Proceedings of the Standing Senate Committee on
Social Affairs, Science and Technology
Issue 4 - Evidence - Meeting of February 14, 2008
OTTAWA, Thursday, February, 14, 2008
The Standing Senate Committee on Social Affairs, Science and Technology met this day at 10:45 a.m. to study the state of early learning and childcare in Canada in view of the OECD report Starting Strong II, released on September 21-22, 2006, rating Canada last among 14 countries in spending on early learning and childcare programs.
Senator Art Eggleton (Chairman) in the chair.
[Translation]
The Chair: Welcome to the Standing Senate Committee on Social Affairs, Science and Technology. Today, we are examining the state of early learning and childcare in Canada.
[English]
In September 2006, the Education Committee of the Paris-based Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development — the OECD, as we know it — released a report entitled Starting Strong II: Early Childhood Education and Care. This report outlined 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 on 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, on a motion by our colleague Senator Trenholme Counsell, it was agreed that our committee would examine these issues.
Today we have two very notable witnesses, notable for their contributions to this subject matter and other parts of life in this country. We have two people who are at the heart of the matter, because they themselves have very big hearts.
I am pleased to introduce Dr. Fraser Mustard, the founder of the Council for Early Child Development. Currently, his primary mission is emphasizing the crucial importance of a child's experiences in the first six years of life. In 1999, he co-authored the early years study on early learning with specific community recommendations. In 2002, he set up the Council for Early Child Development and Parenting.
With him, co-chair of the early learning study, is the Honourable Margaret Norrie McCain. She continues to pay a major role in many early child development policy and program initiatives in Canada, and is a member of the Board of Directors of the Council for Early Child Development. She was also the first woman Lieutenant-Governor of New Brunswick, serving from 1994 to 1997. Senator Trenholme Counsell followed her as the second.
Welcome to both of you. We will start with Dr. Fraser Mustard.
Dr. Fraser Mustard, Founder, Council for Early Child Development, Founder's Network: Let me introduce myself in a way that you will not read in the biography. I founded the Canadian School for Advanced Research, which still exists. It is over 25 years old. Its purpose is to get people from different fields to talk to each other in order to get the cross-disciplinary interaction that is crucial in handling the knowledge flow in the 21st century.
My good university president asked me in 1994 to come to a meeting about the role of the universities in a knowledge-based society. My science career is a separate subject from what I will talk to you about. My reputation on that, good or bad, does not matter, but if you are using aspirin for heart disease, you owe me a debt.
I will come back to the real issue here. I said, "I do not want to talk about that. I want to talk about what determines the quality of populations for the future." Universities only deal with those who have the ability to go to universities, and this is a deeper issue. He said, "What do you want to talk about?" I said, "I want to talk about how the brain develops in the very early years. It affects your health, learning and behaviour throughout the life cycle." You can imagine that a university did not want someone talking about moms and kids. However, they needed my name so I was put first thing on the program. This was in Winnipeg. It was cold, which is what Winnipeg is like in the wintertime. It was not a university-type subject that I was talking about, but the reporter for The Globe and Mail in Winnipeg was present. He was smart. He got the gist of what I was saying. He asked me questions afterwards and he filed a story. The Globe and Mail was short of material for the front page the next morning and so there I was, on the whole left-hand side of the front page of The Globe and Mail going into page two. If you want publicity, do that, because when I got back to my office at noon on Tuesday, the lady who looks after me said, "What did you say in Winnipeg? The phone has been ringing off the hook since I came in this morning." The phone continues to ring. I am off to Australia tomorrow night.
When the Premier of Ontario, Mr. Harris, asked me to tackle this question for him, I said I would do it. This is largely through the influence of Betty Stephenson, a good Conservative in Ontario. I said, "I will do this report for you but I want an advisory group and I want a co-chair who is the opposite sex," and here she is here.
We wrestled with putting the early years report together — if you do not have a copy you should have one — because we summarized all the real data about the situation and what you can do. We have done a second report under the council called Early Years II. If you do not have copies of them, we can send them to you. The reports bring together all of the information.
When you achieve fame for something you were never trained in, it is amazing what your contacts are. I have been working for the World Bank and the bank for Latin America. I have been the Adelaide Thinker in Residence for the government of South Australia. Talk about a real deal. I worked out of the premier's office with a full staff. They organized everything for me. Never once did I have to find a taxi. There was always a car and a driver to take me there and back. I always had groups of people with whom I would be working. That report will be available in two to three weeks. It summarizes the progress in that state in trying to move itself forward, and the good news, my colleagues told me yesterday, is that the government of Australia is now making this issue a high priority.
When I came back from my last major trip to Australia, finishing off my stint as the Thinker in Residence — an ego- boosting title — I asked, why am I coming back to Canada? We are not doing very well. We cannot solve our political problems provincially and federally to get on with what I think is the single most important issue facing societies today. Let me emphasize that with two other windows.
I serve on the board of the Aga Khan University, the Centre of Pluralism in Ottawa. I have been on that board since it started in 1985. It works in South Asia and East Africa. We have decided, as a university, that there is not a discipline that universities have that is not influenced by this revolution in knowledge about neurobiology development. Think about it. It affects economics, psychology, anthropology and my professional field of medicine. It is all there. We are building an arts and science faculty to this university, which has largely been science and education, which will be grooming new staff for all the new departments that have a fundamental understanding of the subject matter I will glance through with you today. The only university in Canada that comes close to doing this is the University of Lethbridge.
Senator Fairbairn: Absolutely.
Dr. Mustard: They have the best developmental neuroscientist team in the country.
My other illustration in this story is China. I have worked with the World Bank. We went there two years ago, to speak to developmental pediatricians. A woman came up at the end and spoke to me. I thought she was an early childhood worker and liked what we were saying. She brought Mary Young and me back at the end of November. The important thing, for you in your role as chairman of this committee, is that she put us in front of the equivalent Chinese group from all the departments — children, education, science and technology, social functions. It was quite impressive. She picked up all our information from the previous session that we had had in China. She said, "We may want you tomorrow." I knew nothing about the Chinese governing culture. She said, "We will take you to see the vice premier for all these fields." They have vice premiers, which is a real cabinet that works with all these different departments. We do not have that structure in our country.
We saw this vice premier the next day. She was a smart woman. Afterwards, I asked, "What is the background of the people?" The woman who had brought us there was a graduate in electrical engineering; a doctorate from a German university in electrical engineering; is in the academy of engineering that the Chinese have; has been president of the university; has had the science and technology advisory function in that society. She got through, as the result of the meeting we had been at the day before, to the vice premier, with whom we met. Mary Young from the World Bank, who was with me, got a phone call when we got back: Would Mary Young bring out two Canadians who are superb on how to measure the quality of early childhood development? In Mary Young's view, we have the best measurement technique in the world. That is the ECDI. The two people to do it will be going to China in June or July to work with them. They want to try this technique in one of their provinces to see how well they are doing in improving child development in China.
Think about this as a Canadian: The Chinese have 60 million children aged zero to 5. We have two and a half million. When you think about that, your committee's role, in my judgment, resembles to some extent what China's group has done to come together to emphasize the importance of this issue.
I take it you have these handouts. It gives an introduction to me.
In the 21st century, you all know that that is a very key issue: If you cannot function well, you will not be able to cope with the exponential growth in knowledge and all the things that are taking place.
The next page is from the magazine The Economist. The Economist pointed out what the man from Singapore who heads education pointed out to us. Singapore has only 5 million people. They know that they have a talent issue to survive with 5 million people on an island. The man in charge of early childhood education, continuous learning, et cetera, has a mandate that integrates the whole subject matter. It is interesting that they have done that. You should meet and talk with him some day if you get a chance. It does not matter which political party is in power, this is a high priority for our society, which is a tough thing for us to do because our politics split us in terms of comparison to what they are doing. I thought that was pretty good.
The Economist did something else in the last year and a half. They wrote a series of articles that are basically developmental neuroscience. The first one is from September 21, 2006, on learning without learning, epigenetics. That is the process by which how you are handled very early in life, in utero, in the first three or four years, the genes in your head are modified by the function. The DNA is normal but the stimuli that come in during this critical early period switch on or switch off genes. It is an important subject. That is probably a dynamite revolution in the neurobiology of brain development. If anyone tells you that early childhood development is not important, take a hard look at them. If people give you results saying it is damaging, look at the processes that were involved because the quality of sensory stimulation that comes in from the parents, or whoever the centre is using, is crucial. You have to check that out. I know there is a study from Quebec that says it is bad, and I know a bit about that. I would never put my children into those places where they did the study. It is stupid, because they are not of the quality you need to perform this function. All quality programs work. Do not believe garbage comes out from second class studies, and I underline that for you.
Therefore, this is an important article. It explains why identical twins, who have the same genes, can have a 20 to 30 per cent variance in behaviour at the age of 20. This is a dynamite revolution. Your report has to handle that. I can give you some names of some real pros to talk to about this.
