Excerpt
Canadian parents would have a strong preference for affordable, $10-a-day licensed child care over individual payments delivered to them from the government, according to a new report.
Released Thursday by the women’s economic empowerment charity The Prosperity Project, the report recognizes that there are still long waits for licensed daycares, but makes the case for expanding spaces in the program instead of scrapping it for a family-allowance model.
The report is authored by Gordon Cleveland, an economist and early childhood researcher at the University of Toronto. Cleveland conducted a series of focus groups with parents, analyzed available data from Statistics Canada and provincial figures. In reaching his conclusions, Cleveland also compared existing studies on child care in Canada and abroad and took a deeper dive into the Quebec experience which has had subsidized daycare since 1997.
It calls the Canada-wide Early Learning and Child Care program implemented by the Liberal Government “a victim of its own success,” noting that the possibility of affordable fees has pushed demand ahead of expansion.
...