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Ken Dryden says Canada must face reality: "The great majority of parents are in the workplace." The federal minister of social development says temporary child-care programs and initiatives must be replaced by a system -- "something really ambitious, something that is there and is going to be there."
Dryden spoke to Maria Kubacki in his Parliament Hill office. This is an edited version of that conversation.
Q: What can licensed, regulated child care and early learning provide that a parent at home cannot?
A: It's not as if they're mutually exclusive. . . . Child care is another experience for a kid in growing up and developing. It's another tool for a parent, another way of . . . believing they are doing all a parent can do for their child.
Q: What is your own experience with child care?
A: We have two kids. They're 29 and 26. My wife was home with our kids in those early years. Child care . . . at that time would have been quite different than it is today.
Q: Different -- worse?
A: Just less developed. I'm sure there were places that were pretty progressive and structured. And certainly my wife made sure our kids were involved with other kids . . . in the kinds of activities that a kid at a child care today might experience.
Q: Is one of the goals of this proposed universal system a kind of social engineering where you equalize, level the playing field between socially and economically disadvantaged children and children from more affluent families?
A: The term "social engineering" has a kind of pejorative understanding to it. You're trying to give kids a chance. . . . For those who have a good chance, (you're trying) to enhance their good
chance. For those who have a lesser chance, for them to have that much more of an opportunity.
Q: One of the figures thrown around on how much we should be spending on a universal child-care system is from the Child Care Advocacy Association of Canada -- one per cent of GDP, about $10 billion a year. Is this a realistic goal?
A: You make decisions each year as you go along . . . and your attitudes change, your expectations change, and the unthinkable becomes totally thinkable.
Q: The Quebec system has been held up as one that Canada might consider following. What's good about it?
A: It's got the ambition right. It's a true system . . . and as a system it's pretty irreversible now.
Q: You're part of a minority government. Is there a sense of urgency about establishing something that becomes irreversible, as you said the system in Quebec is?
A: The reason to act urgently is there. It comes from the outside, rather than the inside. And so I think it's just time to get at it.
- reprinted from the Calgary Herald