On October 7, there was a survey of talent and an article on the competition for talent.
The December 23 article was an interesting one. It was an attempt to get you and me to recognize that we are nothing more than the function of the neurons in our head. I will not take you into all the details of that, but it is a devastating article. You are wincing. It is all right. I suggest you read the article.
The June 14 article is dynamite because it brings an additional process that controls gene function. Those of you who had it were taught that DNA signifies to RNA that goes into the cytoplasm to synthesize the proteins. There are micro RNAs that do not do this. They actually regulate gene function, and this is a dynamite area of new knowledge that will affect the whole approach to this study. That is the Economist magazine writing about that subject, which was impressive. It is trying to get to the business elite of the world about the crucial nature of this subject.
The next page says experience-based brain development in the early years of life sets neurological pathways that affect health, learning and behaviour. That is how I got here. As the Honourable Senator Keon knows, conditions in early life affect your risk for physical and mental health problems throughout life, and that is related to brain function. All of you can understand that for learning, and it also is hugely true for behaviour, and behaviour includes mental health problems.
How does that work? The DNA in your nerve cells determines most of these functions, but the epigenetic processes that modify the control and regulation of the DNA expression create this range of problems and vulnerability. With regard to the vulnerability to coronary heart disease, you can show that a huge chunk of that is set by the time you are one year old. Understanding that is hugely important. This is true for things like depression and schizophrenia.
The British did a study on inequalities in health, conducted by Donald Acheson, and their conclusion in 1998 is as follows: "Follow-up through life of successive samples of birth has pointed to the crucial influence of early life on subsequent mental and physical health and development." A subject that is badly handled has been the culture of health in our country.
The little note at the bottom is to entertain you. This is depression, and this was done by the British on the national longitudinal study of child development in New Zealand, where they looked at genes and environment. You can have a gene for serotonin transporters, as they call it, which can be short or long. The gene is normal — it is important to understand that — but its structure is different. If you are brought up in an abusive situation, and you have two short genes or alleles — and that is what SS means, one from your father and one from your mother — your risk of depression in your 20s is high. If you have the long gene or allele structure, LL, you are resilient. It is pretty obvious. It shows gene environment interaction. If you are brought up in a good environment — we use the term "abuse," here but it is neglect; abuse and neglect — you are not at risk. Therefore, that is powerful evidence about the nature-nurture debate. The more vulnerable people who are affected by poor nurture are those with certain gene structures. We do not know the answer to this at all in terms of all the fields, but that shows you in spades the power of this issue. We suspect autism will be the same story when people break it open a bit more with some of the techniques we use.
So much for health, behaviour, and there is a list of them — attention deficit disorder, hyperactivity disorder, autism, anti-social depression — and it increasingly looks like these risks in adult life or in childhood are set by the conditions of early childhood development. That has huge ramifications for parenting and helping parents understand this issue, and for the staff in any child development centre. I use the term "child development centre." I do not like "daycare." Daycare can be babysitting, or it can be for-profit daycare. Scrap it. If you are serious, you create early child development centres that involve parents. Those are the most powerful things that work. That is what the Scandinavians and the Cubans do. With a dictatorship you might get there, but how do the Scandinavians get there?
With respect to language and literacy, there are myths about those. I get sick and tired of governments in our provinces bitching at the teachers about the problems in literacy. It is stupid. If they understood developmental neuroscience, they would not do that. I know a lot of deputies in education who I think need a lot of help. Some are getting there. The new deputy in Ontario comes from South Australia, so he has it in his head, so I hope Ontario will move, but early child development language begins early. The chart says "Starts early — first 12 months." It is actually the first seven months. Basically, the structure in your brain that interprets sound gets used to interpreting different sounds, so if you are exposed to Japanese and English in that period, you can grow up speaking both languages fluently with total comprehension. That has huge ramifications for society. I have spoken to our francophone community in Winnipeg. They like this idea because they want to have the government — and I think the government of Manitoba has done it — set up centres with early childhood development that begin with two languages when the children are born. That allows them to grow up fluent in two languages and preserve the culture. It also is a good thing if you want to master multiple languages. I cannot do this, but if that structure gets developed, you can learn a third, fourth and fifth language easily.
Turning to the next chart, in terms of comparison of countries regarding literacy, it is the OECD material which looks at literacy and competence in adults. These are people 16 to 65. They have plotted the mean scores of literacy against parents' level of education. That is a crude socio-economic marker because you cannot compare countries in the usual manner. This is the way you can do it. You will notice that there is an international mean for developed countries. For the Swedes and Finns, their population is totally above the international mean. Canada, which you cannot see easily, but it is the first of the lines that go below the mean, we have about a third of our population below the mean, which is not good for the kind of world we are moving into. Australia is the same way and the United States is a basket case. That is a serious problem in the United States, which I will come back to later on.
We now come down to a little study done by UNESCO, involving Latin American countries. We have an oddball country, these are grades 3 and 4 in the Latin American schools. Cuba is extraordinarily better than these other countries. Why is that? Anyone who does not believe in early childhood development influences needs to spend time in Cuba. I have just spent two days meeting with people from Cuba and Mexico because we have a group in Mexico who have adopted the Cuban program in Monterrey, and we already know that they are vastly improving the outcome for these children compared to equivalent social districts in Monterrey.
If I plotted Chile in that upper graph, which we have done, the Chile gradient would be totally below the international mean for developed countries. The question of quality population comes out in this.
What do you do? Well, the Brookings Institution, on the next page, with the heading: "Success by Ten, Early Child Development" says intervene early, start early. Yes, you should start at birth; if not, you should involve the parents when they are pregnant. Intervene often: You need to have good rapport with the parents as you do this. That is what "intervene often" means, namely, that you involve the parents with you in terms of doing it. Intervene effectively: I went into the ABC, the private for-profit daycare centres in Adelaide, and I would never put my child in there. That child would be damaged. I watched how the staff were working and interacting. There were no parent interactions at all, and the staff working with the children were abysmal. We know the data about this: In daycares with poor staff, the outcomes for children are poor.
The next chart says that we have chaos in early childhood programs in our country, created by our governments trying in good faith to help mothers with children. However, the program is chaos. I do not know whether our governments can get their act together to stop the chaos. The Australians are doing so.
Ms. McCain will speak to the sources of brain stimulation and early childhood development parenting programs. The next chart refers to play-based learning, but it is actually problem-based learning.
I set up the program at McMaster University on problem-based learning. I watched a four-month old child trying to get to an object. That is problem-based learning. That is how you best develop your brain. People thought we were crazy for teaching three years in medicine on problem-based learning. We were saved by women who had gone into standard careers and later wanted to become doctors. They had no science background, but they mastered the subject easily, and we ranked second in the country in the national test. Women saved us from all the males who criticized what we were doing.
I calculated the cost to individuals and society. An individual caught in crime pays the price, but think of all the money society must spend to look after that person. Plus or minus 20 per cent, the cost for crime and violence in Canada, for individuals and for society, is about $120 billion a year. For mental health and behaviour, which includes addiction, the cost established by the people in mental health in Ontario is at least $100 billion a year. Those are massive societal and economic costs, and I am tired of the Government of Canada not being able to cope with that.
What would it cost to put in a universal, high quality early child development and parenting program? As The Economist magazine argued four years ago, such a program must be publicly financed, like public education. That is a hugely important issue for our society. Our calculation for Canada is $18.5 billion a year. That is a lot of money, but look at the cost to society of not doing it.
The next chart is Jim Heckman's chart about the return on investment. Mr. Heckman is a Nobel Prize winner in economics who is concerned about the future of the United States' population and ability. He has calculated that the return for every dollar invested in the preschool period, that is, from birth to entering school, is at least $8. It is now up to $16 after including the health data. The schools have a benefit, but they work on the base that comes into the system. In other words, the schools can largely work with what comes into the school system, but the trajectories in learning that you see at the beginning of school widen, and in my age group are you wasting the money.
Earl van der Gaag, a Dutch economist who works at the World Bank, says that early child development affects education; health; the quality of society with regard to crime, violence and other things; and the degree of quality in society.
The U.S. data looked at the literacy competence of the American population using OECD standards. Fifty per cent of the population at Level 1, which is low, live in poverty in the United States. The 2 per cent at Level 5, which is high, live in poverty, but it is a perfect gradient. If you want to tackle the poverty question, you must tackle human development. Do not tackle it simply by throwing money at it. You must realize what really goes on in this world.
That is my sermon for this morning.
The Chair: We appreciate that very much.
Hon. Margaret Norrie McCain, Co-Chair, The Early Years Study, Council for Early Child Development: Honourable senators, along with Dr. Mustard I want to express my gratitude for the opportunity to be here today to present to you our case for supporting the establishment of a high quality early child development system in Canada for the health, well-being and benefit of all future Canadians and, indeed, all current Canadians.
