Cities and Child Care Policy in Canada: More than a Puppet on (Intergovernmental) Strings?
The need for public financial support for non-parental child care arrangements has grown with the rise in women’s labour force participation across OECD countries. In Canada, women’s labour force participation started to increase even in the postwar heyday of the male breadwinner family, but it began really to take off in the 1970s. By 2006, the labour force participation rates of Canadian women in their prime childbearing years (25–44) stood at 81.8 percent.1 Although it is possible primarily to allow markets to respond to the growing need for child care, doing so produces a highly unequal system, because child care is a very labour intensive social service. In a market-based system, even middle class families will rarely be able to purchase a space in a centre staffed by child care professionals.2 Governments thus have an important role to play, though they can do so in quite different ways. Sometimes governments focus on the demand side by providing information to parents and/or offering subsidies to low income families. In its study of early learning and child care, Starting Strong, the OECD made it clear, however, that “a public supply side investment model, managed by public authorities, brings more uniform quality and superior coverage of childhood populations … than parent subsidy models” (2006, 114).
More broadly, a holistic child care policy needs to combine a coherent national framework (backed by adequate financial support) with meaningful devolution to local authorities (OECD 2006, chapter 2; Mahon and Collier 2009). Canada clearly does not meet the OECD’s governance criteria. Most studies focus on the absence of a coherent national framework while ignoring the issue of devolution to local (not provincial) authorities. The “invisibility” of local arrangements is not surprising. The passage of the Canada Assistance Plan (CAP) (1966) contributed to the centralization of responsibility for child care and other services in the hands of the provinces. This was very much in line with the trend to “benign neglect” of the urban that prevailed during much of the Keynesian era in Canada (Bradford 2002, 19). As Jenson and Mahon argue, “Federal-provincial relations have continued to develop since modern social policy was put into place in the 1940s, but the significance of Canada’s overwhelmingly urban population growth since the 1960s has yet to translate into renewed governance practices that include municipal governments” (2002, 1).
The replacement of CAP by the Canada Health and Social Transfers fund (CHST) in 1996 seemed to mark the commencement of an even more province-centred era, with the federal government all but abandoning the use of its spending powers to influence provincial policies.3 Political pressure to “invest” in early childhood education and care in order to establish the foundations for lifelong learning did lead to a new series of federal-provincial agreements, culminating in the Martin government’s bilateral accords with all ten provinces. One of the Harper Conservative government’s first acts, however, was to announce its intention to withdraw from these accords. Its “universal child care plan” included the payment of a taxable benefit of $1,200 per annum per child under six and a new child care spaces initiative. The latter amounts to $250 million per annum, substantially less than the $650 million transferred in 2006–07 under the bilateral accords (Beach et al. 2009, xxii). The spaces initiative also allows the provinces and territories even greater latitude than before in determining how the money will be spent. It thus reinforces the province-centred patchwork of child care arrangements.
This chapter will begin with a review of these developments, but since the real focus is on the frequently neglected local dimension, it will do so in a way that brings out the impact of differing provinciallocal arrangements. The second section of this paper will accordingly examine what happens at the local level in four of Canada’s largest cities. This comparison will explore what determines local capacity for integration, as well as the limits to such initiatives posed by the patchwork of provincial provision. In two cities – Toronto and Calgary – the municipalities have an officially mandated role in managing child care, though Calgary’s is limited to care for school-aged children. Despite the absence of an official role for Vancouver, the municipal government has developed the foundations for an integrated child care system. In all three, cities are revealed to be more than puppets on intergovernmental strings. Montreal is located in the province that has gone the farthest toward meeting demand for child care for preschool and school-aged children. The municipality, however, has no official role. Local integration, to the extent it occurs, takes place at the scale of the neighbourhood.
FROM LOCAL CHARITY TO PROVINCE-CENTRED PATCHWORK
Child care was initially a local affair. The first day nurseries were established in the late nineteenth century by local charities concerned about the children of mothers whose family circumstances forced them to work. Catering largely to middle class children, kindergartens, whose purpose was seen as educational, were also local. Often started as small enterprises, they were later integrated into the school system. The difference in the respective roles of day nurseries and kindergartens was reflected in differences in governance structures. Until well into the postwar period, in most provinces day nurseries continued to be provided by local associations, including family day care providers. Kindergartens were increasingly drawn into the purview of provincial departments of education, which mandated local school boards to offer such programs, often on a part-time basis. As part of the school boards’ revenue came from the local tax base, however, the boards could decide to exceed provincial requirements. In other words, there was a balance of provincial and local involvement. Municipal recreation programs play a role, especially in delivering after-school and holiday programs for school-aged children.
During World War II, the federal government temporarily became involved, financing day nurseries for mothers working in war-related industries in large centres like Toronto and Montreal. As soldiers returned from the war, the federal government assumed mothers would return to their domestic responsibilities and withdrew its support.4 Yet the return to the home was never as complete as expected and, in the late 1950s, the Women’s Bureau of the federal Department of Labour began to document the rising need for day care (Finkel 1995; Mahon 2000). In the 1960s, local social planning councils in Canada’s major cities joined the growing chorus of voices calling for publicly supported day care. The federal government’s response came in the form of two key programs. One was the introduction of the child care expense deduction, an income tax deduction available to parents who could provide a receipt. Such receipts, however, were not always easy to come by. Even today, much of the affordable child care is provided by the informal sector, where receipts are often unavailable. The second program was the Canada Assistance Plan (CAP), a cost-sharing program with the provinces whose main purpose was poverty alleviation. Child care became eligible as a remedial program to enable mothers in low income (often lone-parent) families to “choose” work over social assistance.5 Through CAP, the federal government agreed to fund 50 percent of the subsidies made available to low income families. In other words, federal support focused on the demand, not the supply, side and it was narrowly targeted at those who could pass a provincially administered means test.
There was another dimension to CAP that is often overlooked: the development of provincial administrative capacities. In the spirit of the times, CAP aimed to guarantee all Canadians, no matter where they lived, equivalent social rights, but it did so by strengthening provincial capacities. CAP was thus designed to reinforce earlier province-building initiatives, such as the system of equalization payments to have-not provinces introduced in the 1950s to compensate for their weaker tax base. Those who framed CAP recognized the need to enrich this system specifically in the field of social assistance and related services since they were aware of on-going provincial inquiries that were redefining the relationship between provincial and municipal governments in recognition of the inability of municipal governments to meet growing social needs.6 CAP thus offered a financial inducement for the development of provincial administrative capacity to deliver an equitable social assistance system and to support community services such as child care for which there was a growing need.
