SCYR Committee Meeting

SUB-COMMITTEE ON CHILDREN AND YOUTH AT RISK OF THE STANDING COMMITTEE ON HUMAN RESOURCES DEVELOPMENT AND THE STATUS OF PERSONS WITH DISABILITIES

SOUS-COMITÉ SUR LES ENFANTS ET JEUNES À RISQUE DU COMITÉ PERMANENT DES RESOURCES HUMAINES ET DE LA CONDITION DES PERSONNES HANDICAPÉES

EVIDENCE

[Recorded by Electronic Apparatus]

Wednesday, March 15, 2000

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[English]

The Chair (Mr. John Godfrey (Don Valley West, Lib.)): Welcome. First of all, I want to apologize to the witnesses for the collective doings here. It's been a strange week, as you may have gathered, and it's thrown our timetable into a bit of a cocked hat. So we're finding ourselves voting at all sorts of times on things that we weren't quite planning on.

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Let's take advantage of your presence. I want to welcome both Judith Maxwell and Sharon Stroick from the Canadian Policy Research Networks. Perhaps just by way of introduction—and I want to welcome Grant to the proceedings as well—I'll give you a bit of a context for what we're up to.

The committee issued a report in December, which was really aimed at making some recommendations for the budget. I would say that some of our recommendations were followed on the income side but that the great unresolved piece is really what we are to do to help Canadian families in the community context, particularly in the area of community services, to take the pressure off, which they're experiencing, whatever their situation.

To that end, the subcommittee has really devoted itself to looking at two different issues. I guess it's sort of in the context of what the budget had in it and what it didn't have in it. One of the issues is the whole question of family friendly workplaces, particularly in the context of the federal government because that was a promise in the Speech from the Throne. The CPRN has certainly been a pioneer in discussing issues of work-family balance, whether it's in the six comparative studies and so on. So in a sense, your presence here is going to cover off on a couple of subjects, the first being that one, which was promised in the Speech from the Throne but has yet to be elaborated. But it's also the intention of the committee to pursue work on the issue of what it is we need to do beyond income to help families, particularly families with young, preschool children, at the community level and how we can strengthen community services in an integrated and holistic manner.

We had originally hoped to invite the folks from CPRN to come before the budget to give us a bit of a template against which to critique the budget, but now that the budget has happened, we can sort of flip it around. It is also the case, as I think everyone who has received their notes realizes, that “What is the Best Policy Mix for Canada's Young Children?” came out just before the budget, and I think it was no accident. I think it was designed to perhaps give a little last push.

So I want to welcome you very warmly to this meeting. It's a select but quality crowd here. We may be joined by others, depending on how they find Mr. Dion's speech, but I'm not going to get into that. Perhaps you would like to give us both a kind of overview of your own work and also what you see flowing from the budget, because your Pulling Together came out before the budget itself.

Welcome.

Ms. Judith Maxwell (President, Canadian Policy Research Networks): Thank you, Chairman. Thank you for this opportunity to speak to the committee about the work we are doing on Canada's children.

What I thought I would do to get the conversation started, if I can put it that way, is speak to you about the interdependence between families and society and try to illustrate the ways in which society at large and public policy in particular are not carrying out their share of the responsibility in terms of helping parents be the best they can be for their children.

In order to keep my remarks short, I'm going to address four questions: Why should society support families and children? Why should we focus on all children? What do other countries do on these issues, especially on the work and family side? And fourth, how do Canadian policies compare with the standard that has been set in those places?

At members' places I think we have distributed a copy of the press release for the volume we published just before Christmas, “What is the Best Policy Mix for Canada's Young Children?”, by Sharon Stroick, who's with me today, and Jane Jensen. You will see in that press release a list of all the studies that have been published in the last year or so as our program on the best policy mix has unfolded.

