Excerpts
The federal government’s April 28 Spring Economic Update includes a $6-billion Team Canada Strong program, a commitment to recruit, train and hire 80,000 to 100,000 new Red Seal Trades workers. This is an undertaking built on solid data.
The program is also well-targeted. Team Canada Strong is implicitly focused on young men: The trades are more than 90 per cent male. And young men do need support getting on the jobs ladder. Statistics Canada observes that a recent increase in youth who are not in employment, education or training (NEET) is driven by men in their 20s without a bachelor’s degree who are opting out of the labour market. We know that NEET youth are at high risk of social disconnection, prone to commit a crime or become homeless, and suffer from mental-health challenges and long-term financial instability.
While Team Canada Strong addresses the challenges faced by young men, do we need an equivalent program to bolster other critical sectors of the economy – such as child care – that are predominantly staffed by women? The answer is yes. This is partly about equity, but critically, parallel investment in training and wages for early childhood educators is essential if we hope to proactively address demographic and employment shifts and support broad economic prosperity.
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The economic case for the 2021 introduction of CWELCC was grounded in its potential to raise Canadian incomes: Access to high-quality child care enables more women to enter the work force. Following Quebec’s 1997 introduction of its low-fee universal child care system, the province’s labour-force participation rate for mothers with young children climbed 13 per cent over 20 years.
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Incidentally, access to good, affordable child care could have a particularly notable impact in who participates in the skilled trades. Decades of recruitment campaigns have barely changed the fact that only 7.3 per cent of trades workers are women. This is partly because it is more difficult to re-enter the workforce after career interruptions in the trades than in other industries.
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Canada needs more skilled-trades workers. But it also needs early-childhood educators.
This is essential to realizing the nation-building initiatives that Canada’s new government is pursuing and to staving off multifaceted and long-term social tensions. Investing more in accessible child care and the young women who staff it would make all of Team Canada Strong-er.