BILL NO. 8 - Pre-Primary Education Act. - Second Reading
MS. CLAUDIA CHENDER « » : Thank you to the member for Dartmouth East for an impassioned speech with lots of very good points that I know we'll continue to hear about in the days to come.
I want to take a moment before speaking to this bill just to acknowledge the hard-working senior staff in the Department of Education and Early Childhood Development. We can criticize this all we want, and we will continue to, but those are the folks who have been working around the clock for this hasty rollout and I know that they are doing the best they can.
I'll say off the top that we have supported the need for significant investment in early childhood education and child care sector forever - through the campaign, from when we got here, and to that end we will support these amendments despite the fact that they do appear to be a public relations exercise, so I'll just note from a detailed point of view that this legislation has been in force for over a decade. This is not a new Act - we have a pre-Primary Act, it exists. In the time that it has existed successive governments have, in fact, operated pre-Primary programs under the auspices of this Act, via school boards.
Mr. Speaker, there's nothing in here that looks to me like it in fact needs to come before this House, other than to give the minister an opportunity to stand up and tell us how exciting this day is and what a good job he is doing.
The minister said publicly on a few occasions now, that the reason for proposing these amendments was so that future governments could not undo this work without debate in this Chamber. Again, Mr. Speaker, I respectfully suggest that this is somewhat erroneous. The legislation exists. In order to undo it you would come before this House anyway.
I want to get all of that out of the way so that I can take a slightly different tack and talk about the things that I think we should be discussing here, which is the child care landscape as a whole. We've heard a lot about how wonderful pre-Primary education is and, unlike my colleague for Dartmouth East, I don't dispute any of that, I think it's true. But why the focus on four-year-olds, Mr. Speaker? Four to five-year olds, or in this case three and a half to five-year-olds, depending on the age cut-off, I'm not quite sure why they have pride of place at this moment over the zero to three and a half-year olds, whom the minister has said a couple of times just this evening, are under-served by our regulated child care system. There are not adequate spaces. There is not adequate investment. That's what I'd like to talk about for a minute.
The minister says that consultation is coming, that consultation has begun. I won't beat a dead horse by going into what I think about consultation, but suffice it to say that consultation ought to have happened some time ago. In fact, I would point to some consultation that happened in 2016, where there was a review of regulated child care that was initiated by this government. That review identified the following issues: there's a shortage of child care spaces, the fees are too high, the wages are too low, the quality is inconsistent, the structure of the governance - there are issues with that. At the end, it found that the current model of funding child care is not effective or sustainable.
Again, Mr. Speaker, I want to draw our attention to those issues which have not been solved but have been exacerbated by the introduction of this program at this time in this way.
Just to go into that a little bit more deeply, regulated child care centres were recently in response, I think, to this report, have mandated a wage floor for early childhood educators. They wanted to make sure that that recommendation of this report was met, I suspect, and kudos to my colleagues across the aisle for that. However, when they mandated a wage floor for early childhood educators, they also put a freeze on the fees that they could charge parents. I would point out that, although there has been some investment in this sector, parent fees still by far form the majority of the income that these centres receive.
I think you can see where I'm going, Mr. Speaker. If there's a wage floor and there is an income ceiling, you then have a funding gap, so many of these centres already are running at a deficit every single month and depend on whether or not they happen to have a parent who is good at fundraising in their current crop of kids. This is for those very few children who actually have access to these spots.
These regulated child care centres have been promised and have been waiting for a new funding formula to ease this burden. Now I look forward to discussing this further with the minister in Estimates, but from my initial reading I don't see that formula forthcoming in this budget.
Child care fees in Nova Scotia today are more expensive than university tuition and as the mother of three children, six and under, who was paying regulated child care fees for three children at the time, I can personally attest to that. I many times, in the last four years, have had people ask me the question - which I'll just flag as problematic in a number of ways - can you afford to work? Which I believe is a question that no mother should have to answer. My cheeky answer to that question is, can my husband?
But my real answer to that question is, well, it depends; it depends on what the value of work is. For me, on a personal level, it was important to be able to participate in the labour force, to be able to move forward in my career, to be able to derive meaning from the world around me, beyond just my role as a mother. But I know that I can count myself lucky to have the opportunity to do that, which many, many don't. The median monthly cost for a licensed child care spot in Halifax is $873. So, that's $10,000 a year for a toddler, that you're paying. A family of two children in care, $1,600 a month.
I want to note on the topic of affordability, for government, which my colleagues here have raised, expansion in the early learning and care sector in Nova Scotia specifically would provide more short-term economic stimulus than investing in lots of other sectors of our economy. A 2011 report on Nova Scotia found a GDP multiplier in the early learning and child care sector to be $2.23. The employment multiplier is 46.8 jobs per $1,000,000 of initial increase in expenditure. And the economic returns can of course be higher in rural communities.
We haven't seen anything from this government to address any of that and I haven't even gotten beyond my personal story, to the impact on labour force participation for women.
So, to summarize, the benefits of investment in early learning and child care are myriad. Job creation, labour market participation, skilled work force and productivity, GDP and tax revenue, reduction of poverty and income equality, women's equality, early childhood development, social inclusion, immigrant and population retention and growth, rural and regional economic development.
In Nova Scotia, we've heard a lot of numbers and percentages, so I'll throw out some of my own. In Nova Scotia, the regulated child care spaces for children aged zero to two, 11 per cent; 11 per cent of children aged zero to two are in regulated child care spaces. Regulated full- or part-time centre-based spaces for 39 per cent of children aged two to four. So, yes, for 4-year-olds, we are increasing that number. But I ask what happens to all the other children? You know, especially for women wanting to return to the labour force, if they're lucky enough to take a maternity leave, which we know lots of women with precarious work are unable to do, but, if you can, if you can take advantage of that, then what do you do?
It's very difficult to go back to work and these lack of spaces make it that much more difficult. To that end, child care is a service with multiple goals. There are all the child development goals for children that the minister has spoken about, but it's also a program for mothers who rely on child care. Workforce participation of mothers with the youngest child, zero to 5 years old, 78.7 per cent, which is a shockingly high statistic given how few spaces there are. So, what's happening? Well, we've got friends and family, like we have here in Nova Scotia, filling the gaps. But, what's the impact of that? Well, we have people who are then not in the labour force, who are missing out on economic opportunities, particularly senior women. We also, you know, are doubly impacting women who are marginalized or isolated due to poverty, if they're recent arrivals in the country, or any number of other situations where they're not networked in such a way that they can take advantage of those extended families and other situations.
In closing, what is needed is for government to work in consultation with parents and the child care community to implement a universal system of high-quality child care in which children are nourished, parents can enter the workforce and pursue their passions and early childhood educators receive fair wages. It's not just the early childhood educators and the education centres who suffer when we don't have this system. It's the children and the parents too. We need to eliminate the patchwork of grants and subsidies and instead fund a system with an increased number of spaces that can meet the needs of all families. Thank you.
Published by Order of the Legislature by Hansard Reporting Services and printed by the Queen's Printer.
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