Bill No. 8 - Pre-primary Education Act. - Third Reading
MS. CLAUDIA CHENDER « » : Mr. Speaker, I rise today to speak to the pre-Primary bill on third reading. There are a number of things that I'd like to say although I'll also point out that a number of things have already been said. I think we're all fairly clear on our rather universal disappointment, as the member for Dartmouth East pointed out, in a number of aspects of the way that this has come before this House: consultation, implementation, the impact on the overall child-care landscape, and a number of other areas. I'll go through those briefly.
In terms of consultation, the only thing we've heard about the pre-Primary bill is that there is consultation planned and, for a program that by the government's own admission is world changing for the four-year-olds of this province, it strikes me as odd that there would not have been any meaningful consultation undertaken before this bill.
Now, I don't have an analogy around sharpening an axe, but I do have an experience working in many, many, many settings as a facilitator of consultation processes and, you know what, they're hard. Consultation is challenging and it is of no surprise to me nor to anyone else in this House - many of you have been here a lot longer than I have - that a government might decide that it was expedient to remove that process when bringing a bill forward. It's the longest, it's the messiest, and it's the one that's most likely to challenge the assumptions of the author of any project, because it necessitates that you hear dissenting views.
As has been said in many different ways in this House at many different points of this debate, this is about education. That's what we do in education. We teach children how to listen. We teach children about how to have respectful debate and how to be open-minded. When we look around in the world today at the divisiveness and challenges that we face as a society, I would submit that the core skill that we need - especially in this House, but in our society - is the skill, the ability, the appetite for consultation.
Frankly, it's deeply disappointing that there was no consultation on this bill before it came before us - and leave the bill aside, there was no consultation on this program itself.
I'll move from there to implementation. I can't say a lot about implementation, because the implementation process was shrouded in secrecy. We were told nothing about the implementation or the start date of this program until it had already begun. Every single one of us in this House, I suspect, had phone calls from constituents asking us what was going on - many of whom were excited at the prospect of pre-Primary. They wanted their children to have access to education, but they had no idea.
You can imagine, and I can certainly imagine, as a parent, how unsettling that would be. To be told that there was a promise of this great hope for the future of our children - sign on the dotted line, but we can't tell you when it's going to start, we can't tell you what it's going to be like. Will there be washrooms? We don't know. Will there be furniture? We don't know. How many teachers? We're not sure. Just send your kids to us.
I submit this is a very sloppy way to go about instituting a program, particularly a universal program. Further to that point, I'd like to raise what clearly is a bit of a sensitive topic for the minister. That's the topic of inclusion, which my colleague touched on briefly. When I rose in this House to ask my very first question, I asked the minister how he could guarantee us that this program was inclusive when we know that we don't know how to do inclusion. This government has appointed a commission - by all means knowledgeable and expert - to spend a year figuring out how we do inclusion. We don't know how. This government created a report not a year ago that specifically said that the early childhood education program in this province does not do inclusion well.
Taking those two things into account, it's very difficult to understand how I could be accused of misleading this House and misleading the public by suggesting that this program may not be inclusive. Subsequently we've heard a lot of anecdotal evidence to say that it is, in fact, not inclusive.
I'll move from there to the impact on the child care landscape as a whole. As I just mentioned, we have a report that's very recent that tells us about all the gaps in early childhood education in this province. We have a number of challenges. The minister has repeatedly told us that there are only spaces for 25 per cent of children in this province to be in regulated child care. What the minister doesn't tell us is that by introducing this program at this time, in this way, those 25 per cent of spaces are threatened. We may have fewer than those in a month or in two months. We've heard this from early childhood educators around the province.
I'm not suggesting that we should inexorably delay a new program so that we can protect a particular child care provider's right to hang up a shingle and keep their space open. As a firm adherent to the notion of universal child care, I, unlike my colleagues, will reluctantly support this bill because I think at least it's a first step. (Interruption) I'm sorry to disappoint my colleague over here.
However, I'll say that we have grave concerns about the impact on the child care landscape. It's not just the number of spaces that are available but the ability for those few remaining spaces to stay open. That's about poaching staff; we don't have enough ECEs in the province. That's about children - because of the shroud of secrecy around which this program was launched, many of these child care providers were given less than a month's notice before whole cohorts of children were pulled from their programs. With more notice, they could have adapted their programming model. They could have provided wraparound care. They could have added more spots for infants, which I think is something that's very important. They weren't given the time.
Notwithstanding all of that, the early childhood educators and the daycare operators in this province are waiting for a new funding model. They have been waiting. They have been promised. Right now, as I've said on the floor this House before, they have a wage floor, and they have a fee ceiling. They have a specific amount of money that they are able to use to operate. In many, many cases around this province, those facilities are operating at a deficit. It's a deficit that has been imposed by this government because they have not introduced a new funding formula.
I would hope that this government would take the opportunity at the very earliest convenience to address the number of outstanding issues with the remainder of the early childhood education system.
I read over this bill again about 10 minutes ago in anticipation of this conversation, and something really popped out at me. I'm not sure if this has come to the attention of the members of this House, but as we all know, there's an administrative review going on of the entire education system. One of the rumblings we have been hearing, given this government's appetite for amalgamation, is that the results of this review may in fact be an amalgamation of the school boards.
I reread with interest the parts of this bill that give a great deal of authority to the minister to enter into agreements to run pre-Primary. I wonder if the minister might speak to this, and I suspect he will, when we close debate on this topic. I find it strange after we have heard so many times on the floor of this House about how the minister can't really answer certain questions because that's up to the school boards. It's up to the school boards to set wages. It's up to the school boards to decide a number of details in rolling out this program. Yet, will there be school boards there to administer it? It's kind of a brilliant strategy when you think about it. Give all the dirty work to the school boards, and then put them out of a job. Is that what's going to happen? Time will tell.
In closing, like the member for Dartmouth East, I would like to say that I also don't come at this issue from an abstract position. This isn't an academic exercise for me. I have three children of my own. One is in a regulated daycare, and two are in a public school in this province. I speak to teachers, early childhood educators, parents, and children every single day. This is my other job, as I like to say when I go home from here. For those of you in this House without children, I envy that you have one job, as big as it might be. But the reality is, this very much impacts my daily life and those of a lot of people around me.
Further, I have a nephew who lives with autism. He is so often at the front of my mind in these conversations, partly because he's related to me, and partly because we all know that it's through proximity that we often become sensitized or ought to become sensitized to the issues that are most important to us.
I will close by saying that as a mother, as a person, and as a member of the NDP, I support universal child care. To that end, I very much hope that this is a first step, but as first steps go, it's pretty flawed.
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