I am a disciple of Dr. Mustard. I say that I have a PhD in the school of Fraser Mustard.
Dr. Mustard: She had good neuron development, and she is young.
Ms. McCain: That is a good segue, because I had a good mother. I beg the indulgence of the members of this committee to make a personal statement in support of the value of a non-elected Senate. My mother, the late Margaret Fawcett Norrie, sat in this upper house in the 1970s. She was the first woman senator from Nova Scotia, and Senator Cordy is the third. Through my mother, I came to the full realization of the enormous value that the Senate brings to the Government of Canada, and I think it would be a shame if you became an elected body.
The first woman Speaker of the Senate, Senator Muriel McQueen Ferguson, was not only my mother's friend, she was my friend. She was my mentor and eventually a colleague, because together we formed a foundation for the elimination of family violence in New Brunswick, and we named it after her, The Muriel McQueen Ferguson Foundation.
I was brought here today, as well as by Dr. Mustard, by the realization that family violence is the single biggest impediment to healthy human development. I have read some of my mother's work. She presented to a committee in 1974. I will not take the time to quote her but she was saying exactly the same thing in 1974 to her Senate colleagues and caucus as I am saying today, but she did not have the benefit of science to support what she was saying. Thus, I have two senators looking down on me, and sitting on my shoulder today.
I am happy to join Dr. Mustard and to be his colleague. He is renowned and valued around the world, from China to Brazil, from Australia to the developing world. In fact, in the last couple of weeks Jim Gray from Alberta was visiting an early child development centre in Kenya. He was very impressed with the program, and the people there told him that the model was based on the work of two Canadians, Dr. Mustard and Margaret McCain.
Dr. Mustard has given you some very important information. In fact, he should have one to two hours to bring you up to speed because his knowledge is invaluable. I hope that some day he will be as valued in Canada as he is in the rest of the world, because the impact on human development in our country is critically important, and it has strong implications for the social and economic prosperity of our country.
Some say our message is about child care, that it is about providing babysitting services for working moms. Some say it is about early learning. Honourable senators, it is about all of this, but it is about much more. Today, we present the case for the optimal human development of all Canadians — it is about population-based health. It is Tier 1 in human development, the years zero to 6, the critical years, the years that robust current neurobiological science tells us lay the foundation for life trajectories in learning, health and behaviour.
Dr. Mustard has quoted James Heckman, and I will as well. Dr. Heckman is a Nobel Laureate and professor of economics at the University of Chicago. He stated that education is a major development of long-run employment and unemployment. He stressed that investments in early child development have profound effects on skills and abilities throughout the life cycle.
After pointing out that awareness and knowledge of brain and human development have found critical and sensitive periods in the lives of children, he went on to say that once a child falls behind, he or she is likely to remain behind. He adds that early child development simultaneously promotes economic opportunity and social equity. There could be no better case for early child development than the one that Dr. Heckman made. His research is far more powerful and more robust than any that has come out of any department of economics here in Canada.
Teachers today who are struggling to finds ways to reach the hearts and minds of students resistant to learning are now finding answers. Social workers and psychologists struggling to find ways of altering inappropriate and antisocial behaviour are now finding answers. People struggling to find ways of improving Canada's literacy rates now are beginning to find answers. Crime prevention experts struggling to reach juvenile violence and crime now have answers. These answers are now found in what happens to the developing brain from conception to six, and I refer you again to the message Dr. Mustard gave you on epigenetics. You need to spend more time studying that subject.
Yet, despite all this, there is a huge gap between what we know and what we do. Building on the scientific case — you got a smattering from Dr. Mustard — I want to describe what an early child development and parenting system would look like, but before that I want to present three things: A brief statement about child poverty; the case for a universal early child development system; the important role of parents and their challenges in the 21st century, because the parents are the single biggest factor in how a child turns out.
In the minds of most Canadians, in particular politicians and policy makers, child poverty would probably top the list of risk factors detrimental to children's well-being and their optimal development. That is what people think of, first and foremost. Clearly, poverty matters. Every child deserves to be well fed and clothed, and to live in a safe, protected environment. This is a basic human right that we as Canadians hold dear. The National Longitudinal Survey on Children and Youth, or NLSCY, has studied the many risk factors that classify a child as vulnerable to reaching his or her optimal development, competency and ability to cope with life in adulthood, including child poverty, single parenthood, family abuse, substance abuse and family violence, among others.
According to their findings, 37.3 per cent of children living in the lowest income quartile turn out poorly. In the highest income quartile, in which we would classify rich kids, 24.2 per cent turn out poorly. Looking at these figures in another way tells us that 63.7 per cent of poor children turn out well. The largest number of children who turn out poorly, the ones we classified as vulnerable, are in the middle class, above the low income cut-off point and outside the category of children living in poverty.
Studies conducted by the late Dr. Dan Offord of the Offord Children's Centre tell us that putting more money towards vulnerable children will only reduce their vulnerability by 10 per cent. The NLSCY states strongly that the single biggest factor in how children turn out is parenting, the quality of family functioning, followed closely by the quality of the community in which a child lives.
Children who live in homes or communities characterized by chaos and conflict, fear and stress, are at the highest risk for poor outcomes and poor development. Poverty, of and by itself, is not the high risk factor it is commonly believed to be. It is damaging when it coexists with other high risk factors.
There is no doubt about it; the single biggest factor in how a child turns out is parenting. What children need beyond good nutrition and safe housing is what we call good nurturance: Love, touch, reading, singing, playing, exploring, appropriate and sensitive interaction and responses to their needs, all the things that good parents give easily and naturally. This tells the child that the world is a good, safe and interesting place to be. When they know and understand this, their brain development will be optimal.
So what about parenting in the 21st century? The OECD's Starting Strong Report states that perhaps the most significant change in modern childhood is that the majority of children no longer spend the first five years at home with their mothers. For the most part, only high income parents can afford to have one parent at home caring for their children. Most parents need two incomes to survive, and to keep their jobs they must work harder, longer and faster to stay ahead in a highly competitive marketplace.
Once it was predicted that new technologies would provide more leisure time, but in fact the opposite has happened. With the arrival of all those new little toys, the lines between workplace and home have been blurred. The nine-to-five workday has disappeared and work has invaded the sanctity of family life. Never before in history have parents been so stressed and stretched as they strive to be the best at work and the best at home.
Over 60 per cent — 62 per cent, 63 per cent — of mothers of preschool children are in the workplace during that critical period when a child needs that hands-on parenting; parents have to be in the workplace, not by choice but most of them have to be there.
The best single investment Canada can make for social justice and the optimal development of our children is to get them off to a good early start by building a high quality, evidence-based early child development system. I will repeat: High quality, evidence-based, early child development. The payoff, as I said to one of our senior political leaders, if you cannot go to high quality, stay home. To give them poor quality is probably worse than nothing at all. Go big or do not go at all. The children who will benefit most from a high quality system will be those with the highest risk factors.
The payoff comes in later life for adults who are healthier, have better life skills and life-long learning capacities, and are able to lead a better quality of life overall. The payoff is economic prosperity, built upon a base of strong human capital.
In Canada, the prevailing belief system around child care is that it is about maternal employment — in other words, a babysitting service for working moms — but we see it as a much broader issue. Science tells us that this is tier one in human development, those foundation years, the critical years that set the life trajectory for learning, health and behaviour.
We propose and we envision to achieve our goals is an integrated early child development system linked to the school system that would include child care and education but much more, and we see it as a developmental necessity. Based on many studies, the early years report recommends that this system be universal. By that we do not necessarily mean universal public funding. There are different models we can follow. However, we do mean universal in the sense that it is available, accessible, affordable and optional for everyone.
In other words, we are not telling every parent that they have to give up their child at the age of two and put them in one of these centres, but it is available and maybe they will access it two days a week or three days I week. It is there. There are many different ways of using it.
It must be universal as opposed to targeted towards those we determine are at risk. If you do this, you will miss the largest number of Canadian children who are vulnerable — those in the middle class.
The evidence is compelling that a well-funded, integrated early child development and parenting program will improve the cognitive social functioning of all children, and all children do well in a high quality early child development system.
Studies also show that low income and vulnerable children benefit greatly by being with children who have no vulnerabilities. The plan we recommend is the integrated system of community-based early child development and parenting centres linked to the school system, which are child focused and parent focused. Programs at these centres would include child care as a basic need, but also will include experience-based learning. They will include parent education and family supports. The centres must be culturally sensitive and community driven. They must be linked to community resources such as schools, libraries and recreational activities, and also linked to public health and early intervention programs for special needs children, and they are multiple. It is essential that they be staffed by caring, well-educated, well-paid early child development professionals. These professionals need to be trained to identify children with special needs and be able to refer them to appropriate interventions before biological embedding occurs.