Initially only Ontario and Alberta were prepared to utilize CAP funds to finance the expansion of child care. In Ontario, this was because of the legacy of Toronto’s struggle to keep the day care system it had developed during the war – set out in the Ontario Day Nurseries Act of 1946, which specified standards that had to be met to receive provincial funds. When CAP was enacted in 1966, Ontario was still the only province to have developed a regulatory system. In the mid-1960s, however, Alberta passed its Preventive Social Services Act, which allowed funds to flow to the municipalities to support services such as child care.7 Other provinces began to develop the means to finance and regulate child care only in the 1970s (Pence 1992). None but Ontario and Alberta, however, viewed this as a partnership with municipalities. Moreover, as the 1970s drew to a close, Alberta assumed control over child care for pre-school children.8
The idea of a pan-Canadian child care policy, based on the principle of universality, was placed on the agenda by the Royal Commission on the Status of Women, which recognised that such a program was required to establish equality of opportunity between the sexes. All mothers needed the kind of support a publicly subsidized child care system could offer if they were to become equal to men. The commissioners made it clear that this required the removal of child care from CAP, because of the latter’s “welfare” orientation. The commission was also mindful of jurisdictional issues, however. In line with the thinking behind CAP, the commission agreed that municipalities “where public pressure for the opening of a centre is applied” (1970, 269) did not have the resources required to meet the rapidly growing demand. It saw the provinces as being in the best position to assume responsibility for planning the development of a network of child care centres, the establishment and enforcement of standards, and the provision of information and consultative services to parent groups and local communities. They could not do the job on their own, however. A National Day Care Act was needed to provide an appropriate framework and incentives for provincial action.
The first National Conference on Day Care in 1971 similarly envisioned a comprehensive and integrated service managed by provincial boards that would bring together representatives from health, education, and social welfare, as well as users. Yet the majority report lacked the commission’s boldness of vision. Instead of new federal legislation, it simply called for the establishment of a federal Office of Child and Family Affairs within Health and Welfare. The office would be in charge of funding, including guidelines for the use of federal funds to ensure the provinces adopted optimal standards; the provision of consultant services; and sponsorship of research on child development. The second and third recommendations were enacted but not the first, which was the most important. In other words, no national standards were adopted. The majority report’s position on local involvement, however, reflected greater awareness of the role municipalities might play in managing the development of an integrated set of services at the local level, but this recommendation was ignored. Instead, the establishment of provincial regulatory capacity went hand in hand with centralization. Municipalities were to disappear from subsequent designs for a new governance system until the opening years of this decade.
Lacking the endorsement of the child care advocates assembled at the conference, those fighting to implement the commission’s ideas within the federal bureaucracy had to abandon the idea of a national day care act, opting instead for incremental change (Mahon 2000). In the memorandum to federal cabinet that marked the distillation of the royal commission’s recommendations, the idea of a new national child care grant was rejected, along with the commission’s call for a national child care act. The memorandum was equally clear that the choice to continue to fund child care through the CAP meant the rejection of universality: “While universally available services are probably desirable, federal support for such services under the CAP should be related to the objectives of the Plan, namely the prevention and removal of the causes of poverty and dependence.”9
There were some modest improvements to the original policy through the addition of a “welfare services” option, which involved the use of an income test rather than the intrusive means test. Moreover, funds supplied under this route could be used to cover operating costs and equipment and materials. Consequently, funding was available only to non-profit centres, which created a modest bias in favour of the latter,10 which tend to offer a higher standard of care than their commercial counterparts. In addition, the definition of eligible families allowed for the introduction of a sliding fee scale. Provincial social assistance rates, adjusted to take into account family size, marked the turning point, after which families would have to pay a portion of the costs. The “benchmark” family was defined as a family of four with two children whose income was not more than the average income of a family of that size in the province. Anyone earning more than that would not be eligible for a subsidy.
By the early 1980s, the main features of Canada’s child care governance structure were well established. The federal government was prepared to cover 50 percent of the costs for eligible expenses, while the provinces were responsible for licensing and training, the enforcement of standards, and labour relations. Because there was no ceiling on federal funding under CAP,11 the provinces determined the rate of expansion, which left Canada with an uneven patchwork of care since not all provinces were equally able and willing to expand regulated child care. This situation is reflected in the pattern of coverage. Quebec has the highest coverage rate for children twelve and under in regulated child care spaces (36.1 percent), where the province has played a particularly active role in promoting the expansion of child care. There is a big gap between it and the next provinces, Manitoba (15.5 percent), British Columbia (15.4 percent), Alberta (13.7 percent) and Ontario (13.6 percent). With regulated centre-based care for only 6.3 percent of children twelve and under, Saskatchewan has the lowest level of provision (Beach et al. 2009, table 9, 183).
The inadequacies of this framework were highlighted by the report of the Abella Royal Commission on Equality in Employment (1984) and thoroughly documented in the Cooke Task Force on Child Care (1986). The task force argued that the federal government should use its spending power to develop a comprehensive, high-quality system accessible to all who wanted it. At the same time, it hesitated to challenge provincial rights, noting that “while we share the objectives of those who recommend national standards … we believe that, because primary responsibility for regulation and licensing of childcare rests with the provinces, the federal government should act with restraint when considering the imposition of conditions on federal funding” (Cooke 1986, 287).
The Cooke Task Force, which had been set up by a Liberal government, reported to the recently elected Conservative government led by Brian Mulroney. He was prepared to pass a child care act that would remove it from under the “welfare” shadow but doing so would have come at a price. Commercial providers would have become eligible for the full range of federal funding and a cap placed on federal contributions. The Conservatives’ bill failed to get through parliament before the 1988 federal election was called, however, and, given the widespread opposition it had aroused, the new Mulroney government did not bother to revive it.
Although the victory of the Chrétien Liberals in 1993 seemed to promise another opening, the actions of the first Chrétien government appeared to end all hope for a pan-Canadian child care system. The Liberal party had campaigned on a promise to allocate $720 million for the creation of 150,000 new spaces over three years, to be funnelled through CAP. There were two provisos, however: the money would flow if the annual growth rate was at least 3 percent per annum and if provincial agreement could be attained. The intent was that the federal government would cover 40 percent of the costs, provincial governments another 40 percent, and parents the remaining 20 percent, according to their ability to pay. Although the Chrétien government’s first budget suggested it would deliver on its promises, the February 1995 budget eliminated the initial allocation, rolling it into a new investment fund explicitly tied to assisting employability. CAP was replaced by the new Canada Health and Social Transfer fund (CHST), a block fund that let the provinces decide how to allocate the money. In other words, provincial investment in child care was no longer required to get the equivalent in federal funds. Finally, the budget cut the federal government’s contribution to the transfer by one-third over three years. Those arguing for child care at the provincial level now had to compete with high-profile programs like health care and education for scarce resources.
Another blow to hopes for an adequately funded pan-Canadian child care program came in 1996 when the federal government unilaterally declared that it would not use its spending power to create new programs in areas of exclusive provincial jurisdiction without the consent of a majority of the provinces.12 In the new era of federal-provincial relations thus inaugurated, the Cooke Task Force’s cautious advice concerning the federal government’s use of its spending power to establish a pan-Canadian program began to look bold indeed.
