Bill No. 363 - Early Learning and Child Care Act (amended) - 2nd Reading

CLAUDIA CHENDER « » : I move second reading of Bill No. 363.

We've been talking a lot about early learning and child care in this Chamber. As the Minister of Education and Early Childhood Development has said - and as most of my caucus colleagues and I also can attest - daycare wait-lists and even wait-list fees are not a new issue in Nova Scotia. Rising demand, in part due to the fee reductions, is causing those wait-lists to balloon, and is putting families at risk of predatory fees.

The rising demand in itself, of course, is not a bad thing. Those of us who have been around more than a few years have talked about this at length in this Chamber, particularly with the introduction of pre-Primary. It means child care fees are more affordable for families than they were in the past. This means that mothers are able to work, which has positive economic benefits. It has benefits for children - particularly children who are living in poverty or living in challenging situations. We know that early childhood education can have an incredibly positive long-term impact on the lives of those children.

The problem is that there aren't enough spaces. While the fee reduction is good, in Nova Scotia right now, nearly 50 per cent of children live in a child care desert. That means an area where there are three children for every one child care space. We need a massive investment in these spaces. While we have seen some, the math is tricky, and the way we do it shows that the net increase is minimal.

The government boasts about new spaces, but these numbers show a different story. We know that the way in which these changes have been rolled out - this child care agreement - has caused the closure of many existing centres. There's no two ways about it. The growth in this sector has been limited to school-age programs, which are needed but are not addressing the dire shortage of infant and toddler spaces.

I should just digress for a second and say that, when pre-Primary was rolled out, we knew this would happen because of the rollout. What we said at the time was - because this is what we were hearing from centres that were already feeling the strain - run that pre-Primary program in existing centres where you can, because this is what helps keep them open. The government didn't do that. So a sector that was already under strain then got a one-two punch with the rollout of this Early Learning and Child Care Agreement.

Data obtained just this June shows that, since the government was elected, only 28 net new licensed child care spaces have opened across the province. I should say - because someone else will - that these are all full-time, all-day spaces. I acknowledge the value, particularly as a working mother, of before- and after-school spaces. When we talk about early learning and child care, about that agreement and the benefits it will bring, and about $10 per day daycare, we are talking about full-day daycare for our youngest children. The rest of it is important, but that is crucial. In that regard, this government is failing.

In HRM, there were 144 fewer child care spaces in June than when this government was elected - in a province that is growing exponentially, in a city that is growing exponentially, where that growth is being encouraged, where people are coming, where people are settling in all of our constituencies and, in some cases, are leaving because they can't find child care or a doctor, and they can't afford a house. They're like, all right, never mind, I'm going home. That's not what we want.

Families are unable to even find an open wait-list. We hear from daycares about parents calling in tears, desperate for a wait-list opening. I'm always fascinated when I meet people with young children and they say, So-and-so just started in daycare. So I always stop and say, Okay, tell me your story. How? What daycare? When did you get on the list? How did that work? In almost every single case it was like, Well, I did get on the list when I was pregnant but also, my nephew's uncle's wife works there and she did me a solid. That's how it works, because those wait-lists are so long and so unmanageable - and it's not to cast aspersions on the daycare operators because they are under an enormous pressure of having hundreds of families waiting to get in, but it's almost impossible.

This has led to a situation where families put their kids on multiple wait-lists because if you are pregnant and you put your name on a wait-list for a daycare, not only are you not guaranteed a spot, you are unlikely to get a spot. So what do you do? You put your name on 10 wait-lists and you hope that you hit the jackpot and one of them comes out.

In 2019, a report found that 92 per cent of Halifax daycares maintained a wait-list and that 16 per cent charged a wait-list fee. Anecdotally, we are hearing more and more about those fees. In August, one daycare chain with seven Halifax locations said it would not get rid of its $200 non-refundable wait-list fee because it is seeing growing demand, which is very confusing.

With non-refundable fees, some parents are paying hundreds of dollars, and they still have no guarantee of a spot when they need it. They are paying for the privilege of not necessarily having child care for their children. There is a very real impact.