Ideally, the system needs to be supported by a wide range of interventions for children with special needs so that these needs can be identified early. I stress once again, it is vital to provide early intervention for children who live with abuse. Family violence is the single biggest impediment to the healthy development of children. Senator Ferguson is sitting here telling you this.
Delivering an early child development system with these key components can happen in several ways. They can be federal, provincial or local government sponsored programs; regulated child care centres which provide developmental programming; family child care in the provider's home; kindergartens, nursery schools, family support programs; and pre- and post-natal programs and information.
In the past 15 years, a significant body of knowledge and understanding has been generated about the significance of early child development, but there is still, in Canada, a deficit of action between knowledge and action. For a developed country that invests heavily in education from six onward, we are especially lagging in early child development. We are at the bottom of the list of the OECD countries, and this runs counter to what science is telling us. The well-being of children is so critical it warrants the commitment of governments, institutions, service providers and, the number one driver, the general public. This does not mean everyone plays the same role, but everyone needs to play a role because our future and our national prosperity depend on it.
I want to add one more piece, and I think perhaps you will get a presentation on this. We have one threat on the horizon that we see as a threat, and that is the potential — well, they are actually arriving — of big box child care businesses. We are very worried about it. This is a business. Marching to the profits for shareholders — not the healthy outcomes for children, not population-based health — they are solely into child care for working moms. They are not addressing human development. They are not providing for the development needs of children. In Canada, I think they call it Busy Beavers, but it is ABC in Australia. They are in Australia, the United States, the U.K., and coming into Canada in Ontario, Alberta and perhaps British Columbia. In Australia, in 2007, they made a profit of $1.3 million, and 40 per cent of their revenue was from public funds.
Now, there is a debate because there are many for-profit — I choke over this — child care centres in Canada, but we want to talk about development. In my head, I have an analogy where they could fit because there is a problem of how to deal with the situation. I see the for-profits more or less in the place of independent schools in our country. Our independent schools are, generally speaking, of very high quality and march to the curricula of our departments of education. They are constantly evaluated and monitored, and they charge market fees, high fees, to attend. None of them receive public funds, nor should they. Personally, I see the for-profit early child development, or child care, whatever you want to call it, in Canada in the same place. If it must be, it must be in the same place with charging fees and being monitored and evaluated by our departments of education.
I throw that in. I think you will have a more complete presentation on that.
The Chair: Thank you very much for those two very substantial presentations. I gave our witnesses extra time here. We are very fortunate to have them and share their long expertise and commitment to this subject matter.
You have convinced me that we should shift our thoughts from child care into early education development and integration into the school system, but the thrust of both of your recommendations is quite strongly in that direction. Does this, in effect, mean extending school? Right now, they start at age five in kindergarten. Perhaps they should start at three, having an extra two years in the system? Is that another way of phrasing it? Is that another way of organizing it and making it part of the education system but just at an earlier stage?
Is any of that being done now, and are there good examples of that kind of integration into the school system that you could cite?
Finally, education, if we are going to talk about it in that context, is a provincial responsibility. We are a federal entity. What would you see as the federal role in that system?
Dr. Mustard: I will begin with your last point. Why do we have a Government of Canada? Surely you want a high quality population to make stable a society to let Canada work. Who has that responsibility other than the federal government? You have not been doing it.
Ms. McCain: Also health, not just education.
Dr. Mustard: The Government of South Australia, over five years ago, amalgamated the children's portfolio and education into one ministry. That is interesting. The Swedes have done that; the Cubans do it in spades. Saskatchewan, I think, is trying to do it.
What is the reason for that? If you think about it in terms of how the brain develops and functions, the period that we would call preschool in our society is structuring the brain in terms of how the education system will work, so to separate them is basically stupid. You have to rethink the story in terms of what we now know about modern neurobiology, because school systems cannot significantly change gaps that are already present when the kids enter the school system. The weight of the evidence on that is enormous, and as I watched Ontario spending money on literacy programs in the public education system — well-meaning with some gain from it — still, there is nothing like the gain that they would have achieved if they had put that money into the period before the children come into the school system. The system requires rethinking and requires a culture that rethinks that situation because you are basically concerned with the quality of human development.
When I spoke to the social policy group in the Government of Alberta three or four years ago, the Minister of Health said: Why do we not scrap our ministry of learning, or whatever they called their education system, and have a ministry of human development? He was smart. He understood exactly that and had a medical background. He understood the duality in terms of the development story.
To get there will not be easy. Our universities, with the exception of the University of Lethbridge, are not there coherently, but in Lethbridge we stand a fair chance of putting in place early child development parenting programs linked into the university for training of staff, et cetera, and we have leadership at the top of that university that is onside, plus the fact that they have the best developmental neuroscience people in the country.
The Chair: Ms. McCain, could you answer that question, and pick up on what Dr. Mustard said about cultural change?
Ms. McCain: There are many parts to your question, senator. I want to go back to how we see this evolving. Yes, education is a provincial jurisdiction, but this is also about health and about behaviour, so there are overlaps. We see this as overall human development, so we can — you can — find a place for it in the federal arena.
How do we see this happening? We are probably building downwards, and it will not happen overnight, and every province is in a different place. Quebec has already got it down to, I think, even two-year-olds. Ontario is building on what they have, which is junior and senior kindergarten. They are going to full day/extended day. The goal is to see it move down to three-year-olds and two-year-olds to meet the needs of working parents. That is where we have to go. Whether we see two-year-olds and three-year-olds in these centres every day will be optional. Some parents will be working part time, so they will access only part time. There will be many different ways of using the system. It will augment parenting and will be optional. We do not see them sitting at little desks. Rather, it will be experience-based learning with play and ideally with caring, nurturing staff who work as a team with parents. After one-year maternity leave, parents need good, high quality non-parental care. There will be many different ways to access the system and the provinces are addressing that. I will start work with New Brunswick as they look at what they can do to build the system downward. It is more than education; it is health and behaviour.
Dr. Mustard: I will follow up on Ms. McCain 's points. She has done many things, one being to work with some of my colleagues to take one of the primary schools in Toronto that the school board wanted to close. She persuaded the board to put in an early child development and parenting centre, amalgamating a very sophisticated, high quality daycare program, which is really an embryonic child development centre involving parents — one of Mary Gordon's parenting programs in kindergarten. That works. I was with the Superintendent of Education for the Bow Valley Corridor from Canmore to Lake Louise last week. He went there and said that it showed him what should be done. That is an example.
Ms. McCain is right in saying that you get into where you can do it and then let people see it. I am sure that those who went to Cuba thought it was a strange place when they looked at what they were doing. It is possible to do this if you can achieve widespread understanding. That is the key.
The board council of which Ms. McCain and I are members was deliberately set up to try to close the gap between what we know and what we do. The council creates fellows in different parts of the country who work with us. Although we are not government funded, their job is to work with the communities to gain the understanding so that they will do what Ms. McCain is talking about. It is to be hoped that that will affect the political process.
The Chair: Thank you.
Senator Keon: It is absolutely delightful to have both of you here. I will be brief because I will have the privilege of spending considerable time with Dr. Mustard a few weeks down the road. As you know, I chair a Senate subcommittee of this committee that is doing a study on population health and I hope to have the final report out in December 2008. The basic platform of this report is maternal and child health and development.
Neither of you talked about maternal health. I was very impressed with the way they are handling that in Cuba. We had some conflicting information about the importance of maternal health, and I would deeply appreciate it if you would comment on this. As well, we will need to address issues of poverty relevant to maternal and child health and development. Senator Eggleton also is doing a study on cities that will deal with the poverty issue, in concert with what we are doing in the area of population health.
I am beginning to think that one of the things we have to look at is basic family income. Forget about minimum wage, but let us talk about minimum family income to address poverty. The old saying that it takes a village to raise a child still applies and, certainly, it takes a family to raise a child.
How important is maternal health? I consider it extremely important, and you have told me that as well, Dr. Mustard, over the years. Have you changed your mind?
Dr. Mustard: You are asking a fundamental question. If we had had much more time today, we would have taken you through that aspect. I will begin with some simple examples.
We know that the architecture and function of the brain begins in utero. There is increasing evidence that maternal infections during pregnancy might be a factor in causing schizophrenia later in life. We do not know enough about that but that comes into maternal health and it looks like a likely possibility. Whether it is true for autism and other things, we do not know for the moment. Maternal health in terms of avoidance of infection, in particular viral infections, is hugely important in terms of the entire sequencing of the story.
The second is more complicated. The first time I saw this I was working with the man who runs probably the finest rhesus macaque colony in Washington, U.S.A. If you take a rhesus macaque female of a certain genetic structure and separate her from her mother, she will develop poorly and then when she breeds and has offspring, she will poorly mother that offspring. We see that in our own society. With rhesus macaques, you can do a little trick. You can put that infant and that mother in with some robust mothers, and find that the outcome for the infant is different. It develops normally because the environmental effects have been buffered.