Yet child care was soon back on the agenda. In part, this reflected the government’s concern to reduce child poverty and to “activate” those on social assistance. This view had begun to take hold during the government’s social security review and was reflected in the decision to roll the previously allocated child care monies into the new “employability” investment fund. From this perspective, child care was seen as a support for turning “unproductive” individuals (including lone mothers on social assistance) into productive labour force participants and a means of counteracting the effects of poverty on child development. While this conception of child care seemed to lead back to the “welfare” (now “workfare”) orientation, Canadian experts in early child development, like Fraser Mustard and Clyde Herzberg, helped to convince the federal government that all children could benefit from “investment in the early years.” This new understanding came as the establishment of the Social Union Framework Agreement (SUFA) was opening up new possibilities for federal-provincial cooperation.13
Concluded in 1999, SUFA reflected the federal, provincial, and territorial governments’ objectives of renewing Canada’s social programs and establishing a stable and sustainable basis for financing them. Although SUFA codified the federal government’s self-imposed limitation on the use of its spending power, it did re-commit all governments to establish programs of comparable quality across the country. It also promised to put in place a new accountability mechanism – that is, public reporting on agreed performance indicators. Thus the agreement committed each of the signatory governments to monitor and measure outcomes of its social programs, to report regularly to its constituents on their performance, to share information and “best practices,” and to work with other governments to develop comparable indicators. These new accountability procedures were much weaker than the European Union’s “open method coordination,” which works through collectively defined guidelines, combined with timetables for achieving goals and the establishment of quantitative and qualitative indicators and benchmarks.
From the outset, children and child care were central to SUFA’s agenda, since the governments had agreed on the National Children’s Agenda (NCA) before to its conclusion. The NCA outlined the governments’ agreement to work together to develop a comprehensive, trans-sectoral, long-term strategy to ensure that “all” Canada’s children had a real opportunity to develop to their full potential. Although the NCA seemed to speak in favour of universality, the first initiative – the National Child Benefit (NCB) – focused on the child poverty reduction/activation objectives. In particular, the NCB included a new low-income supplement (available to the working poor and those on social assistance). The provinces were invited to “claw back” up to an equivalent amount from social assistance recipients, to be reinvested in support services such as child care. Later items more strongly reflected the “social investment” conception. The Early Child Development initiative (2000) included “the strengthening of early child development, learning and care” as one of the four areas where the provinces and territories could spend the new federal funds.14 True to SUFA, the agreement committed the participating governments to monitor their progress and report back to Canadians. In negotiating the deal, however, the federal government had backed off its original aim – to require the provinces and territories to invest in all four areas – in the interest of getting all the provinces to sign on. Without a requirement to invest in early learning and child care, however, less than 10 percent of the over $300 million in federal funds was used for that purpose.
The Liberal government’s commitment to early learning and child care was more strongly reflected in the agreement concluded with the provinces and territories in 2003, which permitted the provinces and territories to select from a broad menu of child care expenditures. They included demand side options (information provision, fee subsidies, quality assurance systems) and supply side alternatives (capital and operating grants, training and professional development, and wage enhancements).15 In turn, the provinces agreed to provide annual reports on the type of services and amounts spent on each, the number of spaces for children (under six only) in each kind of setting, data on subsidy policy and its reach, training requirements, child-staff ratios, and group size. The amount committed – $350 by the fifth year – was well below the 1 percent of GNP (for Canada, $10 billion per annum) recommended by the European Union’s Child Care Network.
In February 2005 a new federal-provincial-territorial agreement on early learning and child care was concluded. It identified the following as central: quality principles, universally inclusive principles, principles of accessibility, and developmental principles (QUAD). The 2005 federal budget allocated $5 billion over five years toward the establishment of a QUAD-based system, and by November 2005 it had negotiated bilateral agreements with all ten provinces. All ten agreements referred to the QUAD principles, and eight of the agreements made it clear that investment would be made in regulated care only.16 All agreements mentioned inclusion of First Nations and Aboriginal children, as well as the need for appropriate programs for minority official-language children, children with distinct cultural and linguistic backgrounds, and children with special needs. The agreements also marked progress toward the constitution of a pan-Canadian framework. For the first time in decades, Quebec agreed to be part of the new child care initiative. Moreover, all agreements indicated a willingness to exchange information with an eye to improving the system as a whole – i.e., using SUFA principles. In the end, however, only three agreements were finalized,17 and all agreements provided for either party to withdraw with one year’s notice. This was one of the first things that the Conservative government, led by Stephen Harper, did.
The Conservative government’s two-pronged alternative included a “universal child care” benefit (UCCB) and a “Child Care Spaces Initiative” that would offer businesses and communities tax incentives to establish twenty-five thousand new spaces. They were quick to implement the first, which reflects the views of social conservatives, who see public investment in child care facilities as “inequitable” because they offer nothing to stay-at-home parents.18 The UCCB offers a taxable benefit of $100 per month for each child under the age of six. It goes to families with a stay-at-home parent as well as to adult earner families, and as originally designed, the benefit offered most to upper income, single-breadwinner families (Battle et al. 2006). In the March 2010 budget, the Conservative government amended the terms so that lone parents can declare the benefit as part of the child’s income and thus avoid paying taxes on it. One- or two-earner couples with the same income, however, continue to pay taxes (Battle et al. 2010).
The Conservative’s original child care spaces initiative tried to break with the system of federal transfers to provinces, which has been the basis for funding child care since the passage of CAP. The Conservatives planned to offer tax incentives to business (and also community groups) to establish new spaces. This plan foundered, however, since consultations undertaken by the Department of Human Resources and Social Development (HRSDC) during the summer of 2006 made it clear that there was insufficient interest. This is not surprising. An earlier scheme launched by the Harris Conservative government in Ontario, had also failed.19 The advisory committee established in the fall of 2006 reiterated the reluctance of business to get involved, though its recommendations clearly reflected the Conservative government’s strong desire to induce it to do so.
In the end, the Conservatives’ February 2007 budget announced the government’s intention to turn $250 million over to the provinces and territories through the Canada Social Transfer. In one sense, this represents a return to the traditional arrangements whereby the federal government contributes to child care programs shaped and managed by the provinces. Yet the Conservatives envisage a more radically province-centred system. According to the minister then in charge, Monte Solberg, there will be few strings attached. The money is to be used for “child care,” but deliberately removed is any reference to QUAD or any sort of national standards. In addition, although the promised funds represent less than one-third of the money that would have been available under the cancelled bilateral agreements, the government made it clear that it is up to the provinces to decide whether they want to invest more in child care, using some of the funds made available “to address the fiscal imbalance.” The Conservative’s stance on child care thus reflects their vision of a new federalism in which the federal government deprives itself of the spending power used during the postwar years to support the pan-Canadian development of a welfare state.
CHILD CARE AT THE LOCAL LEVEL
Canada’s child care system may be province-centred, but services are produced and delivered where people live – in local communities. It is also at the local level that the various pieces of the child care puzzle, notably child care for pre-school and school-aged children, with recreation programs often playing an important part for the latter, come together (or not). This section looks at child care arrangements in four cities – Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, and Calgary,20 where 40 percent of Canada’s population is concentrated. This comparison allows us to examine the impact of varying provincial arrangements on the local level, while also exploring the importance of local politics. As we will see, when it comes to child care, these municipalities, with the exception of Montreal, are “more than puppets on a (provincial) string.” At the same time, the Montreal case shows that provincial policies matter. Montreal’s much higher coverage rate reflects that province’s much higher investment in child care.
Toronto, Ontario
In Ontario, municipalities retained a “welfare services” role even after the passage of CAP. Until the late 1990s, they were not required to develop a child care plan as part of this role, but Toronto has played a role in child care since the 1940s. Its basis was laid under the temporary wartime arrangements mentioned above. When the federal government withdrew its financing, local groups, with the backing of municipal councillors, mobilized to save child care (Prentice 1993). The Ontario Day Nursery Act, passed in 1946, established provincial standards and a framework for cost-sharing with municipalities who were to manage the system. The province’s policy strongly favoured the liberal view that day nurseries were a service for the poor – i.e., not a public service for all who wanted and needed it. For several decades, Toronto’s child care policy looked very much like Ontario’s, albeit with even higher standards. In the 1970s, however, a new policy began to emerge that broke with the liberal orientation not only of its own policy legacies but also of those established by the province and reinforced by CAP.