In a CBC article from this August, Kayleigh Fleet, the mother of twins in Halifax - that one hits kind of close to home - paid nearly $2,400 to place her children on a wait-list with Kids & Company, only to find out at the last minute that her spots were no longer available. She had to make the decision to delay returning to work and discovered that only a portion of her payment was even refundable. This is not unusual.

We hear the narrative in this Chamber that this is a thing that happens occasionally, and it isn't. It happens a lot. We have been hearing concerns about this for a long time. We raised this issue in the House seven months ago - and at that time, we raised the issue with a solution. We asked the minister to ban these fees. Ontario did it in 2016. I mean, there are other things. You can ban the fees, you can create a centralized wait-list, which takes the pressure off of these individual daycare operators.

The minister said today that there isn't a system. Well, that's not actually true. We have a Department of Education and Early Childhood Development. We have an entire section of the civil service that runs our regulated child care system. The idea that we don't have a system, I think, is an insult to the work that those people do. Sure, it's a patchwork. There are individual operators. The same with doctors. Are we going to say we don't have a medical system?

Yes, we have a system, but there are a number of operators in that system. So the idea that we can't regulate that system - which, by the way, we do, that's why we call it regulated child care - is an excuse that isn't even really worth addressing. We need to ban these fees, but instead of spending months working on a solution, we have debated whether or not this issue exists.

In the seven months since we raised this issue, we have gone back and forth with the minister, who has often said, We really don't think it's an issue anymore, we don't really know if it's an issue anymore, we're not really sure if it's an issue anymore.

Last week, the minister said it's not still happening. I'll table that Hansard.

This is really, really troubling because, again, this is a problem with an extraordinarily simple solution. If we think it's bad, if we don't really think it's happening, then make it illegal. Stop it from happening.

We are legislators. We are in this Chamber to make laws. So when we come to the Province with an issue that is an area of provincial responsibility - education - and a problem - predatory wait-list fees - and a solution - outlaw them. Create a policy or a law that says those are illegal - and the minister's response is, Well, we don't really have a system. I think that's quite insulting, actually. That doesn't accurately reflect the situation.

We're glad to see that today the minister finally accepted that this is a problem, that she has directed her department to look into it, but we don't think that families need to wait any longer. We have put forward the solution a number of times. It exists in another province. It works. What are they looking at? This is like the interminable jurisdictional scan that the Department of Justice used as an excuse not to outlaw non-disclosure agreements, which we still can't get an answer for the final decision.

Is the minister going to look at it for another three years while parents are forced to pay more and more money in fees while they wait longer and longer to have child care, are excluded from the workforce, are unable to give their children the advantages of early childhood education, only to be told, Oh, well, we decided not to do it? We hear this more and more, and it's deeply troubling.

This is a problem. There is a solution. We're asking the minister to take action. Every day that the government waits, more families are vulnerable to these fees. There are other solutions. As we said, we need to continue to increase the child care sector. We need more spaces. We need to continue to work through that agreement.

We most recently have heard that the minister's staff was able to finally submit the paperwork needed for Ottawa to release the next branch of funding for the Canada-Nova Scotia Canada-Wide Early Learning and Child Care Agreement. We were glad to hear that. Why it took several months, if not a year, to do that from when we could have had that money, from when we could have building capacity in our system, is troubling.

At the end of the day, I think this is about parents, and mostly mothers, who I speak to on a daily basis who are struggling to find child care. This, again, is in the context of a rising cost of living.

My kids the other day - we were watching a movie, and in the movie, the dad went off to work and the mom stayed home, and they said, "But what does the mom do?" And I said, "Well, she's a stay-at-home mom," and they were like, "What?" I said, "Yes, she stays at home. She takes care of the kids. Isn't that nice? I'd sometimes like to do that," and they were like, "No, Mom, that's totally weird. That doesn't happen." Because they don't know anybody - they literally don't know anybody who doesn't have two working parents, because that is the economic environment that we are in.

In that economic environment, parents need child care. They need affordable child care. They need available child care. They certainly don't need predatory child care fees. I would ask the government, in closing, to move forward quickly to ban wait-list fees, at minimum, so that parents do not have to pay for the privilege of trying to navigate our deeply challenging child care ecosystem.