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So let me begin with this first question: why should society support families and children? I know a lot of people ask, aren't the parents responsible? Certainly parents do have the primary role in looking after children day by day and year by year, but we've always invested in public schools because we thought society could help families in that way. I think what we need to talk about now is what we would invest in with respect to early childhood.

The needs of families have changed quite drastically over the past 20 to 30 years. About 70% of women with young children work full-time, and almost all of them work outside the home. Secondly, we have smaller family units without extended family members, so there's no one at home to care for children, prepare meals, and do all that stuff that is so important to health and well-being. Third, there is a lot more instability in family structure and in work arrangements. Both of these types of instability can create abrupt discontinuities in family life that make it very difficult for families to adapt.

The reason I go back over these kinds of historical changes is that they really mean that families are no longer autonomous, self-sufficient units the way they might have been in an earlier time, when people lived in smaller communities or lived on a farm. There's now a profound interdependence between parents, on the one hand, and their employers, public institutions, governments, and communities, on the other.

In addition, we have a lot of new research, a whole new knowledge base that has developed in recent times and has shown that we cannot wait until children are of school age to begin to ensure that they'll have their developmental needs met. There's evidence on brain development and on the efficacy of various interventions, and there are a lot of community experiments that we can look to for advice now. I'm thinking of experiments like 1, 2, 3 GO!, in Montreal, Success by Six, Better Beginnings, CAPC, many provincial programs, and new ones recently started by HRDC.

So that's the first question.

[Translation]

The second question deals with the fact that our work is focussing on all young children. We adopted this approach because, although certain specific groups of children require more attention than others, all families have needs that can be offset with the help of the appropriate policies. I am not just talking about government policies, but also policies applied by employers and community authorities.

Our work and other research such as the national longitudinal study indicate that the harmonious development of children requires three favourable conditions: a sufficient income, effective parental support and supervision and a receptive community environment. Finally, the development of policies calls into question another level of interdependency. Families must be able to count on a series of support measures that belong to these three categories: income, parental supervision and neighbourhoods.

[English]

In Canada, though, if you look at the direction of public policy in recent times, what you find is that rather than addressing the needs of all children, policies have swung towards very narrow targeting. Some of that targeting is based on income, but we now have evidence from the national longitudinal survey that shows that about 70% of the children in Canada who are experiencing either functional or behavioural problems are not poor children. So if we target by income, we're going to miss a lot of the children who need help.

The other type of targeting is by category. For example, we design programs for autism, but if we focus only on autism we miss a lot of other disorders that are very difficult, both for the child and the parents. Or if we focus on families who are on social assistance and give them certain kinds of attention, there are other families who are very much in need who will be missed.

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We need to make sure that within our panoply of programming we are addressing the needs of all children and recognizing this interdependence between income, parenting, and supportive community environments.

The third question is, what can we learn from other countries about this interdependence? Several European countries, each in their own way, have developed a very active role for the state. Whether they're motivated by gender equity, by social-democratic principles, or by more traditional or conservative principles, the result is still a variety of child-centred policies that support income, early childhood education, and so on.

In most European countries, for example, between 70% and 100% of children aged three to six are in publicly provided child care, whether or not the mother works. In Canada, the ratio is around 40%. These European countries do focus on income and are much more successful at reducing child poverty than Canadian programs are, but in the European context it's important to note that employers are full-fledged partners in all these child-centred policies. They're contributors both in kind and in organization, if I can put it that way, but most importantly in the financial sense.

Now, in contrast to European countries, we have the United States, which most definitely does not take the broad-based approach. The United States, as you know, is the country that has the most unequal distribution of income and economic opportunity of all the countries in the industrialized world. Basically the United States leaves families to sort out their own problems. In fact, their most significant social program is one that simply tops up the low incomes of the working poor with the earned income tax credit. Therefore, there are no programs that recognize the need for services and for the community base that I talked about earlier.

Let me then turn to my fourth question: how does Canada compare? Canada ranks high in its provision of health and education; they are universally accessible and of reasonable quality. But overall, Canada has not adapted its policy and program structures to respond to the changed family situations that I talked about at the beginning of my remarks.