As a result, Toronto now has the largest child care system in Canada outside Quebec. To achieve this, the municipality has worked with local school boards and others to lay the foundations for a high-quality early learning and child care system, delivered largely by non-profit providers. Its standards consistently exceed provincial guidelines – standards that the provincial government tried to get it to abandon in the 1970s in the interests of “economizing” (Mahon 2005). Most recently, the city has developed a set of operating criteria built on the values of quality, respect for diversity, and parental involvement. The quality of care also depends on the ability to attract and retain qualified care providers, which, in turn, depends on wages and working conditions. Toronto played a pioneering role in this regard when it developed a wage-enhancement policy in the mid-1980s to provide fair wages without sacrificing affordability. Toronto has also been a key driver of innovative pilot projects, including the development of an integrated set of children’s services. Lessons from one of these, First Duty,21 have informed the work of the Mayor’s Roundtable on Children, Youth and Education, which recommended a system of neighbourhood hubs with child care centres as the core of a system of integrated services.
Its governance structure, in partnership with the wider community, facilitates this kind of creative planning. It has had a child care advisory committee since the late 1970s, and in the early 1980s Metro developed a child care plan in consultation with the wider community. In the late 1990s, the city established the position of Children’s Advocate on Council to monitor the implementation of its “children’s strategy.” In 1999, the city collaborated with the Community Social Planning Council of Toronto to identify important service gaps. And in 2003 the Mayor’s Roundtable on Children, Youth and Education was established to advise the mayor and council and engage the wider community. The roundtable brought together twenty-six people representing all levels of government, the two main school boards, business, labour, and child and youth community organizations. In January 2005, city council adopted a set of principles developed by the roundtable, which became the backbone of Best Generation Yet, a ten-year plan for developing a city-wide network of integrated children’s service hubs.
That the province mandated city (or metro) involvement in child care is part of the story, but only part. A key factor was the establishment of a network of support for an integrated child care system, seen as an indispensable element of urban social infrastructure. There is not the space here to detail the steps through which this network became established. Elsewhere I have shown how feminist child care advocates, city officials, and municipal councillors forged a network of support behind a vision of the right of all children to quality child care (Mahon 2005). This breakthrough was facilitated by the existence of a favourable political opportunity structure, which made it possible for parents and other child care advocates to find allies on Metro Toronto Council (Kipfer and Keil 2002).
The network has proved its durability and effectiveness numerous times. In the mid-1980s, it looked as if this model would get much-needed financial support from the provincial government, but when the federal government did not pass the new Child Care Act, the province curtailed its spending plans.22 The local network of child care advocates was strong enough to induce Metro Toronto Council to fill the gap, which meant assuming more than its 20 percent share of the costs. With the election of a neo-liberal government in Ontario in the mid-1990s, the network’s strength was tested again. Once again, Metro23 responded. Toronto Children’s Services developed new ways to expand the local pool of funds while the newly created Children’s Advocate on council kept child care on the municipal agenda and began the development of an integrated “children’s strategy.”
The political mobilizations of the 1970s and 1980s thus left an important legacy in the form of a high degree of cooperation between the city, school boards, child care agencies, and advocates. The city’s children’s strategy also enjoys the support of Toronto’s business elite (Hamel et al. 2005). Toronto has not been able to fully realize its vision, however. Although it has laid the foundations for a child care system based on universal principles, it is still able to provide only spaces for one-fifth of preschool children and as few as 7 percent of school-aged children.24 Its financial dependence on provincial and federal decisions has posed a series of limitations on its capacity to realize its plans, and its vulnerability was made all the clearer when the Conservative government announced its intention to withdraw from the bilateral agreements with the provinces. Toronto had planned to add six thousand new spaces, with one-third of these targeted at poorer, under-serviced communities. Although the Harper government has announced its plans to turn over (reduced) funds to the provinces for child care, the pace of expansion will continue to be limited by decisions of senior governments.
Calgary, Alberta
Alberta, and Calgary as one of its largest cities, almost agreed to participate in the temporary wartime intergovernmental accords to finance the establishment and operation of day nurseries (Langford 2011). Its failure to do so meant that governmental involvement was delayed until the 1960s, with the passage of the Preventive Social Services Act (PSSA)25 and CAP. Yet here, as in Ontario, municipalities became involved as demand for child care began to rise (Hayden 1997; Langford 2006). As with other urban municipalities in Alberta, funds made available through the PSSA enabled Calgary to establish the foundations of a high-quality child care system by the early 1970s. Unlike Ontario, however, the province decided to assume control, gradually eliminating municipal responsibility for preschool child care. As we will see, however, the municipalities retained sufficient room to maintain their distinctive programs. Calgary was able to do so until the local balance of forces shifted, opening the way to unbridled growth of commercial child care. More recently, provincial moves to decentralize operations of the agency responsible for child care and other children’s services – part of a broader trend, especially marked in Alberta – have created new space for the emergence of local partnerships, while provincial cutbacks to social services have made such alliances necessary.
The original cost-sharing arrangement required municipalities to cover 20 percent of the costs. These arrangements gave Alberta municipalities considerable latitude to develop innovative programs. Although all projects had to be approved by the province, and the province expressed a clear preference for provision by private social agencies in order to contain costs (Masson and LeSage 1994, 389), Calgary managed to establish a municipal child care system that operated as “lighthouses” in the field. By the end of the 1970s, it had established fifteen municipal centres and six family child care programs that were linked to them. Like Edmonton, Calgary was recognized at that time for the high quality of its innovative programs offering decent salaries to its qualified staff.
Underpinning its growth was a pattern of alliances roughly similar to that found in Toronto. The city had appointed a daycare counsellor as early as 1969. This appointment established a voice for child care within the municipal bureaucracy, one that was actively supported by both traditional women’s groups such as the Calgary Local Council of Women and by a new generation of feminists centred at the University of Calgary (Langford 2011, chapter 5). Despite the city’s impressive effort, the supply of municipal child care services did not manage to keep up with the rapidly growing demand. As a result, by the end of the 1970s Calgary had developed the largest commercial child care sector in the province, which had organized to represent its interests at the municipal and provincial levels. This development had an impact on municipal child care politics. Thus, when the province adopted a new child care policy in 1978 that involved a turn to portable subsidies tenable at any licensed centre, including commercial ones, Calgary was the first municipality to sign on (Langford 2003, 70).
The city’s social planning department nevertheless remained strongly committed to its “lighthouse” child care centres. Thus, when the province moved to centralize control over preschool child care, leaving the municipalities with responsibility for school-aged children, Calgary continued to back its original centres. To finance this support, it negotiated an innovative “flow through” arrangement that allowed it (and other Alberta municipalities) to get access to CAP funds26 even though the province had withdrawn its support for the preschool programs (Jenson and Mahon 2002). Calgary’s eventual abandonment of the municipal program for preschool children cannot therefore be attributed to provincial dictates. While the province made it more difficult for the system to survive, strong support from the municipal social services department and parent users enabled it to hang on for a decade, despite increasingly fierce attacks from a powerful city councillor and long-standing member of the city’s community services committee. The city abandoned its preschool program only when those opposing the policy managed to push the department’s director into retirement. They were able to do so, moreover, because the civil society organizations that had come to the department’s aid in the 1970s and early 1980s were silent (Langford 2011, chapter 10).
