Universal, Public, Affordable Child Care Must be at the Core of the COVID-19 Recovery
CLAUDIA CHENDER: I am pleased to rise and speak again about the need for a universal, public, affordable child care system here in Nova Scotia.
When we discuss health care, as we often do in this Chamber at this time, of course, we often talk about pre-existing conditions. We know that the risk of contracting COVID19 is higher for people with pre-existing conditions and that their risks of illness are higher. Let’s loosen our focus and talk a little bit about the pre-existing conditions of our province.
Nova Scotia went into this pandemic with some of the highest rates of poverty and food insecurity in the country and with a staggering rate of child poverty. We know that, despite economic gains, a significant portion of our workforce earns very low wages.
We went into the pandemic with many people experiencing significant housing insecurity, with the health care system facing significant challenge, and with a marked lack of affordable child care.
It’s now recognized as fact that COVID-19 has had an uneven impact on Nova Scotians and that that impact has been outsized for those living on the margins. COVID19, in a word, has intensified these pre-existing conditions.
When we received the budget recently, we were given a two-page photocopy handout that listed the $1 billion in appropriations that had been spent with no oversight from this Chamber, loosely under the heading of recovery funds to ameliorate the immediate impacts of COVID-19.
The budget that we received was basically framed as a recovery budget. Recovery here cannot simply mean getting back to normal. We have the opportunity and the responsibility to build back better.
We know that this recession was not like other economic downturns. It wasn’t a gradual decline in employment. It was an immediate loss of many jobs. Those jobs weren’t lost because of external economic forces, but because of government-ordered closures. We supported those closures. We continue to where they’re necessary.
Those closures were concentrated within female-dominated, low-wage sectors. This is really important to understand. This is unlike any historical recession, and this is why the term “she-cession” has been coined by economists. This recession has impacted women specifically in a way that prior recessions have not. Partly this also had to do with closures in child care and schools. Again, that had to happen but, again, an uneven impact on women and particularly parents.
These impacts are both hidden and exacerbated by the fact that we don’t adequately measure or quantify the impact on women of the added burden of unpaid care and emotional labour. We know that this has most certainly resulted in economic losses for women. A lot of those aren’t going to show up in the GDP, and they’re not going to show up in the labour force surveys. This pandemic has made very clear our collective overreliance on informal child care arrangements, particularly those with grandparents and neighbours. These so-called organic arrangements are not available to everyone in the same way.
We’re going to hear that the government is talking to their federal counterparts, and we’re always glad to hear about this, but we need action now. We saw almost $1 billion in government money flow out the door because it was necessary. Hundreds of millions of those dollars went to roads and infrastructure projects in the recession that primarily impacted women and low-wage workers.
What are we doing to help our social infrastructure recover? While government kept child care centres whole - they like to talk about that, and that’s great, but let’s think about what that means. They kept daycares open. They kept them from failing so that’s great. But it’s also totally necessary. While we are glad that happened, we’re stopping short of a rousing round of applause because so much more is needed.
Every time we talk about investment in social infrastructure in this House, the government is apt to respond and say, we want to invest but we also want to support the economy. Let’s talk about the economic impact of universal child care. For every $1 invested in the child care sector there is a $2.23 increase in the GDP. This is 67 per cent higher than the GDP multiplier for construction, the one industry that was kept as an essential industry and did not close during the pandemic, I’ll note.
On top of that, per dollar, the child care sector creates more jobs than any other industry: 46.8 direct and indirect jobs are created per million dollars increased spending in child care. This employment multiplier is 220 per cent better than spending in construction. I’m not picking on construction - construction’s great. We can have late debate about construction another night. I’m just saying that this is where government dollars are flowing because it’s necessary, it’s required. We’re making the argument that it’s also required for us to have a universal, affordable, accessible health care system.
While we’re glad that the government is speaking to their federal counterparts, we note that Alberta, Newfoundland and Labrador, Prince Edward Island, and British Columbia have all instituted their own provincial program - and Quebec, of course, which is the model - of low-cost, accessible daycare without having signed that agreement with the federal government. That ranges anywhere from $10 a day to $25 a day, but any of that is a vast improvement on the $45-a-day average price that parents pay here in Nova Scotia for child care.
I’ll point out that only 20 per cent of the operating funds for regulated child care in Nova Scotia come from government at all. The rest is made up by parent fees, and that’s why this whole system is untenable and essentially needs to be turned on its head.
The government does have grants programs, but they are a labyrinth and difficult to navigate, and a lot of people fall through the cracks. From our perspective, government needs to do three things: address high parent fees, increase the number of child care spaces available, and improve working conditions and access to training for early childhood educators. All three of those things can be accomplished with a wholesale revamping of the early childhood education sector.
If we take one lesson from the pandemic, it’s that we can’t continue to allow this foundational piece of our economic and social system to be addressed in a patchwork manner that results in differential access to care and downloads choices on to individual families when they’re better addressed at a systemic level. We hear stories about issues to do with this all the way from Sydney to Yarmouth and everywhere in between. We need a provincial view. This is a province that, for better or worse, has consolidated a lot of its operations in that way.
One of the arguments for getting rid of school boards, for instance, was: We’ll be able to do things in a streamlined manner, we’ll be able to apply everything across the province. That’s what we’re asking for. This government did it with pre-Primary. We voted for pre-Primary. We said at the time that the introduction of pre-Primary would destabilize the rest of the early childhood education sector, and that is what we’ve seen, so we are asking government to continue down the path that they started and to implement a universal, affordable, low-cost system of early childhood education for all Nova Scotia families and children.