As Ms. McCain knows, when we set up Beatrice House in Toronto to help single homeless mothers, largely African- American, with young children, to put their own feet on the ground to prevent damage to their children, because the children get neglected. We took over a school and renovated it and spent a long time building an effective program for the mothers and a very good early child development program, and it now works. It has been taken over by the YWCA, and they are marketing it.
When you look at maternal health, you have to think about the downside of health in terms of mental health problems and behaviour and how you can help that as well in terms of the steps you take forward on it.
Finally, nutrition is hugely important. There is recent evidence about environment and genes. In the very early period of life, certainly after the child is born but probably in utero, the quality of the diet in terms of what we call "long chain unsaturated fatty acids," which you find a lot of in fish, has a huge effect on the development of the brain and the neurons because it affects the membrane structure of the neurons. Guess what: this has a huge effect on IQ in the first five months of life. Nutrition also affects health so you put your finger on what I believe will be the single biggest issue in looking at human development for both physical and mental health problems down the road. We could debate the coronary artery disease story in terms of nutrition in the early period of life and in utero. I wish you luck and will give you all my information to put in a fine report.
Senator Keon: I will take all the credit.
Dr. Mustard: I do not mind that.
Ms. McCain: I would add that with respect to the effects of stress on mothers who are pregnant and during the first year of life after the birth, you should probably look at how stress hormones are affecting the foetus in utero and how a mother who is under extreme stress parents in that first year of life. Children are suffering emotional deprivation when the mother is highly stressed. Maternal health is not just physical; it is also mental.
Dr. Mustard: Let me pick up on your point. Ms. McCain has raised the point about the limbic HPA system in the body. It is a basic system. It is how you and I respond to events every day. This pathway is dynamite. It affects your vulnerability to physical health problems, mental health problems, your capacity to learn, et cetera. That pathway gets regulated and set, at least on the evidence from all the animal work that we do, in very early life and it begins in the uterus. Like my rhesus macaque female who was brought up poorly, she will be under severe stress. It is that pathway that will interfere with her capacity to bring up her own offspring. That is why people in medicine today do not like to give pregnant mothers cortisol, because it has these complicated effects on the biology.
There are spinoffs into this situation in terms of all kinds of things we do in a society, but at least we know the pathway and how to monitor it. The function of this pathway is hugely influenced by the caregiving to the child when they are young. That affects the epigenetic processes that govern the gene functions in that pathway.
The Chair: I will move on to another doctor, who is also a former Lieutenant-Governor of New Brunswick and the sponsor of the resolution that brought this matter from the Senate to the committee today, Senator Trenholme Counsell.
Senator Trenholme Counsell: Thank you very much, chair, and colleagues. I feel quite emotional; I might even cry, sitting here listening to the two of you today. You are people I have great respect and admiration for, but I also consider you as very dear friends, almost like family. As Ms. McCain has said, we go back a long way. I want to thank you very much for coming.
As a preface to a question, I had the good fortune to be chosen to go to New Zealand with an Asia-Pacific parliamentary delegation in January. In New Zealand, I was able to take a day and a half to visit early childhood centres and learn about their system. I would like to say three things and then perhaps we could have a commentary on that.
First, in New Zealand they had a three-year planning process and developed a ten-year plan to implement early childhood development, education and quality child care. Second, under the Ministry of Education, they have a very extensive curriculum beginning at birth and going through to school age years. This is a curriculum that is available in every centre. That is the second thing. Third, they also had a 10-year plan to educate the people who work in child care centres, and in early childhood development parenting centres. These people, within 10 years, must have at least a three-year university or college program. They must graduate. They are being helped financially to do that.
In conjunction with that, the really amazing thing to me is that these child care workers are paid the same as elementary schoolteachers. If that does not wake us up, I do not know what does. That is New Zealand. They have the advantage of one government so they do not have the complexity of a federation, such as we have in our wonderful country, with its many levels of government.
I want to say one more thing about this. They have the big box companies there — I will not name them but they have them. Something like 53 or 57 per cent of child care is delivered by these companies, but they must follow the curriculum or they lose their licences. All centres are inspected every three months. They must pay the same salaries, otherwise they cannot continue to have an open door to exist in New Zealand. I bring that to your attention. Perhaps we could have a comment on it.
The purpose of this study is to look at why we rated so poorly in the OECD report; and because we are parliamentarians in the Government of Canada, as senators, to perhaps recognize, support, praise and work on what the provinces and territories, communities across this land, are doing. Also, we hope that we can make some suggestions to the Government of Canada, whoever is leading that government at any given time, as to what the role of the federal government is. I would like you to expand on that.
The only thing that has come up in these hearings that has concerned me, and we have not had anyone discuss this since it happened, was testimony by Professor Milligan, I believe from the University of Toronto, in which he referred to a study in Quebec where they observed deterioration in certain measures relating to aggression, anxiety and other aspects of development — even children's health. That study worried me very much. It is in here without any real commentary or reaction to that study. I had better stop there.
I would like you to comment on the New Zealand study — maybe a bit more as to what the federal government of Canada can and should do; and second, I would like to have your reaction to this report by Professor Milligan.
Ms. McCain: Have you been in New Zealand? You had better comment.
Dr. Mustard: You are correct in that New Zealand has one government. They have some very able people who have understood this situation and that is how they move forward. Some of those people have penetrated over into Australia. In my work with South Australia, I was dealing with New Zealanders.
Australia has a complex problem in that the regions of Australia understand this. Now their national government has agreed to make this whole area a priority for the country. I have no idea how they work with the states, so I do not know how they will do this.
If you want to take a lesson back to Canada, as I said earlier on, what is the role of the federal government? It is to keep Canada a highly productive, safe, creative democracy. That is why I vote for the federal people. It seems to me that this is what we are dealing with, and this is what the federal government of Australia has now accepted. They have an outfit called COAG, which is the state governments and the federal government meeting together, and this is one of the items on their agenda. I do not think we have ever kept that kind of structure going in our country. I know they have periodic meetings, but we have not put it together.
The lesson from New Zealand — and from Singapore, by the way — is that if you want to make this work, you must find a way to get the institutional structure of our governance in keeping with what has to be done. It is not there at the moment. Do not ask me how to do it. I am not a politician.
In terms of your concern about the report from New Brunswick, if you go into an ABC for-profit daycare centre and watch how the staff work, they are really not holding those infants and toddlers; they are not talking to them.
Let me give you an example of the importance of that. Those people who know me know I am fond of cats. I arrived at our farm — which we used as a weekend retreat early on to bring our children up — one Friday night, 20 years ago. My wife said to me, "You will have to drown the kittens." Our female barn cat had had a bunch of kittens, but she got killed on the road and the animals had not been weaned. I do not like killing animals so I did not drown them that night. I went to bed and thought, what will I do about these kittens, because she is going to pressure me to drown them tomorrow morning? Being a good doctor, I said to myself, if I put some milk in a syringe with a nipple on it, can you feed kittens? Guess what? You can; they like it.
So I fed these kittens for two and a half days and got my daughter to call the vet to see if they had bottles and nipples for kittens. They had bottles, nipples and formula for kittens.
It is a long story, but we kept the one kitten for ourselves, to grow him into being a barn cat. However, I had already socialized him so badly that he was not going to be a barn cat. He would retreat up to the church when we were not there for security. Finally, the local farmer said, "You had better do something with that cat. He is not a barn cat," so he was adopted into the family. Guess who was his adopted parent? Me. I would sit down to read and work and the cat would be up in my lap, purring. I would leave and he would sit there. That was our chair. It taught me a lot about attachment. When he reached the age of 20, he became blind and deaf. I said we should take him to the vet and have him put down. However, I had turned my kitchen into a geriatric cat ward. This animal could come in and find me and get on my lap.
I realized that there are multiple sensing pathways at play. He had my smell embedded in him early that allowed him to track me. That said to me, this early period of life is pretty crucial on how you apply the sensing pathways.
When you go into a for-profit daycare centre and you see crappy interaction with the infants and toddlers, you know that they are not driving the multiple sensing pathways involved.
The Swedes did a longitudinal study on males. They looked at verbal skills development in the very early period of life: infants, toddlers, et cetera. They then looked at their development through the school system and whether they got caught in the teenage violence story. About 25 per cent of the males who had poor verbal skills development in the period of 6 months, 12 months and 24 months ended up in the criminal justice system as teenagers. At the time, the knowledge base was not where it is today. The Swedes interpreted this that they were in the criminal justice system because they could not understand the laws because they were poor in literacy. They knew that literacy is set up by what happens in early life.
That is when I came down to speak with your people in New Brunswick. I said the Swedes have bombed this. How do kids learn the basic brain functions that are important for literacy and language? It is because of the early inputs. You cannot work with an infant or toddler without holding it. Guess what pathways you are driving? It is like my ancient cat. Smell, touch and all those other things drive the stress pathway development.