One of our projects did a survey of the policies in six provinces and the federal government, and it shows a patchwork of programs. Provinces seem to be struggling to find the balance between income and services. No one is yet happy with the mix, and a lot of experimentation continues.

Quebec, of course, is in a league of its own. Since 1997 it has had a societal strategy for families and children, which is gradually being implemented. There the package is a mix of income support and services, with a special focus on developmentally oriented child care at a reasonable price.

Part of the difficulty in reviewing the Canadian policy situation is that jurisdictional boundaries have contributed to a fragmentation and to certain barriers to policy development. The federal government holds mainly income levers, while the provinces have both the service and the support levers. This creates a third level of interdependence across governments. They have to work together to create the overall mix of programs and policies that families need.

The major breakthrough in the past few years has been the national child benefit. Work is continuing, as you know, on the national children's agenda. The Canada child tax benefit is moving very gradually to the level of support regarded as minimum by most analysts, which is about $2,500 per year per child, and we did get another instalment of that money in the federal budget. The national child benefit programming by the provinces is promising, but still very experimental, with wide variations in coverage, level of service, and even type of service. The extension of parental leave to one year is certainly a step forward, but it constitutes probably about half of what is needed in terms of coverage and wage replacement.

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Overall then, we can say that 30 years after women went out to work for wages, there is no established framework of programs that help parents balance work and family responsibilities while children are young.

[Translation]

Our research indicates that Canada's objective should be to set up a framework of established early childhood programs. This framework would include a series of measures to help parents, including child care services and programs that focus on the harmonious development of the child, which would be available in all communities in Canada. All of the family's natural partners, in other words employers, community stakeholders and public authorities, should participate in implementing these measures.

[English]

The recent debate about fiscal policy shows that governments are preoccupied with tax cuts and health care. Children's issues are much less visible now than they were even six months ago, and there is evidence that the federal-provincial dialogue on children has stalled. Yet parents today face an entirely different set of challenges from the parents of 20 and 30 years ago.

We know that the vast majority are doing heroic duty to love and nurture their children, but they cannot assure the best possible lives for their children if they try to function independently, nor can they go on strike for better parenting and community support. They're locked in a state of interdependence with partners who, as of now, are not taking up their full share of the responsibility. Yet we do all claim to favour investing in children.

Those are my opening remarks, Mr. Chairman. I'd be happy to address your questions.

The Chair: One of the advantages of having a small group of focus is that we can actually have a real conversation.

Grant, I know you've been thrown into this sort of helter-skelter, but go at it.

Mr. Grant McNally (Dewdney—Alouette, Ref.): Sure. I'll ask you a few questions. I have to run off to another meeting. I'm sorry I can't stay longer.

This is an area of huge interest for me as well, as a parent of four young children. My children are nine, seven, five, and three. Also, I was in education as a teacher before embarking on this career, and my wife was a preschool supervisor, so these are all issues we are well acquainted with within our own family.

I'd like to ask you about a few of the underlying assumptions to your proposals. One, I'm reading that for you and your group, programs would tend to be the answer to resolve these issues. Am I reading that right?

Ms. Judith Maxwell: We are arguing that we need broad-based, widely available policies and programs to create adequate income, support effective parenting, and strengthen community support. We're not arguing that this all needs to be done by governments, by any stretch of the imagination. But governments can play a very useful role in mobilizing society to respond to the needs of families.

Mr. Grant McNally: Okay. I don't disagree with that at all. There are a number of different ways to try to solve those dilemmas, and you mentioned policies and government programs as one way of addressing them.

You did mention toward the end of your discussion the preoccupation with health care and tax cuts in this current budget, and I would argue that the notion of tax cuts is not a mutually exclusive notion, that it might be a way to address these needs as well. And there's the fact that of course our tax dollars are collected by the federal and provincial jurisdictions, then redistributed to others through social programs.

