Excerpts from the report:
If we are to achieve equal rights for women, governments must deliver on child care. Without access to good, affordable early learning and child care services, true equality remains unattainable. Good child care is part of a range of supports - including parental leave and family-friendly workplaces - that are necessary to help women meet our children's needs, study and train for jobs, earn a decent income, and help keep ourselves and our children out of poverty and abusive relationships. Despite good intentions and promises by some governments, major inroads to solving the child care crisis in the rest of Canada have yet to be made. Those who continue to pay the highest price are children and their parents, particularly mothers.
The federal government made a $5 billion down payment on child care in the last budget, but stopped short of putting in place the accountability and legislative measures needed to transform our patchwork of inadequate services into a quality system of early learning and child care. Without legislation even this step could be in jeopardy, leaving the vast majority of Canada's mothers right where we are today - scrambling to find quality, affordable child care.
The solution to this crisis does not lie in paying mothers to stay home or giving families money so that we can "choose" a child care option. Such arguments ignore the realities of women's lives (mothers are in the workforce to stay) and our aspirations, as well as the social and developmental needs of children. In any case, the price tag would far exceed the cost of developing a child care system, which is the reason proponents of the pay-to-stay-at-home option never say what it would cost to make it truly viable. And giving money to families does nothing to ensure the creation and sustainability of an adequate supply of quality, affordable early childhood services for those who want and need them.