The 1990s was marked by substantial provincial cutbacks and restructuring. With the election of Klein’s Conservatives, the budget of municipal affairs was cut in half, as was funding for kindergarten (Miller 2007, 240). Provincial allocations for regulated child care fell from a high of $67 million in 1995 to $54.3 million three years later and recovered only when the QUAD dollars began to flow (Beach et al. 2009, table 27). In 1999, the province eliminated its system of operating grants to centres, focusing its efforts on the demand side. At the same time, it moved to decentralize administration of its community services and health care programs. Child care is thus now handled by regional child care and family services authorities (CFSAs). The CFSAs report to local boards appointed by the province. Although members are selected from the region, they enjoy a limited degree of autonomy from the provincial government. Under Klein, the province made clear its authority over “decentralized” regional bodies by terminating the election of regional health authorities and firing a medical officer of health for criticizing the government. As Miller argues, moreover, “more common than direct attacks on democratic institutions is the use of resource authorization and allocation powers to bring local governance bodies into line with provincial policy” (2007, 240).
Nevertheless, the municipality retains a role in the system. The city works with the Calgary CFSA through a regional child care committee whose task it is to foster sharing of resources, continuous training, resource development, and mentoring in the city. Yet the way in which child care resources are allocated through each of these separate provincial programs leaves the city with a financial gap, since funds available through the FCSS are sufficient to subsidize only 60 percent of the cost of after-school care. Parents have to cover the remainder, putting after-school care beyond the reach of many low income families. This limited subsidy is well below the level offered to preschool children through CFSA.
Unlike the situation in Toronto, where the municipality plays the role of spider in the web, in Calgary it is the voluntary sector that seems to bring the pieces together. That the lead role in Calgary is played by the voluntary sector is not surprising, since the province has long favoured the voluntary sector over public provision. It is also testimony, however, to the existence of what Miller calls a “place-based … moral community,” one that may have the potential to regenerate support for a different model from the that on offer at the provincial level. Of particular interest is the Calgary Children’s Initiative, started by the United Way. The Children’s Initiative acts as a catalyst, bringing local forces – the various levels of government, community groups, business, labour, and researchers – together to identify the gaps and sponsoring research and pilot projects to learn about how best to fill them. One of these projects is focused on raising the quality of preschool care, long a problem in the now commercially dominated system.27
Vancouver, British Columbia
Unlike the situation in Ontario, in British Columbia municipalities have no official role in the planning and administration of the child care system. To be sure, unlike other municipalities, since 1953 Vancouver has been governed through its own charter, which “gave the city much greater powers of self government than other British Columbian or Canadian cities, which remain subservient to provincial municipal acts” (Punter 2003, 13). Yet the charter neither indicated that social services like child care should form part of the city’s mandate, nor did it provide the resources to finance such a mandate. What makes the Vancouver story so interesting therefore is that despite the lack of a mandate, the city came to play a very active role. In other words, the provision of child care may officially be centralized in the hands of the province, but local resources can be and have been mobilized to increase the municipality’s room for manoeuvre.
The province began to assume control of child care in British Columbia later than in either Ontario or Alberta. The province had been involved in the wartime day nurseries program and although it had begun to license child care in the 1930s, many providers remained outside the system (McDonell 1992). It was not until the passage of CAP that the province began to provide any funding, and even then it was slow to start. Only when a social democratic government was elected in 1972 was overall funding increased, ceilings raised on eligibility for subsidies,28 and funds made available for launching new activities. What funding the province has subsequently been prepared to provide – and this has varied significantly as governments have shifted between left and right in the province – went directly to providers, however. Moreover, although control was centralized in the hands of the provincial government, jurisdiction has long been divided among provincial ministries (McDonell 1992, 32).
Vancouver entered the child care policy field later than either Toronto or Calgary as well. The opening was created in part by the intensive economic restructuring of the 1970s and 1980s, which generated both increased needs (more mothers working in the expanding service sector) and opportunities (redevelopment of the city centre). Yet needs do not speak for themselves. The opening was also created by the emergence of local parties capable of challenging the business and social elite that had governed the city since the 1930s. They opened the way to a new civic activism. As we shall see, in Vancouver there were fertile conditions that child care advocates were quick to seize. Like their Toronto counterparts, they were able to break with the liberal model dominant at the provincial and national levels. In doing so, however, they could rely only intermittently on provincial support.
The city had showed an interest in child care already in the 1970s when, under the leadership of a reform council, it provided some funding for the Coalition for Improved Day Care Services, many of whose members would later go on to found the British Columbia Action Coalition in 1981.29 While this coalition helped child care advocates to develop a common voice, it was the emergence of a favourable political opportunity structure, marked by the emergence of The Electors Action Movement (TEAM)30 and its left-wing counterpart, COPE, that ultimately paved the way for the adoption of Vancouver’s child care policy in 1991. As Hutton notes, the appearance of new political forces at the urban level laid the foundations for the city’s proactive role: “Local policy and planning powers have been deployed in the interests of reproducing Vancouver’s central area via dialectical relations with market actors and with certain social groups. In practice, this has meant accommodating the profitseeking imperatives of capital … and facilitating the emergence of ascendant social contingents, but has also incorporated the insertion of broader public values and needs, including social housing and public amenities” (2004, 1956). One such example is the 1987 planning exercise designed to provide a policy framework for the central area, which included improved “livability” – understood to involve “adequate parks, accessible retail and commercial services, a well-designed public realm, and child care and community facilities” (Punter 2003, 107) – among its priority goals.
Three important breakthroughs were made as a result of these debates. First, the Mayor’s 1988 Task Force on Children resulted in the creation of a Vancouver Children’s Advocate. The advocate, long involved in struggles for child care, produced a civic child care strategy based on the principles of quality, accessibility, and affordability. Among other things, the strategy, which was endorsed by the council in 1990, committed Vancouver to being “an active partner with senior levels of government, parents, the private sector and the community in the development and maintenance of a comprehensive child care system in Vancouver” (Griffen 1992, 97). This commitment would have meant little, however, without a second breakthrough – the appointment of a child care coordinator as part of the social planning department. The coordinator developed the detailed plans supporting municipal action in five key areas: capital programs, child care planning, operating funds and program support, development and administrative support, and advocacy.
Vancouver was able to follow through on these commitments in part because of a third innovation – the invention of developmentcost levies and community-amenity contributions. Although they were introduced by a mayor and council tilted in favour of the old establishment party, the NPA, the presence of a strong left on council contributed to the outcome. As Punter writes, “with all the opposition coming from the political left, he [the mayor] was able to finesse right-wing cuts and convince developers that they had to accept development levies, selective changes to zoning, master planning of major redevelopment and elaborate participatory planning processes in return for large-scale projects and development certainty” (2003, 109). The development cost levies and community amenity contributions played an important role in strengthening the foundations of Vancouver’s child care system. Through the amenity bonuses, developers receive extra density permits if they deliver a child care facility built to the city’s standards. The Vancouver Society of Children’s Centres was created to operate these centres.
