive research in early childhood and care, we do have quite good data sets on the schooling system. After considering the family background, Canada's public schools do just as well as private schools. In fact, they do slightly better. Not only that, the average score of students at age 15 in Canada's public schools is comparable to the average score of youth in American private schools. We have a strong public schooling system. We could emulate that in the early childhood sector.
Ms. Friendly: This is an important question in the sense that the concept of parents being willing to pay is completely framing it, in contrast to the public school system, as a private responsibility. Suppose parents are not willing or able to pay, or the quality child care is not there. In some of our provinces, you would be hard-pressed to find a good child care program. This is where the question of public policy comes in. Some research also shows that parents are not good judges of quality, contrary to popular opinion. For a variety of reasons, they are not there. The question of parents being willing to pay, especially in the United States versus Canada, is very important, and you contrast that to the public assumption of responsibility through public policy like we do in the public school system to create an excellent and accessible public school system. You are raising an important and fundamental policy concept.
Senator Cochrane: I have had experience in actually observing this whole situation in the city of St. John's, Newfoundland. The parents that I have observed are prepared to pay for high-quality child care. I have also observed among that group, that this mother will call another mother who will call another mother, asking for an assessment of the child care program and the progress their child made in the program. It is not that they do not want to pay. They are interested in their child getting top quality child care. That is what I have observed in St. John's, Newfoundland.
Although we know that 54 per cent of children in Canada are in some kind of child care, there does not seem to be a provincial registry waiting list. How can we assess how many children are waiting for regulated child care spaces?
Ms. Friendly: We cannot make that assessment. Again, it goes back to the question. For the most part, there are independent free-standing entities. People put their names on a variety of waiting lists. A few municipalities in Ontario are keeping centralized waiting lists. It is not impossible to do. At this point, it is just a hodgepodge. It could be done, but it is not done. What kinds of things would you actually put in place? For example, on Manitoba's government website parents can find available vacancies. These things spring up as little projects and then disappear again. They are individual initiatives that are sometimes good and sometimes not. We need those types of measures to make this system work.
Senator Cochrane: What are your views of home schooling?
Ms. Friendly: I am not particularly in favour of it because I think it is really great for children to be in school with other children.
Mr. Willms: We have tried to assess that in an empirical way. It is very difficult to assess because the parents who take their kids out to home school them are usually unique in certain ways. It is not as though we can randomly assign kids to home schooling. We do not know in terms of the outcome side of it.
The Acting Chairman: Senator Trenholme Counsell has a question, which she will give you now, and you can answer later and send it to the clerk.
Senator Trenholme Counsell: I think your goodwill will allow me to ask this question. We are federal parliamentarians, and it does not matter which party we represent. We have tried to take the politics out of this, and everyone is acting accordingly. I would like each of you to send us this answer, if you choose. It is not mandatory, of course.
If you were to make three recommendations to the Government of Canada as to what we should do now in response to the OECD report, what would they be? As I would ask you to recommend to us which models we should study, which countries, or there may be some state in the United States that is exemplary, but I would like you to suggest three models we should study in priority. There is a chance that we might travel, or we might do it through video conferencing. You could give us your top three examples, prioritized as to the international models that we could look to for our report.
The Acting Chairman: I want to thank the witnesses for coming. What you have said is very important for our study, and we hope to come up with positive recommendations in the near future. I also want to thank the interpreters and reporters who worked the extra time here today; we appreciate that very much.
The committee adjourned.