Coming back to the story that you have from Quebec, crappy daycare is damaging to children. The research is probably chicken poop — pardon my language. I am blunt. I am sick and tired of academics who cannot get it right because they do not understand developmental neurobiology. That is how they get screwed up. Pardon me. I hope that helps you understand the situation.
Ms. McCain: The observations that Senator Trenholme Counsell made in New Zealand are extremely important. They include the long-term plan, consolidating their plan under one ministry, with which Dr. Mustard will agree — and a powerful ministry. They have chosen education and that is a good place. The high education of staff and paying them well, as I mentioned in my presentation, is extremely important. You mentioned that they have the big box businesses, but those are following strict criteria. Canada is not ready. We do not have those criteria in place yet. The big box businesses are moving in under much looser guidelines.
Regarding the University of Toronto study, I am very familiar with that. I heard Dr. Baker, who is part of the same team. I followed him in making a presentation. They also said that they could find no physical, nutritional benefits to breast-feeding. They know nothing about attachment theory. These are a group of economists. The research has been strongly refuted by reputable psychologists, developmental scientists, and other economists as well. We do not put a lot of weight on that.
Dr. Mustard: Heckman is a Nobel laureate for doing brilliant work. He understands his subject better than 99.9 per cent of economists. He has been able to link the neurobiology to studies, and he went to visit the rhesus macaque primate colony in Washington to study the biology seen there in terms of humans. Only trust economists who have a good biological science background.
Senator Fairbairn: I do not think there is a word either one of you has said that everyone around this table would not support. Indeed, almost everyone around this table, in one way or another, has been working in the area of literacy before coming here, or since coming here.
One of the difficulties in this issue is that a lot of people do not really believe, in this caring country, that this foundation issue you have been talking about really exists. If it does, it really is not a federal issue, it is an education issue. My question for you, Dr. Mustard, is do you ever have an opportunity to, or would you, sit down with a leader or a prime minister and tell your story?
There is not any particular political brand to this. Clearly, from what you have said today, as you have heard in other countries, if we are to create a great surging wave in dealing with this situation, where do we go? Where can we get you to go to tell the story that you have told us today?
It is a very powerful story and it is almost overwhelming. When you put literacy and learning together, people often just do not really believe in it.
I bet you if you sat down with the current Prime Minister, who not only is very supportive of education, but he also is a great cat lover, you would get along. There is a sense of frustration that sometimes you need to get up there to the very top and sell the issue. Without that kind of support, it is very hard to get this issue actively going in the way and in the depth that we all would want it to go.
Dr. Mustard: I will talk to anyone as long as they are prepared to listen.
I had the two pictures from the Ottawa Citizen about the Prime Minister and his kittens. I have two office cats called Betsy and Bailey. I decided I would send him a letter, signed by Betsy and Bailey and myself, recognizing that kittens need help. We were pleased to see that he was interested in early kitten development.
I put my point in that the same thing is true for human beings. I got a reply from someone in his office. Betsy, Bailey and I were pleased that we got the letter in and got a reply. I think you are right about what you have to do.
The reason that South Australia has been able to move is that the premier stood up and said "We will put early childhood learning centres within our primary schools." That converted the state to moving on these issues. All the different turfs amongst the communities that work in early childhood create a chaotic mess. One thing this announcement did was that all of a sudden they came together.
When I was doing my work in the Adelaide residency, they all said to me, "Can you get the government of South Australia to create a whole-of-government approach to support programs for early childhood development?" They are going through that process now. There is a huge role for the leadership politically, and for our parties across the country to do this. I think it would be fantastic if you could get the Prime Minister of Canada to take a leadership role in that movement. That would be dynamite for the country.
Senator Fairbairn: I certainly would be eager to get together with others to help do that.
Ms. McCain: We did have the ear of two former prime ministers, and we did have a national child care plan, and we did have agreements with 10 provinces. You probably know it was not easy to get there. It was the beginnings of that national plan that we envisioned. I would like to change the name. We have met with the current Leader of the Opposition, and he does understand it. If you can open the door to the current Prime Minister, we would appreciate it. We have not been able to get there.
Senator Callbeck: Thank you very much for coming today. Certainly we are very privileged to have both of you. You make a compelling and powerful case, as Senator Fairbairn has said, and I sincerely hope you will be able to get to talk to the Prime Minister.
Ms. McCain, there are two or three things in your brief I want to ask you about. On page 4, you talk about income levels and the number of children who turn out poorly. You say at the lowest level, 37.3 per cent turn out poorly. At the highest income level, it is 24.2. Where we have the largest number of children who turn out poorly is in the middle. I really found that strange when I read it. What is that percentage, and why is that?
Ms. McCain: It is in the Early Years Report. Do you have a copy of the Early Years Report? I think it is in Early Years II as well, is it not?
Dr. Mustard: I cannot remember if it is in two.
Ms. McCain: If you combine the percentages in the two middle-income quartiles, the second and the third, you will get a higher number than either of the lowest or the top. In terms of numbers of children, the highest number of vulnerable children is in the middle class.
Senator Munson: The question is why?
Dr. Mustard: Let me try to help you with this. This is an epidemiological expression. This is an exponential expression. You are looking at the total population. If 15 per cent of your population is in poverty, that is only 15 per cent of your population, and if 60 per cent of them are doing well, you can see the proportion of numbers. If you go up to the affluent end, the McCain end, 12 per cent have trouble at that end. That says it is a smaller number, but it is still a number. The largest part of your population is middle class. These relationships are a gradient. If you add up the numbers in the middle class, you have a larger chunk. You are climbing from the lower figure to the higher figure performance, and that is what most people do not actually grasp.
When you do your population health report, you will have to put that in there, Senator Keon, because that is the toughest thing to get people to understand. You must take people through it step-by-step. If they are mathematically inclined, it is okay, but remember that your competence in mathematics was set before you entered the primary school system. That is a tough issue, and it is hard to get across.
Ms. McCain: The message there is that money is not the big risk factor that we think it is. Children do need to be well fed, well housed and well clothed. Their basic needs must be met. Beyond that, you must ask what other needs are not being met? Probably a lot of family functioning is not good. There is probably family abuse. There could be neglect in a rich house. Many rich kids are being neglected emotionally, and it is affecting their neurobiological development. These are the risk factors that have come in, and this is the point we are trying to make. Money will not change the outcomes of these children.
Here we are. It is on page 84. The question of why has to do with nurturance, stimulation, quality of parenting and quality of family functioning.
Dr. Mustard: Let me add to this, because this is an important point. I cannot name him, but you have a very successful businessman from Calgary who is concerned about addiction because he himself has had a problem with alcohol. He has talked to the corporate leadership of this country that within all our major corporations you have addictions problems through alcohol. He knows that the risk of addiction is not lack of will. It is because of dysfunctional neurons set in early life. That is hugely awesome. You can have neglect in affluent families even if they have wealth. You can have successful fathers in the business world who neglect their families. You can have hired caregivers to help who are not competent. The development story requires high quality people. When you put in good early child development programs, which are known to be that way, 80 to 90 per cent of your families will use them, regardless of their financial status.
Ms. McCain: We could spend a whole hour on different kinds of parenting.
Senator Callbeck: You are recommending a system here. You say that you are not advocating universal public funding. I thought I heard a conflict there. You mentioned elaborating on other models. Are there other models? How do you see this system being funded?
Ms. McCain: I think there is room for high income parents to pay the high fees. Many families are paying $300 or $350 a week for in-house caregivers who are not doing the job well, with caregivers who are not well-trained, do not speak the language well and are not stimulating the children. These children would be far better off in high quality early child development centres. A high-income family should be paying fees. They should not get it for free. That is where I come from.
Senator Callbeck: A sliding scale?
Ms. McCain: I believe in a sliding scale. Dr. Mustard will probably kick me under the table.
Dr. Mustard: No.
Ms. McCain: There are different ways of looking at such a situation. In Quebec, it is $7 a day for those who can pay. There is room for many of those families to be paying a great deal more. I do not think we can afford another universal publicly funded system today. There are other ways of getting at this problem.
Dr. Mustard: Given that that is the possibility, my basic rule is that if you want equity and equality in your society, you must make certain that the program is available to all families with young children. If you can sell that to a mixed system, more power to you. I will be blunt with you: No country has sold that to a mixed system.
In Toronto, we have one girl's private school which has extremely good staff, and they are putting in place an early child development initiative as part of that school system, beginning with the birth of the child. It is very high quality. It is exactly what needs to be done. They have even taken the first, second and third grades and put them on problem- based learning, because that is basically what you are doing with a good early child development program.
Yes, you can do it that way. I am a firm believer that if you are to succeed in the 21st century, you will have to have reasonable equity in your society; you do not have any choice about that. That is what you are competing against. You want reasonable equality in the health and well-being of your population, so the choice is whether you can do this.