Working with community groups and other agencies, the city also supported the foundation of an integrated child care infrastructure. Thus it has contributed to the operations of Westcoast Child Care Resource Centre, an invaluable resource for the local child care community. In the late 1990s, it initiated a “regional umbrella group” (RUG) that brought together over eighteen of the major Vancouver-based child care organizations.31 Over four years, RUG members met on a quarterly basis to develop coordinated responses to common challenges; to strengthen linkages with institutions providing graining, mentoring, and support; and to increase capacity to plan child care services both at the micro (organizational) and macro (citywide) scale. More recently, the city awarded a municipal research and innovation grant to six large child care agencies and the United Community Services Co-op to develop a model for the coordination, recruitment, management, and placement of substitute early childhood educators in licensed child care programs across the city.
In 2004, the city, the Vancouver School Board, and the Parks Board signed a child care protocol that “sets out a framework for the City and the two Boards to work towards a more coherent approach to policies and practices, in order to build a comprehensive range of childhood education and care services,” with equalized access “across the city to a full continuum of care,” including the development of a system of child development hubs.32 This in turn led to the formation of a Joint Council on Child Care, with elected staff representatives from each of the parties, community members from the city-wide networking committee, and the University of British Columbia’s HELP project. The council offers an important vehicle for coordination among these local agencies.
In addition, the city reinstated the office of the child and youth advocate as a complement to the existing child development and youth-focus social partner positions.33 The advocate was supported by a citizens’ advisory committee somewhat akin to Toronto’s Children’s Advocate. The committee brought together a mix of youth and service providers in Early Childhood Development, child care, and youth-serving agencies, along with elected members of the school and parks boards. The first occupant of the post brought her own connections to the wider child care network. She had formerly been executive director of the Simon Fraser University Childcare society, an active member of the Child Care Advocacy Forum, and past chair of the Provincial Child Care Council. In her 2005 work plan, she noted that while the larger child care providers that had been brought together under RUG were well connected, the smaller stand-alone providers needed an information sharing and advocacy network. The Westcoast Child Care Resource Centre was contracted to coordinate this work. Following the election of a conservative mayor, the office of the children’s advocate was once again abolished, however.
Thus, despite the absence of a provincial mandate, Vancouver has been able to establish the foundations for the kind of child care system envisaged in the 1991 plan. The impact of its policies is visible in the high proportion of spaces – 84.2 percent – under non-profit auspices. Vancouver has also done somewhat better than either Toronto or Calgary in providing out-of-school-hours care, although the proportion of six- to twelve-year-olds covered remains rather low at 8.6 percent. More broadly, like Toronto, the municipality has come to operate as a spider in a densely woven web of children’s service providers and advocates. As in Toronto, these achievements represent the fruit of the child care advocates’ efforts to seize a favourable municipal political and economic opportunity structure. In the 1970s and 1980s, the city was being transformed from a centre for processing resources into a post-industrial economy. This transformation generated a need for child care and an opportunity to build it. The economic opening in turn coincided with the appearance of reform-oriented parties ready to take a proactive stance toward the establishment of a strong social infrastructure. Child care activists were able to convince them that children (and working mothers) had a place in this “livable” city.
Nevertheless the limits imposed by developments in provincial and federal policies are also apparent. Despite considerable effort, the overall levels of coverage – 11 percent of children aged twelve and under, 10 percent of preschool children – remain low. Limited provincial funds forced the city to rely on community amenity contributions and development cost levies, which may have exacerbated a problem common to many child care systems in which demand clearly outpaces supply – that is, the concentration of spaces in the new developments that cater primarily to the “post-industrial” urban middle class.34 More recently, following the election of a more conservative municipal council and mayor, the office of the children’s advocate was once again cancelled. In addition, the provincial (neo-)Liberal government reacted to the federal government’s cancellation of the bilateral agreements by capping the child care operating fund program, cancelling the major capital grants program, and drastically reducing the funding for child care resource and referral programs. In fact the government intends to eliminate the latter programs entirely before the end of the year. Needless to say, Westcoast, a crucial piece of Vancouver’s child care infrastructure, has been hit very hard by this decision.
Montreal, Quebec
Of all the provinces considered here, Quebec currently exercises the most control over the development of child care, and since 1997 it has offered the most extensive support, breaking with the liberal pattern that otherwise prevails across Canada. This has not always been the case, however. While day care centres in Montreal received federal funding during the war, the conservative Union National government was not prepared to fund them when the war ended, and there was little local opposition to their position. For the most part, support was limited to the small working class anglophone community, since the francophone community continued largely to rely on family networks for care. Despite the emergence of a strong Quebec feminist movement in the 1960s, child care was not incorporated into the vision of a modern Quebec supported by an active state, which inspired the Quiet Revolution. The provincial government thus ignored the 1968 brief demanding provincial support for a tax-financed non-denominational child care system, which was backed by over one hundred associations (Desjardins 1992).
For a while, grassroots organizations were able to get access to federal funds through programs like Opportunities for Youth and the Local Initiative Projects. The latter enabled local groups to establish over thirty centres in Montreal by 1972, mainly in poorer, working class areas. These early experiments established some of the core features that would later become part of what is now known as the “Quebec model,” notably the emphasis on parent involvement in decision making in non-profit, neighbourhood-based centres and organization at the sub-municipal scale. That model was long in the making, however. The province began to draw on CAP funds for child care only in 1974, and since it chose to make subsidies available to low income parents (and the ceiling was low), not to centres, it did little to help establish a sustainable child care infrastructure.
An important breakthrough at the provincial scale occurred in 1979, when child care got its own Office de Services de Garde à l’Enfance (OSGE). As Desjardins argues, the new structure was given a wide mandate: “Apart from ensuring that quality child care services are available, it also plans the implementation of services in relation to other family policies. Moreover, it is in charge of formulating an annual development plan that takes into consideration the extent of the demand for and viability of the projects submitted. All these tasks must be accomplished while maintaining close contact with the network [of child care providers] since the OSGE must also provide technical and financial support for child care services, centralize information on the issue and circulate that information, provide better staff training, ensure compliance with health and safety rules and so on” (1992, 39). At the neighbourhood scale, another (decentralized) provincial body – the Centres Locales des Services Communautaire (CLSC) – played an important role, working closely with the non-profit child care providers in their catchment areas (Jenson 2002, 315). Yet until 1997, there was no comprehensive provincial or municipal framework to support local initiatives. This was reflected in the uneven access to child care documented by Rose and Chicoine in their 1991 study of access to child care for school-aged children in Montreal inner city neighbourhoods. It was also reflected in the growth of a substantial commercial sector, similar to that found in Calgary.
