Childcare and post-secondary education share enough traits that they are worth examining together, as HESA has done previously here and here.  The most obvious similarity is that, in contrast to K-12 education, they are both forms of non-compulsory education.  Well, sort of: it’s never entirely clear to what extent people are pushing childcare as an education measure and to what extent they are pushing its value to freeing families – mainly women – to participate in the labour market which results in the two concepts being constantly elided with terminology such as “Early Learning and Childcare” (or ELCC).  For some reason, the provinces, Quebec and Alberta apart, seem to be somewhat more comfortable with a federal role in these areas, provided Ottawa is showing up with money to pay for things. This is a bit like postsecondary.

There are also some significant differences between the two, though.  The first is that there is a more significant private sector in ELCC than in Canadian postsecondary education.  The second, and probably more important is that ELCC is a *much* more homogenous service than postsecondary education.  There are some differentiations in ELCC, but they basically come down to whether the care is done by teachers reporting to school boards or not (the K/SK – pre-K divide) and, among the pre-K set, the age of the child, because different required child-to-caregiver ratios drive staffing costs.  Comparing this to the degree of credential and program variation in post-secondary education shows why ELCC is more amenable to a standardized national approach.

But still, the similarities are close enough that it’s worth examining the state of the policy discourse in one to see how it might eventually come to affect the other.  So let’s dive in.

There are two major issues with respect to childcare.  The first is availability.  There simply aren’t enough spaces available and that can sometimes make public childcare unavailable at any price; this is especially true if the childcare one needs is outside the mainstream business hours of 9 to 5.  The second is price.  In many provinces – particularly Ontario – childcare subsidies are ludicrously low, which means that prices can be very high, particularly for the youngest children (in Toronto $20,000+/year is not uncommon). 

The challenge with any new investment is that these are rivalrous ends: a dollar spent to subsidize consumers is a dollar that can’t go to increasing the number of spaces.  In theory, this problem can be solved simply by spending twice the amount of money so both problems can be solved simultaneously, and this seems to be the strategy the feds are proposing (the feds have never really explained how the billions they set aside in their spring budget are meant to be spent, but my strong impression is that they are working off the calculations in this short paper from the Atkinson Foundation).  But if you read the Memorandums of Understanding that were hastily concluded with a number of provinces before the election, what you will notice is that they say exactly zilch about the number of spots to be created, while at the same time being very specific about the price parents will be asked to pay – an easy-to-campaign-on $10/per day (to be achieved by 2026).

(Actually, it’s not quite that simple: the promise of $10/day is an “average”, though how the average is to be calculated is entirely unclear.  It might mean a flat price, but it might also mean different rates charged to parents of different means…it might also mean averaging across age groups, including JK and SK, since not all provinces offer full-day versions of either.  This matters enormously: average childcare costs in Ontario are over $50/day if you exclude JK and SK, but only $20/day if you include them.) 

Is this good policy?  My feeling here is yes and no.  As my colleagues Jonathan Williams and Jacqueline Lambert demonstrated a few years ago, ELCC is vastly under-subsidized compared to post-secondary education, and is deserving of greater subsidy.  We ask young parents, with few assets to their name, to contribute a lot more in terms of ELCC than we ask them to contribute to the (more expensive) education of their children in post-secondary education. So greater focus and investment in the area is worth it.

But is the money going to be spent the right way?  That’s a harder call.  It’s difficult to make predictions about this because the details in the existing MOUs are very limited.  We don’t know how many new spots there will be, or the extent to which money is going to new spaces versus reducing prices for a more limited number of spaces.  We don’t know how any new spots will be distributed by age-level, or even how much will go to pre-school versus into the primary system.  To the extent they are outside the school system, we do not know how much money will go into full-time 8AM-5PM childcare and how much will go to more time-flexible childcare (the latter would be much more likely to help working class mothers, the former very much goes to the middle- and upper-middle-class).  And most of all, we don’t know how these averages are going to work.  If they involve income-based sliding price scales (as Jonathan Williams and I suggested back here) that’s probably a good thing (especially if supply spaces remains limited); if they are not, this may well be another one of those subsidies that likely ends up with a reverse income-skew – that is, one which tends to benefit better-off parents over worse-off ones.

We don’t know any of these things, so we can’t say for certain.  I hope I am wrong about this, but my guess from the rhetoric currently coming out of Ottawa and from childcare advocates is that it is i) going more to fund full-time spots than part-time, flexible ones; ii) move to making spots cheaper than to expanding availability, and iii) wherever possible prefer flat-rate prices over income-tested ones.  In other words, it’s going to subsidize something that deserves more subsidy but in a unduly regressive way. 

And that’s a serious problem, because I guarantee that if this plan is deemed to be a success, what is happening on the childcare file is going to happen to post-secondary sooner rather than later.  More on that tomorrow.