As you mentioned, in New Zealand you can be private, but you must abide by the national standards. That is okay. I will accept that. However, not in Australia, where you are allowed to make profit and you have 40 per cent public funding. That is even more disastrous than having a totally publicly funded system.
The other side of the coin is that you must innovate. In my career in government, when I had to run health sciences at McMaster, I was penalized because I could run a more efficient laboratory medicine system to serve the city of Hamilton. Some idiot in the bureaucracy would calculate the cost and the cost savings. Toronto got away with a lot of money and I was penalized for being innovative. I hated government-funded systems at that stage. I just want you to know that.
Senator Munson: Colourful language, Dr. Mustard, that you do not like daycare — scrap it — and that you are sick and tired of government. You talked about the threat of big box child care. You used words like "chicken pooh-pooh" and "crappy" and so on. That is heavy stuff, and it seems to me that you have always thought outside the box.
Our committee did a report on autism, Pay Now or Pay Later. We were thinking outside the box in saying: If you do not pay now, you will pay later for what will happen to these children who are autistic. We hear that this is under provincial jurisdiction and that we cannot do anything about this problem. People are still thinking inside this federal- provincial box, which drives me nuts.
You talk about delivering this early childhood development program, and the universality is mixed in there, yet it can happen in many ways: federal, provincial, local governments, sponsored programs and regulated child care centres which provide developmental programs. With that kind of multi-delivery system, how do we get everyone on the same team and delivering what you want?
Dr. Mustard: In South Australia, which is doing this, you now come up against huge infrastructure problems, no different than building bridges and roads, et cetera. As Senator Trenholme Counsell said, you must now prepare a high quality staff to be able to run the program. That is true of every country that follows this route. It means that you must get your universities and colleges to come together to produce the high-quality staff. You must also have your staff understand developmental neuroscience, because the inputs that you give when you are working with infants and toddlers — the sensing pathways affecting the brain — your staff must understand that.
This is where Lethbridge has an advantage, because it has a superb developmental neuroscience group. They can spin over and affect the programs for child development and education in ways that most districts cannot. If you go to faculties of education, they would be brain-dead on this subject, which is unfortunate.
This requires some institutional restructuring to ensure that the university has the capability and developmental neuroscience which is relevant to all the disciplines in the university, including economics, by the way, as well as health sciences. That is tricky to do because the manpower base in this area is not huge. What you would have to do as a country, if you want to do it, is to think of how you can put stimulation in the system to augment this understanding at the level of the colleges and universities. I think that would be a wise move.
Another issue you need to think about — which we found in South Australia — is that there are people who came in and created daycare centres, in the old language, but basically are running good early child development and parenting functions in the centres. The woman who runs one of these centres is of Italian background. I met her in Adelaide. She does not have a lot of fancy degrees, but if I were setting up a program in my school, I would grab her. You need to set up some kind of a post-graduate training program to upgrade the skills of these people. As you start to go through that process, there are infrastructure costs in creating the manpower or people power. This will not be easy to do unless you can put incentives in the system to do it.
The other thing that is essential in terms of following this route is that it has to be community based, because the most powerful vector of getting people to take part is communities talking to each other.
Finally, you must have an outcome measure. Remember: no data, no problem, no policy. We developed a data system through working on the first report, called the ECDI, or Early Childhood Development Initiative, of which the Government of Canada has been a part. You should know the power of that measurement because it has been done on the whole population of British Columbia. We can show you by district the average performance of the children in those districts. What you get is the debate that we were having, that the more affluent the district the better the performance, but there are still kids who are not doing well. They are called off-diagonals. Why? You can penetrate that study and find out the reasons for it.
The other thing you should know about that study is that it shows clearly our performance as a country in enhancing early child development. It is an outcome measure, and it is a disgrace. I wish you could get that into the Prime Minister's Office, by the way, if you can find a way to do it.
To conclude, our colleagues in Australia have adopted this nationally, which is impressive. That is very impressive. We have not done that in this country.
Second, the people in Western Australia who did this study initially on their population found districts which were middle class that scored far too poorly. They moved in with a special early child development initiative — under which they would now pick up the two-year-olds because they would be testing them three years later — and by way of which they dropped the numbers of vulnerable children entering the school system from 46 per cent to 12 per cent in three years. There is a real benchmark for any politician. We could say that if you have done that, you are actually changing the trajectories in health, learning and behaviour for life. Does that help you?
Senator Munson: Yes, very much. I appreciate that on the training aspect, because it is the same thing in autism. We do not have enough people who are trained properly to deal with autistic children this country.
Dr. Mustard: Remember, the outcome measure is also crucial to move this initiative forward politically.
Senator Munson: You have talked about child care and daycare centres. Senator Cook was just mentioning that you do not see men. We have talked about mothering a lot today and about the whole issue of family. Where is the role of the father in this early childhood development? I am serious about that, because if you are talking about family and community based services, then dad is actually someplace else in this whole equation.
Ms. McCain: Not necessarily.
Senator Munson: Well, most of the time.
Dr. Mustard: You should ask my son in Cape Breton. I had six children, and he can tell you whether I, as a father, was any good or not. He is pushing this agenda in Cape Breton, by the way. His name is Jim Mustard. You might want to talk to him. He would be an interesting character to talk to.
Basically, my help in this, which is a trivial matter, is that I took my children on Sundays and looked after them. I had to beware, because my wife was looking after me and six children, and it is not an easy thing to do.
The parental leave policy is interesting. Some countries provide 18 months' parental leave with income support. The first six months are for the mother and the next twelve months can be shared between the mother and the father. You need to also think through that as part of your infrastructure.
The Chair: The next questioner is Senator Cordy from Nova Scotia.
Senator Cordy: Thank you for attending here this morning. It has been a fascinating discussion. I thank you for sharing your thoughts with us and with the audience on TV. As a former elementary school teacher, and kindergarten and primary teacher for a number of years, I am convinced that the whole issue of early childhood development cannot ever be overstated. It is so very important.
Both of you spoke about the need for high quality child care. Dr. McCain, you talked about big box child care. The sad part is that parents in Canada are so desperate for child care that, at this point in time, I have no doubt that there will be a big uptake on that service. My husband's nephew turned down a job promotion in Toronto because the waiting list for child care was over six months. We have all heard stories about that. Unfortunately, those types of big box child care centres will be used.
You both talked about a high quality, evidence based and child development system for Canada. We were at least at the starting gate with Ken Dryden. However, that will not happen now, and it certainly appears it will not happen in the foreseeable future. I look at the mindset of the Canadian public in addition to politicians. I think the driving force for the politicians is the public. In order to have quality child development, we need quality people running it. Yet we insist on paying our workers who are looking after young children minimum wage. We want them well qualified and to have university degrees or even two or three years' training, but I am not sure the retention rate can possibly be that high. In Nova Scotia, Mount Saint Vincent University offers a wonderful early childhood degree, but then these young people who are graduating and trying to pay off student loans are only making minimum wage.
How do we change the mindset of people so that early childhood development becomes important and so that the people who are cleaning the child centres are not getting paid more than the professionals looking after the children?
Ms. McCain: How to do it? I guess just continue to do what we are doing. This is part of our ongoing initiative. It is one stream that I mentioned in my presentation, namely, elevating the status, the education and the remuneration of early child professionals. They must be brought up to the same level as teachers. They have to be included, eventually. That is a work in progress. It is not easy. We have a lot of professional barriers to work through.
There have been some examples at our first duty sites, where they managed to blend the two professionals together; that is, teachers and ECEs. Paying them is also an issue. We must get that across to governments. That is an ongoing work in progress. That is part of the initiative. Yes, many of the community colleges are moving towards offering degree programs. The community colleges in Toronto that are giving ECE diplomas are now developing their curriculum to move into a degree program. This, too, is a work in progress.
What was the first part of your question?
Senator Cordy: It was about changing the mindset, because it must come from the community.
Ms. McCain: That comes with knowledge transfer. We have a huge amount of work to do and there are not that many of us doing it. If I could clone Dr. Mustard and move him across the country, then we would move mountains. We have great momentum going in the East because of Dr. Mustard. He is a star. How many of us are stars at age 81?
Dr. Mustard: Do not give my age away!
Ms. McCain: He gets standing ovations. We have had three huge conferences in the East. About 600 people turn out to hear this man and he gets a standing ovation every time. At Mount Allison last year, the feedback on the survey from the 400 people attending his conference was: We need more Fraser. We want to hear more Fraser. That is part of knowledge transfer.
We are doing this without federal government support — we have lost that. However, there is momentum in many pockets across Canada which is encouraging. My family are putting money where their mouth is. In our family foundation, we have made early child development the single mission of the foundation. One day, it will be a significant foundation. It is not as big as we would like it to be now, but we will be able to do something. Part of the mission will be building community capacity.