The implementation of the Parti Québécois government’s 1997 “$5 a day”35 child care program had a dramatic effect on the number of spaces available for preschool children, just as the earlier decision by the Ministry of Education to require school boards to provide care for school-aged children substantially improved access for older children. That Montreal now has spaces in registered child care for 50 percent of preschool children and 40 percent of school-aged children (Mahon 2009) has allowed it to stand out among the cities under consideration here, and it shows the positive impact that a strong provincial policy can have. The core of this program was consistent with the 1970s experiments, since a key role was initially allocated to the non-profit, community-based Centres de la Petite Enfance (CEP), which are responsible to locally elected boards. The share of non-profits in preschool provision is, however, lower that in either Toronto or Vancouver, an artifact of previous years of underfunding and that sector’s political clout.36
Nevertheless, despite Quebec’s substantial commitment to affordable, accessible, quality child care, equitable access remains an elusive goal. Thus Japel et al. (2005) found that children from middle and upper class families were more likely to have a space and in better quality settings than those attended by children from working class families. The latter are often forced to rely on inferior for-profit centres, lower quality family day care, or unlicensed care. This pattern is visible in Montreal where the Conseil Régional de Développement (CRD) documented the difficulty of establishing good-quality family child care in poor neighbourhoods. These results follow in part from the way Quebec planned the implementation of the 1997 policy, which was a “bottom up” process whereby proposals for a centre had to be generated at the neighbourhood level. While funds were made available for groups interested in developing a proposal, and the CRDs were able to work with them on this, it was not sufficient to ensure that enough proposals for centres came forward from poorer communities.
Other actors hold other pieces of the larger child care puzzle. As in Toronto and Vancouver, the school boards form part of the local child care system. While they are responsible for developing plans to ensure equitable education services across their areas of jurisdiction, there are five school boards (three francophone and two anglophone) in the Montreal area. In Montreal, moreover, responsibility for recreation programs, which play such an important role for school-aged children in the holiday months, is devolved to the level of the nineteen boroughs. Given the absence of a city-wide plan, the recreation programs are thus even more unevenly developed across the city (Mahon 2009). These divisions exacerbate the problem of coordination. The OECD’s Babies and Bosses report noted that “the provincial government of Quebec sees a key role for local authorities in developing a new approach towards synchronizing various services so as to support the parental work-life balance on a daily basis” (2005, 129, note 12). There is little evidence of such city-wide capacity in Montreal, however. Neither the municipalities that make up the greater Montreal area nor the CRD’s successors, the CRE,37 seem to be playing an active role in developing such family policies.
This is not to suggest that the local level has been of no import. There has been local involvement, albeit at the sub-municipal scale. Until the Charest government eliminated their coordinating and support role, moreover, the CEPs, working in tandem with the CLSCs, provided an opportunity for integration and voice, though only at the level of the neighbourhood. This emphasis on the neighbourhood can also be seen as a legacy of Montreal’s urban reform wave. As Hamel et al. note, “while urban social movements were numerous in Montreal and were responsible for the election of the Montreal Citizens’ Movement (MCM) to City Hall in 1986 … they were unable to secure new alliances on a metropolitan scale (beyond their neighbourhood scale of action)” (2005, 120). More broadly, equating democracy with decentralization to the neighbourhood scale, reform movements in Montreal have not tried to establish a strong role for city-wide institutions. This local political culture subsequently came to be reflected in Montreal’s new governance structure, in which the boroughs were given a critical role in community service provision (Hamel et al. 2005).
Clearly, then, strong provincial commitment to establishing an accessible, affordable, high-quality child care system across the province makes a difference. Yet there is also a valuable role for a city-wide structure that has the authority and resources to develop and implement an equitable local plan. The CRD/CRE in Montreal had the scale required to do so but did not possess or develop such an authority. The CRD undertook some valuable research, and its successor played a role in coordinating the proposals to establish CEPs, but that was the limit of their involvement.
CONCLUSIONS
As this study has argued, the system of federal-provincial arrangements has produced a province-centred patchwork of child care provision. This has led to a pattern of highly uneven coverage, and only Quebec has made real progress toward the development of a universally accessible and affordable system of early learning and child care.38 Some provinces, like Alberta, rely primarily on the commercial sector to provide regulated child care, while in others child care is predominantly provided by the non-profit sector. No province relies substantially on public provision. Some provinces rely heavily on family day care, but in most provinces the majority of parents have to rely on informal care. Mechanisms of public support vary widely in terms of the mix of instruments and the generosity of support, including definitions of who qualifies for public subsidies. Standards and training requirements similarly testify to the uneven patchwork of provision.
Two decades of neo-liberalism set in motion a process of “downloading” that ultimately sparked demand for a “new deal for Canada’s cities.” Thus the federal government moved to cut expenditures by curbing transfers to the provinces, while the latter, in turn, transferred responsibility for urban infrastructure and some social services to municipalities, without providing sufficient funds to support these new responsibilities. At the same time, Canadians were becoming ever more urban, with more than 65 percent of Canada’s population concentrated in twenty-seven metropolitan areas. In combination, these developments sparked a movement to put cities on the agenda. While most of the attention of this campaign focused on an ageing physical infrastructure, urban redevelopment schemes, and social issues like homelessness, child care also appeared on the horizon.
Toronto, which had a well-developed child strategy and “the infrastructure for the largest concentration of children’s programs (outside of Quebec)” (Coffey and McCain 2002, 14), helped to make child care part of the cities agenda. But by the end of the 1990s, its system was increasingly in jeopardy, largely as a result of inadequate provincial funding. The city commissioned the Coffey-McCain report, which argued the case for direct federal support.39 It recommended that the federal government should utilize SUFA to establish a child care partnership called Supporting Community Partnerships (SCPI) and modelled on the homeless initiative. It would have permitted direct funding agreements with municipalities in provinces that failed to invest in early learning and child care. The report also suggested that municipalities, local authorities, and communities should be engaged in monitoring spending under existing programs such as the Early Childhood Development initiative. While it recognized that provinces should retain the authority to establish program goals, targets, and outcomes, it felt that it should be up to the municipalities to design and execute the programs. The federal Liberal social policy committee, chaired by John Godfrey (a Toronto MP), also called for new federal-municipal arrangements, following the precedent established by SCPI, in areas where the province/territory and federal government could not find sufficient common ground to work together.
Despite their absence from the arena of intergovernmental arrangements, cities were more than “puppets on a string,” as the four cases above have shown.
These four examples suggest the following:
1 The OECD is correct, even for a country like Canada where municipalities are “creatures of the provinces”: the local is the site where the various pieces of the child care puzzle can be pulled together.
2 Local capacity to do so is influenced by whether municipalities have a mandate to manage the child care system.
3 Yet the presence or absence of an official mandate is neither necessary nor sufficient. The Toronto, Calgary, and Vancouver cases all show the decisive importance of the development and maintenance of a strong network of support linking municipal officials and councillors, parents and child care advocates. Under these conditions, municipalities can be more than “puppets on a set of intergovernmental strings.”
4 There are, however, limits to what can be achieved at the local level in the absence of sufficient support, especially in the form of a stable source of adequate funding. Here the Montreal case is instructive. Despite the absence of city-wide coordinating capacity, provincial support, through the ministries responsible for child care and for education, means that the coverage rate there is substantially higher than in all the other cities.
5 At the same time, the Montreal case reinforces the first point: the development of local capacity for organizing an integrated child care system forms a critical complement to the development of a strong, well-funded framework at a wider scale (national/provincial) of action.