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One of the things that got me personally involved in politics was this whole notion of my tax bill increasing and the fact that I felt, as an individual, I had fewer and fewer personal choices with those discretionary dollars to use for my family. I'm finding there's a big network of people in my community who are looking at this as a possible solution, a lot of people who I don't think would be addressed through the solutions you're talking about. They would maybe be in that 30% of people. You mentioned the 70-30 split—70% of families who have both parents, both individuals working.

How would you address the 30% of people who have made a choice—as have the 70% made a choice; choices are great—to have one parent stay at home, or another person at home as the caregiver, while another individual goes out to earn adequate income, as you put it? I guess my question is, how would you mesh, as you said in your comments, programming that would meet the needs of all children if that category of 30% of people who are now in a minority position of individuals working in our society... How would you square that, or address the needs of those individuals if they are not, say, tapped into both parents in the workforce, so they wouldn't be able to take advantage of child care at the workplace, and those kinds of issues? How could you see a policy... I guess it would be more through a policy initiative rather than an actual program that would address individuals in that category.

Ms. Judith Maxwell: I think it's very important that society recognize the contribution that all parents make, whatever choice is made, about working versus staying home, so one of the measures we recommended was a tax credit universal for all families with children.

Mr. Grant McNally: Right.

Ms. Judith Maxwell: In other words, a clear, symbolic—in some ways—but nonetheless tangible recognition that we as a society value the effort that parents make and the contribution that they and their children will make to society.

Apart from that, I think there are a lot of other elements here, more on the program and support side, that are just as valuable to families where there's one earner and one parent at home. For example—and we see this very much in European countries, even countries like Germany that take a much different view of whether or not women should work, and in fact encourage women to be at home with their children—there's still a strong sense that child care can make a contribution to the well-being of those children. It's a choice of the parents, but often they will wish to see that the children have that kind of development opportunity that they can have in a good child care setting, in addition to the fact that there will be a parent at home with them for all the rest of the day when they're not in the preschool setting, or however you want to describe it.

Mr. Grant McNally: Can I interrupt you for a second? Are you saying that for individuals who, say, have the one parent at home and one parent out working, an opportunity would be for the individuals in that category to also take advantage of—

Ms. Judith Maxwell: Of child care.

Mr. Grant McNally: —child care? So you're thinking about early childhood education or preschool.

Ms. Judith Maxwell: Yes. And we put a lot of distinction here between what we call babysitting type of care and educational or developmentally oriented child care.

Mr. Grant McNally: Sure.

Ms. Judith Maxwell: In the same sense that you want the best school for your kids once they are of school age, I think as a society we're going to have to move to the direction where we'll say we want the best school for our kids from, say, age three, or something of that sort.

The other kinds of things that can be very useful for all parents, whatever choices they've made, are things like parent resource centres, where if the kid is going through some sort of stage that you don't understand, it's very helpful to be able to go to a centre where there are reading materials, where there are advisers, where there are other parents with whom you can share experiences and so on. If we had that type of community-based organization... As we know from those that exist, most are non-profit organizations, run in many cases on a cooperative basis.

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Mr. Grant McNally: So it's formalizing the kind of networks that happen informally in a lot of communities for that type of parental support.

Ms. Judith Maxwell: Yes. “Normalizing” networks is a good way of describing it, actually, because now that families tend to move around more, they're often more separated from their extended family. They don't have those ready-made, long-term social connections that are really important when you're in those early years of child rearing. Therefore, the community can self-organize to make sure those kinds of resources are there.

Other types of situations also tend to arise for families. For example, it still can happen that there may be an elder relative in the family who gets ill, and suddenly you're faced with a child care problem even if you're not working. There can be situations where one of the children is running into serious difficulties, and resources are needed from the community when the family can't solve those on their own.

So I see the work and family balance as being a very important issue to a great many Canadians, but I don't see the kinds of programs and community-type supports we're talking about here as being somehow exclusively oriented only to families where both parents are working or there's a lone parent.