To go back to your question, yes, we must think outside the box and communities must be engaged first. There is a role for the federal government and for provincial governments, but bringing together all the patchwork equity of activities that are going on at the community level is important. There is a document that talks about moving from chaos to cohesion and getting all the people actually involved. As part of the patchwork quilt, we are trying to pull them together and to have them working together at the community level.
Certain component pieces are sacred. However, within that, communities must deliver that service according to their own need, whether it is rural or urban or multicultural. We cannot have a cookie cutter, but we can and do have component pieces that address developmental needs.
There is activity now. I am excited about what is happening in Eastern Canada, where probably the greatest need exists. It is all happening at the community level, but, suddenly, the provincial government has come in and wants to do something. We have activity in the premier's office and activity on the ground in the communities. We will start to build on strengths to show other communities how it can happen.
Dr. Mustard: To add to that, the $18.5-billion figure I gave you for a universal early child development and parenting program includes high-quality staff, paid at least at the same rates as the primary school teachers. Also, it includes subsidized parental leave for 18 months. That is what the cost is for the program. You can say that is a lot of money, but look at the downstream cost to society if you do not do it. That is why you need an economist like Jim Heckman to meet with you, because I am not sure most of our economists understand this situation, although there are some young ones coming along now.
Further about movement, the Government of South Australia put together nine public servants under the age of 30. They came from different departments and they were asked to talk with me. They were then to propose to the Government of South Australia what should be done. They were young and they were not entrenched in any particular turf or discipline, but their report is very similar to my report. That is another strategy you might want to think about.
If you take the encumbrances that you have with people with professional careers who have been there I long time, should you now start to move on the younger people in your governing structure if you want to move the agenda? I think you should. You are a bunch of old fogies. You can champion that, Senator Keon.
Senator Cook: Thank you both for challenging my brain this morning.
Much has been said, and I will read it all on page 9 in your report. I come from the province of Newfoundland and Labrador, where our premier has embarked on a 10-year social strategic plan that encompasses many things, including early childhood development. I will limit my question to leadership.
Dr. Mustard, you said that you did not know how, because you are not a politician. Well, the challenge of this committee is to put forward the recommendations that will send a clear message based on reality. Who takes the leadership on this? What are the trigger points where we move from chaos to cohesion? Will national standards be one? I know I seem to be answering my own question now. Will national standards be a possible trigger? Will education be the trigger for the people who work in those systems? Where are the profit and the not-for-profit organizations? What are the trigger points that will take this committee, in preparing direction in a report, from chaos to cohesion? If you could leave with us one or two points, that would be helpful.
Dr. Mustard: I will try. You are asking a fundamental question. To pick up on a point Ms. McCain made, we set up the council because I am one person. I cannot criss-cross the country continuously. I move back and forth across this country pretty frequently. This last week, I was in Alberta and British Columbia, doing this kind of thing. Now, I can only do so much traveling.
That is why the council has set up a program of fellows, people from communities who want to be partners with us, whom we help to articulate the understanding in the community. They interact with the politicians, as we know from Ms. McCain — talking about the Maritime Basin — they talk to each other. I am pleased that the Government of New Brunswick, I think got the other two governments to come together. I may be forgetting, but the Council of Ministers of Education is having a webcast in the middle of April. New Brunswick wants me to give a webcast from Saint John, across the country. That says that there is obviously some take-up in the government and they are now exploiting their own electronic media to move it forward.
To come back to your question: We need to look where there is receptor capacity and move in with it and have people who understand it that can work in a community. My son, who is a homesteader in Cape Breton, is a champion of this. He even gets into New Brunswick and to P.E.I. He does not get to Newfoundland because that is a little harder. He would be listed as living in poverty by our scales. However, he is a homesteader in exquisite circumstances in a high- quality place that I could not afford to create for myself. Therefore, you need to find these individuals across the country. We now have a number of them who are prepared to do this. Then we must facilitate the governing structures to understand it because, if you can get enough movement in your communities, then politically it becomes possible for the governments to do something.
Senator Cook: Thank you. I was also part the Cuban experience and it was wonderful. It was a big learning curve for me. I have been pre-occupied ever since; their society is organized so differently from ours. I am still searching for elements that will be of relevance for my country.
Ms. McCain: One thing that catches people's attention is their literacy scores versus ours. We are spending so much money on education, and look at our results. Look at Cuba, one of the poorest countries in the world, and look at their literacy and life expectancy. These are triggers that actually capture people's attention. Every time you throw that out, people sit up and take notice. Forty-two per cent of Canadians are functionally illiterate, and science indicates that it is directly linked to what happens in the early years.
On the topic of looking for leaders: You can go back to our home province and you will find a leader. In New Brunswick, it was partly Jim Mustard who captured the attention of both the Minister and Deputy Minister of Health. All it takes is a spark; they light that fire and move it around. That is sort of what has happened. They want to do something. You must look around to see who will be that champion within your province.
Senator Cook: There is some stress around for-profit and not-for-profit daycare centres in my province, and maybe so in the other parts of Canada. How do we resolve that? Surely there must be a way for them to peacefully coexist. Would we look to national standards or a licensing body? Where would we look for that? I believe we need them both.
Ms. McCain: It is a dialogue we have had with the former government. I still am of the opinion the public money should not go into for-profit. We cannot suddenly eliminate the for-profit, but I do believe strongly that they cannot march to a profit agenda. They have to march to a criteria and outcomes agenda for children. That has to be paramount; the child has to come first, as they do in the independent school system.
My children are at high-quality, independent schools and we do not get a penny of government money but we march to government standards. That has to exist in the for-profit in early child development.
It can happen, but we are not ready for the big box. We do not have the criteria in place yet. If we let them in and then try to grandfather criteria into the system, we will have a tough time. However, then they cut back on the number of diapers they put on their children. They will not change them — from the time they first come in until after lunch. They are economizing on the amount of diapers they use. So what if they get diaper rash? That is a small example.
Dr. Mustard: I would like to add to this discussion. I am a physician, as is your deputy chair. In the mid-1880s, London was plagued by a lot of gastrointestinal disease — cholera. Public health officials said "Something is causing this distribution." At this time, London did not have a universal water or sewage system. Eventually, Dr. John Snow worked it out that the Broad Street pump was causing the spread of this disease. He did not know quite why, but he understood that it was there that it was happening. Eventually they realized that it was because the water from the pump was spreading bacteria. From that point on, all civilized societies provide publicly supplied water. You pay for it, but systems are in place because you cannot afford to damage the population.
If you look at early child development in the same way as trying to improve the quality of the population which you do not want to damage, it is no different than the concept of investing publicly in a strategy to ensure that all of your population is protected from disease. You can still have your own private water and sewer system in London if you want.
However, The Economist, a magazine which is not known to be left-of-centre but, rather, right-of-centre, in its article on this subject three or four years ago, wrote that because early child development is crucial for overall development, it should be publicly financed. I thought that was stunning. The magazine said that if societies have learned how to publicly fund public education — and have private education feeding into it but set to the same standards — then that will work.
That is the way you have to go at this situation. This is a universal need for society. We do have differences in income, and you do not want it to become so bureaucratic that you cannot be flexible. Therefore, you want some private sector support against the standards running because that can innovate sometimes better than a publicly funded system. A kind of clever balance like that is the way to do it. Now that Newfoundland is about to become rich with money, you have a chance to lead the rest of the country.
Ms. McCain: I will speak to the first duty site in Toronto that had been evaluated to monitor. There were five, though four have now been taken over by the provincial government. One is still independent but it is under the umbrella of the Institute for Child Study at the University of Toronto. We are learning so much from them about how to implement and develop a high quality environment.
The high quality really comes back to what Dr. Mustard picked up in New Zealand: The quality of the staff; the nurturance and stimulation that they provide. We are learning so much about how to break through professional barriers and how to work with parents.
Fathers do deliver the children in the morning and pick them up at night and talk to the caregivers. We have not figured out how to get fathers to breast feed yet, but they can do a lot of cuddling, touching and reading. This is critically important. We talk about parents. We do not talk necessarily about mothers. However, mothers' health in utero is critical as is the health of the first year in breast-feeding. I was all over the map on that statement.
The Deputy Chair: Thank you so much. This has been an absolutely rare opportunity. We are so pleased to have had you here. You have enriched all of us a great deal. As I mentioned, I really do want to spend some real time with Dr. Mustard and he has been good enough to allow me to come down and spend time with him.
Dr. Mustard: I will not "allow." I demand that you come.
The Deputy Chair: I will do what I am told.
Honourable senators, we need to now go in camera and approve two reports that have to be tabled. Dr. Mustard and Ms. McCain, we would invite you to join us for lunch in the adjacent room. Dr. Mustard, I will see you before I go to the chamber.
The committee continued in camera.