In the end, while the federal Liberal government – first under Jean Chrétien, then more strongly under Paul Martin – began to implement “a new deal for cities,” this did not intersect with its child care policy. The new “gas tax,”40 which inaugurated direct transfers from the federal government to municipalities, focused on physical infrastructure, while the SUFA accords continued to be negotiated exclusively by representatives of the federal, provincial, and territorial governments. The Conservatives also ignored cities as their child care spaces initiative was negotiated with each province on a bilateral basis. Cities did not gain a place at the table.41
1 www40.statcan.ca/101/cst01/labor05.htm?sdi=women%20labour%20force%20participation%20rates.
2 See OECD (2006, 116–18) for a good analysis of market failure in this sector.
3 The Liberal government later split it into two funds – Health and Social Transfers – and the Conservative government separated the latter into three components – social programs, post-secondary education, and early learning and child care. It also extended the CST to 2014 and introduced an escalator clause of 3 percent per annum. While this change is an improvement, it is lower than the 6 percent per annum allocated to the CHT.
4 In Toronto, however, protests against the threatened closure pushed the province to step in (Prentice 1993).
5 The federal government explicitly rejected the push for workfare on the part of certain provinces, upholding instead a mother’s right to choose whether to work or remain on social assistance while her children were still at home.
6 The Department of Health and Welfare’s files, which reveal the thinking behind CAP, explicitly refer to the Boucher inquiry in Quebec, the Byrne commission in New Brunswick, and the Michener inquiry in Manitoba.
7 This act established the basis for a vibrant municipal child care system in leading centres across the province. See Langford (2011).
8 See the excellent two-volume study of the development of provincial child care systems edited by Alan Pence (1992) for more detail.
9 NA, RG 29, Records of the Department of National Health and Welfare, Accession 85–86/343, box 19, file 3203–7, Minister of National Health and Welfare, “Memorandum to Cabinet – New Impetus for Day Care Services under the Canada Assistance Plan,” 17 March 1972.
10 Approximately 77 percent of all child care centres are operated under non-profit auspices in Canada. Three provinces – Alberta, Newfoundland, and New Brunswick – however, have a high proportion of commercial operators.
11 Until the Mulroney government imposed one on CAP funds for the “rich” provinces of Ontario and Alberta. This move was aimed especially at curbing Ontario’s social assistance expenditures.
12 The minister responsible, Lloyd Axworthy, remained strongly committed to child care, however, and, in the fall of 1995 he sent federal negotiators to consult with the provinces, with a proposal of $630 million over five years. This initiative was suddenly quashed, and Axworthy was moved to another portfolio, to be replaced by a minister whose main goal was the reform of unemployment insurance (Mahon and Phillips 2002, 202–6).
13 Quebec remained outside of these opportunities for cooperation.
14 The other areas were promotion of healthy pregnancy, birth, and infancy; improvement of parent and family supports; and strengthening community capacities.
15 Recall the OECD’s argument, which is based on its own studies and other research, that the balance should be tipped in favour of supply-side intervention. The Multi-lateral Framework Agreement thus permitted the provinces to choose less effective options.
16 Quebec’s agreement did not include this clause, but it was already ahead of the other provinces. New Brunswick, the last to sign, used the Quebec agreement to avoid committing funds to regulated care, despite the lack of spaces in that province.
17 This required submission of a detailed plan by each of the provinces.
18 All parents used to receive a family allowance, which reflected the higher costs families with dependent children face. The previous Conservative government cancelled these allowances, however.
19 The Workplace Tax Incentive offered business a tax deduction of up to 30 percent to establish spaces. There was no take-up.
20 Much of the data here is drawn from Mahon (2009).
21 A partnership of the city, the Atkinson Foundation, and the Toronto District School Board, the project involved five experiments in integrating education and care for preschool children. Each experiment brought together formal education (kindergarten), child care, and family resource programs to provide seamless access to these and other core services. All have a governance structure involving parents, which has control over a pooled budget and a mandate to deliver comprehensive services.
22 Since this was also a time when other Ontario municipalities had begun to develop their child care systems, Toronto faced competition for limited resources. (The Ontario government had put a cap on its child care costsharing arrangements in the late 1970s.)
23 The Harris government abolished two-tier governance in Toronto and other major cities. Thus “Metro” was replaced by the new “City” of Toronto.
24 Its recreation programs, however, encompass more of the latter and play a critical role during school vacation and professional development days.
25 PSSA is now called Family and Community Support Services (FCSS).
26 It is interesting to note that the federal day care counsellor at that time had been recruited from Edmonton’s municipal system, which was very similar to Calgary’s.
27 In Calgary, just over a quarter of the child care spaces for preschool children are in the non-profit sector. This stands in marked contrast to the pattern in what remains of the old FCSS-financed sector, where over half the spaces are in the non-profit sector.
28 In fact, British Columbia was one of the provinces (along with Manitoba) whose moves toward a universal program put pressure on the federal government to widen the terms under CAP in the 1970s.
29 This was a period when the child care advocacy movement began to develop organizational capacity in many provinces and at the national level. The second National Child Care Conference, held in Winnipeg in 1982, helped to stimulate this development. The national child care coordinator, Clifford Howard, played a critical role in initiating the conference.
30 Punter describes TEAM as committed to “more participatory planning practices and a more inclusive vision for the future of the city, which appealed to the younger, better educated, more urbane and environmentally conscious electorate” (2003, 14). The left-wing Confederation of Progressive Electors (COPE), created around the same time, has also remained an important force in city politics.
31 These organizations included fourteen of the larger child care providers, two programs run by Westcoast Child Care Resource Centre, the City of Vancouver Social Planning Department, and the BC Ministry for Children and Families. This was paid for with funds from Human Resources Development Canada. See “Outcomes of Vancouver Child Care Regional Delivery Model Pilot Project,” http://www11.hrds-drhc.gc.ca/pls/edd/VCCRMDM_123003.htm.
32 City of Vancouver, Policy Report to Vancouver City Council from the Director of Social Planning on the Child Care Protocol, 3 February 2004.
33 Initially established in 1988, city council eliminated the post in 1999 when the province established an Office of Child, Youth and Family Advocate, reporting to the provincial legislature. In 2002, however, the Liberal government announced that the office of an independent advocate would be eliminated. It was under these circumstances that the city decided to reinstate its independent advocate.
34 As Hertzman (2004) found, there is a ten-fold difference in neighbourhood access rates: the largely working class east side is markedly underserviced.
35 Now seven dollars a day.
36 Under the original plan, the commercial sector was to be gradually eliminated, but the moratorium was lifted in 2002, and this sector has grown rapidly under the Liberal government elected in 2003 (Jenson 2006).
37 The Centres Régionales des Élues. These are mainly made up of municipal and provincial representatives. There are fewer civil society representatives than the old CRD.
38 For more on the Quebec system, see Jenson (2002, 2006).
39 The city had previously negotiated a deal with HRDC under Axworthy, but the Harris government effectively blocked it.
40 This provided a five-cent rebate on the federal gas tax to cities on a per capita basis. The provinces accepted this and agreed not to claw back the funds thus provided.
41 Interestingly enough, the Conservative’s Advisory Committee, chaired by Gordon Chong – a Conservative from Toronto who chaired the city’s Neighbourhood Services and Metro’s Human Services committees – referred several times to the involvement of all orders of government in managing Canada’s child care system. It made no recommendations for their official involvement, however.
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