Mr. Grant McNally: Thanks.

Thank you, Mr. Chair, for allowing me to participate.

The Chair: I'm glad you're here.

Mr. Grant McNally: I'm sorry I can't stay longer.

The Chair: Come often.

Mr. Grant McNally: I'll do that. Thanks for the invitation.

The Chair: Libby.

Ms. Libby Davies (Vancouver East, NDP): Thank you.

Thank you to both the witnesses for coming today. I think you know that this little subcommittee has struggled to survive to pursue, in the various ways we have available to us, this idea of much better public policy around Canada's children, one that's more universal.

I have a couple of questions. The first one is actually around the budget. The budget is a benchmark. At the end of the day, the question is, where's the money? The budget is a benchmark for a lot of the issues we discuss.

On the budget, then, I think there had been this huge expectation built up that it was a children's budget and that we would begin to see at least some of the framework in place for future development. I personally think it was a huge disappointment. There wasn't anything for child care. There wasn't anything for a housing program. The indexing of the child tax benefit and the indexing generally I think was a very good measure, but even with the child tax benefit the increase in the base, which I think works out to about $50, is about $1 a week. It's fairly minimal.

Of course, one of my big bones of contention is the clawback for families on welfare, or children on welfare. The truth is, we really didn't make much progress with the so-called children's agenda.

I'm interested in hearing your impressions on the budget and where you think the government could have done a better job in beginning to advance some of that work.

Ms. Judith Maxwell: I think it would be fair to say that we shared some of your disappointment in the sense that the anticipation, certainly from reading the Speech from the Throne, was that the government was prepared to think on a more comprehensive basis than what we did see in the budget.

Also disappointing is that it looks from the outside as though some of the momentum has been lost from the combined federal-provincial work that initiated the NCB in 1998 and that had been carrying on the development of the NCB as well as the national children's agenda. That's quite worrying, because in fact the interdependence between the federal and provincial governments is an extremely important factor in the ability of the country to move forward on these issues.

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I found it difficult, commenting on the budget, to make a huge fuss about it, because there were significant steps forward. I think having longer parental leave available is really extremely valuable, both in the signal it gives to parents that it's okay for one parent to stay home for that full year and in its providing what is very modest financial support to make that possible for the family to do. It does shift the trade-offs and it does in a sense open up an envelope we can work to make better over the years.

With regard to the changes in the Canada child tax credit, there is more money going in. It tends to be more focused on the modest-income group as opposed to the low-income group. That's a political choice. I also think it is a reflection of the fact that the federal and provincial governments have not yet worked through the completion of this process of getting kids off welfare and leaving families who are dependent on social assistance more whole, if I can put it that way, than they have been in these introductory years of the program.

As well, we shouldn't ignore the fact that the tax cuts are good for families, that in fact their overall disposable income will be better. The difficulty with working through the tax system is that it's such a blunt instrument. It's good for families to have more money in their pockets, more earned income in particular. Adequate income is one of the cornerstones here. But a lot of the financial challenges families with children face are episodic—for instance, that moment when you have to sign up for licensed day care. In some provinces, it can be $800 or $900 a month. That's a huge amount of cash for a family with young children or a young child to come up with.

That's where we get into the challenge of whether we are going to run a market-based system for child care, which doesn't produce enough of the supply and is not accessible to a wide enough array of families, or going to make commitments to various forms of subsidies.

Quebec has chosen a particular model. I think there are other ways of financing child care that can make it widely accessible to families. The fact that we have the child care expense deduction is positive, but it's after-the-fact help. The families still have to come up with the $800 or $900 per child per month and then claim the refund the following April. The refund, as you know, is partial in relation to the total cost.

So after the budget we're still left in the situation where key doors have been opened, there's more on the table for families now than there was before the budget, but we still haven't made that shift in mindset that just as we have established programs for health and education and social assistance, we need to establish programs, comprehensive programs, for supports for families.

