Introduction
Alongside the best interests of children, one of the driving motivations of a high quality universal child care system is to advance women’s choices and opportunities, including the opportunity for women to become entrepreneurs.
However, as this article describes, enabling and relying on child care entrepreneurs to build out BC’s universal child care system is problematic – including for children, women, families, educators, taxpayers and the general public – and inconsistent with decades of well-established research and evidence. We therefore recommend that existing child care entrepreneurs and businesses be supported with an improved unified operating funding model, and that the BC government take immediate steps to ensure future expansion is dominated by public and non-profit providers.