MAW is currently finalizing its policy around unpaid work. Our goal is to enhance the gender equality and economic autonomy of unpaid and paid caregivers by encouraging government policy-makers to recognize and support dependent care work as work of economic value.

Universally Accessible Child Care

“Children in Canada are treated like consumer items, the private responsibility of parents. But at the same time, the ambiguity about women’s roles in the workplace has resulted in a paralysis of social policy that means Canadians have neither universal childcare nor a tax credit/family allowance to offset the cost of raising children. Canada needs to develop a series of social and fiscal policies that recognize the value society places on children, as well as the additional cost to families of raising children.” (Rebick, 2000, p. 139.)

While endorsing the above comments by longtime feminist activist Judy Rebick, MAW would add that Canada needs to initiate measures to recognize unpaid care work, the majority of which is performed by women, as work of economic value. In the context of child care policy, that means including unpaid care as part of the child care system.

Accessible child care is a necessary but not sufficient condition for developing women’s economic and social equality, and an essential support to all parents. Canada lags behind many other countries, including some that are significantly poorer, in providing publically financed and regulated child care. Successive federal governments have failed to fulfill promises to expand the child care system.

Governments can no longer ignore social responsibility for care in favour of targeted support or private approaches to care provision. The inability of the market to create a sufficient number of accessible child care spaces demands government intervention. Until this country invests in child care, Canada will not meet its stated commitments to gender equality, promoting balance in paid and unpaid work, supporting women’s economic autonomy through participation in the paid workforce, and reducing child poverty.

A Collective Responsibility

Public investment in child care can be justified on both social and economic grounds. A woman’s economic autonomy and equality at home and in the workplace can be determined by her ability to structure her paid and unpaid work commitments. Government funded and regulated child care helps ensure that women have access to paid care that is affordable and of adequate minimum quality. Both of these objectives promote a public good: quality child care contributes positively to child outcomes, from which society as a whole benefits. Low cost care enables women, especially low-income women, to maintain a paid job, thus reducing the state’s net costs in social services. Cleveland and Krashinsky (1988) calculate that for every dollar invested in high quality, universal day care for children two to five years of age, there would be a two dollar benefit to children, parents and society. Collective support yields collective reward.

Feminist economists describe social policy provisions like child care as necessary investments in a nation’s economic infrastructure and human capital. Unpaid caregiving must be identified as a productive economic contribution on the part of the caregiver from which society as a whole reaps rewards. Such a strategy will bring all care into the realm of collective responsibility.

Redefining Child Care

Parents require flexible child care arrangements as much as they need child care at a reasonable cost. Another basic objective of child care policy must be to augment the ability of parents to chose the kind of care that best meets their family’s needs.

For many parents, the preferred choice continues to be providing their own care full-time for a short period or indefinitely; parental care represents a central form of child care. Analysts must locate this type of unpaid care within the child care system to properly determine what policy instruments will enable responsibility for child care to be equitably shared by parents, individuals without children, governments and the private sector.

Quebec’s innovative child care initiative brings to the fore the question of funding: is universal childcare, where government pays all but a small flat-rate fee for all families, the best approach to meeting all the goals of child care policy?

Risk: Marginalizing Unpaid and Informal care

A recent analysis of Quebec’s 1997 family policy reforms examined both the flat-rate child care program and targeted income support. The authors calculated that 72 per cent of the province’s families now receive less financial assistance from the government than before (Baril, Lefebvre & Merrigan, 2000, p.16). This result is in striking contrast to Quebec government claims that 95 per cent of Quebec families benefit from the new policy (ibid).

Government provision of flat-rate child care fulfills the policy objectives of promoting quality care, reducing barriers to paid work, and enhancing work balance. However, in limiting parental options to one mode of care, it undermines other significant policy goals identified by MAW and others.

The Quebec model prioritizes centre-based care over all other types, including informal home-based care and unpaid care. While it maintains some parental choice by continuing the Child Care Expense Deduction for parents who use receiptable care outside the system, the program creates a significant disincentive to the selection of alternative forms of care by subsidizing only the costs of institutional care. Although the Quebec government aims to provide a complete array of child care

Risk: Devaluing Caregiving

While paid child care has long been recognized as a necessary service to promote women’s equality, current discourse emphasizes research linking “professional” child care with positive child outcomes, particularly, but by no means exclusively, for low income children. Jenson and Stroick (1999) note that some child care activists suggest that it is the care provided by trained early childhood educators that optimally fosters school readiness and healthy socialization. These activists feel that the more traditional view that paid care provides a poor substitute for maternal care is responsible for lack of public enthusiasm for institutional care and the resulting government underfunding of non-parental child care services (ibid, p.19). Jenson and Stroick feel that the promotion of institutional child care by activists is a political tactic designed to erode the notion held by some Canadians that parental care is best for child development.

