Excerpts from the bulletin:

In Canada, day care emerged during World War II when women were involved in the war effort and later in the post war years when they increasingly entered the workforce. The result of this social change was dual income families, single parents and the decline of the extended family. This dramatically increased the demand for high quality, publicly funded day care.

Canada does not have a national system for child care&emdash;instead we have an underfunded patchwork of early learning and child care programs delivered by provincial governments. These programs fail to meet the needs of status and non-status Indians living off reserve and Métis. Implementing a new system that would be inclusive of our children would be complex and difficult because of intergovernmental wrangling.