While MAW supports a child-focused approach to child care, we feel that it is important to examine the implicit assumptions that the “professionalization of caregiving” model makes about caregiving work. At issue is not the idea that children need quality care or can benefit from caregivers trained in early childhood education, but the arbitrary and exclusive definition of “quality.” To reject unpaid or unregulated caregiving in favour of “child development specialists” in an effort to increase public support for paid care is a divisive strategy that risks diminishing the value of all child care. It suggests a Northern/Western, industrial and urban-based bias about the best way to organize caregiving and meet the needs of young children.

For example, aboriginal women who want their mothers to care for their children and be valued for it may be threatened by such a model, particularly if they risk the appropriation of their children if they do not choose to access the care of child development specialists. Women who come to Canada as caregivers/nannies could have their access to this country compromised should “child development specialist” become the term of reference for paid caregiving. It is also clear that the wages and social value of those who are “just” caregivers will continue to be diminished by comparison.

Risk: Exploiting Caregivers

A flat rate model may also perpetuate the exploitation of paid caregivers, who as an occupational group hold a higher level of education than most Canadian workers, but are paid far less than the average industrial wage and tend to have access to few benefits (Kyle, 1999, p. 210). Pressure to control the costs of a flat-rate child care system and/or the total family support budget creates at least two risks over the long term: the introduction of measures to limit or reduce wages and benefits of care workers, and/or the initiation of a siphon effect, where resources from other programs to support families - including income assistance or other services - are redirected toward the child care program. Either scenario places the autonomy and status of paid and unpaid caregivers in jeopardy.

Universally Accessible Child Care

Policy reform must significantly increase investment in child care to create quality spaces at costs that allow all women the real option to pursue the paid work that enhances their economic autonomy. Developers of child care policy must also respect parental choice and value all forms of care. MAW submits that the best means of fulfilling these objectives is through a government-subsidized, national child care system. This system would recognize regulated child care as well as unpaid and informal child care, and would be cost-shared between levels of government, corporations/employers and parents. A cost-shared program enables the government to sustain investment in child care infrastructure and ensure care workers receive fair wages and benefits. The system should include before - and after-school care for older children and be open to all children, regardless of their parents’ workforce status.

MAW proposes that the government directly subsidize the cost of regulated child care so that it is accessible to parents at the lowest income levels for no or very low cost, with the cost increasing to a reasonable maximum level as parental income rises. A measure to provide direct “equivalent to subsidy” funding to parents who use receipted informal care would be one way to recognize alternative forms of care within a national system.

Along with directly subsidizing the price of childcare, governments must invest in childcare infrastructure and operating costs, including wage subsides. Funding must be available to informal as well as formal child care providers.

Inclusion of All Care

While MAW argues strenuously for a universal approach to social policy, the imperatives behind any “universal” program are lost if such a system is exclusive rather than inclusive. Collective responsibility for children’s care, nurture and development is a tapestry with many threads of caring, all of which should be valued not only as socially desirable and generally useful, but as concrete productive work. Policy solutions must include all caregivers, paid and unpaid.

Bibliography

Baril, R., Lefebvre, P., & Merrigan, P. (2000), Quebec Family Policy: Impact and options. Montreal: IRPP.

Cleveland, G., & Krashinsky, M. (1998), The benefits & costs of good child care: The economic rationale for public investment in young children. Toronto: Childcare Resource & Research Unit, Centre for Urban & Community Studies, University of Toronto.

Jenson, J., and Stroick, S.M., (1999), A Policy Blueprint for Canada’s Children. Ottawa: Canadian Policy Research Networks.

Kyle, I. (1997), Private and Public Discourses: The Social Context of Child Care. Canadian Journal of Research in Early Childhood Education, 6(3), pp. 203-222.

Rebick, J. (2000). Imagine Democracy. Toronto: Stoddart.

1. Introduce a universally accessible, government subsidized, comprehensive national child care system to provide quality non-profit care to all families, regardless of the parents’ labour force status. Fully recognize unpaid and informal child care as part of that system. Such a system would address the urgent need for accessible child care spaces and provide adequate funding for the creation of new spaces.
2. Set achievable targets for the number of spaces created.
3. Ensure accessibility by pricing all child care spaces to income, from nothing for lowest income families and social assistance recipients up to a maximum acceptable amount for higher income families. Support informal child care through an “equivalent to subsidy” measure.
4. Acknowledge and seek innovative ways to integrate the informal child care market into the formal market in ways that respect the strengths of both settings.
5. Support the flexibility of the home-based childcare option by providing a comprehensive support network that will maintain adequate standards.
6. Encourage non-profit, cooperative day care centres by providing base funding, capital grants, and program development funding. Do not penalize quality licensed for-profit centres by limiting their access to similar funding opportunities.
7. Encourage the establishment of quality, accessible before- and after-school programs using the same priced-to-income formula.
8. Ensure that home-based caregivers have access to child care funding, grants and other incentives that would improve the quality and accessibility of the services they offer.
9. Ensure that caregivers are involved in the development of relevant training/education packages, courses and programs and that this training reflects a variety of caregiving models.
10. End exploitation of childcare workers by ensuring that their salaries and benefits are commensurate with their responsibilities and experience.
11. Work with all caregivers to establish national standards (outside Quebec).

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