Ms. Libby Davies: If I could just follow up, I think it's all a matter of trying to balance these things out. As you say, on the one hand, tax cuts, in terms of being cash in the pocket, everybody likes, but you have to balance it and look at it from the point of view of actually how much cash that is in real terms to purchase the kinds of services you need.

I think your illustration of how much it costs for day care is very valid. So you may have gotten $100 or $200 in savings and tax cuts... you know, this $54 billion. The wealthier you are, of course, the greater the benefits. But the working family or the low-income family is still very strapped in not being able to actually go out and purchase that service because it is in the marketplace.

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There's one thing I think has changed. I can remember when the whole debate around child care was very much child care and it was based on the premise of people going to work, moms going to work and needing child care. I think there has really been a huge shift that hasn't been translated into the program, in a lot of people's thinking. Just the idea now that early childhood education and child care are good for children, regardless of whether you're in the paid or unpaid workforce, is a huge shift in people's thinking. I think that's really good. Unfortunately, it's not backed up with anything really substantial.

I was interested in the research the organization has done on these family resource centres, because again it's not like there's one model out there. We have to look at things that are fairly adaptable. The idea of a family resource centre with licensed child care but also other kinds of supports for one or two parents who are at home is a really great idea. From what I understand, there are 13 of them in New Brunswick—that's the highest number—and they are federally funded.

I don't know how this actually works in terms of the social union, because it is clearly a provincial responsibility. I'm just curious as to whether you have more information about these resource centres, and whether or not you think they're a fairly good model that should be applied more universally.

Things like CAPC are minute. They're all good little programs, you know. I remember when Pettigrew was still the minister and he came here and said, if you look at what we spend on public education and then... Sorry, it was Health Canada. If you look at what we spend on things like CAPC, we're talking about pennies. So on the idea of greatly expanding a more universal system, do you think these resource centres are one way to do that?

Ms. Judith Maxwell: We definitely think there is a need for something we sort of generically call a community resource centre. It could house quite a wide array of services and support groups—both formal professional services and a lot of informal things at the same time—or it could be more the place you go for assessments and referrals, and to pick up tip sheets on how to deal with particular issues, and that sort of thing. So there are a lot of different models that exist now.

The ones in New Brunswick you referred to are focused only on low-income families. We would prefer to see them broadly available, so there was no stigma attached to going there. They would not be associated with a particular income class or anything of that sort. But of course you need more capacity in order to make it more widely available, and I think New Brunswick has had to make a specific choice.

I don't actually know what the funding arrangement is between New Brunswick and the federal government. Do you know, Sharon?

Ms. Sharon Stroick (Manager, Family Network, Canadian Policy Research Networks): I can't remember offhand. It is in provincial stories.

Ms. Judith Maxwell: Right, but we have that information in one of our studies, so we'll dig it out and pass it to you.

I've actually worked with the people who run a parent resource centre here in Ottawa. There's a toy exchange and a book exchange. You can borrow books and the kids can go in and pick up their—

Ms. Libby Davies: Is there licensed child care?

Ms. Judith Maxwell: There is a child care service, an assessment service and drop-in child care, as well as something that's longer term. The executive director said to me, “We have a lot of people who don't come very often, but they explain that they have peace of mind because they know it's there when they need it.” But it does get intensively used by a lot of other people in the community.

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I used the word “episodic” earlier. If you think about it in terms of the life course of an individual, the early childhood period when your kids are really small is very short, yet the investment you have to make to equip your home, look after the child, and get appropriate care in place for that five-year span until they're in school full-time is really quite huge for people who are poor or of modest income. It's a lot even for people of middle income. You can create these centres with that kind of sharing of resources and contingent fall-back position on an episodic basis. When people are in difficulty because their regular caregiver is not able to come that day, they can use the drop-in. The kind of peace of mind it offers to parents is remarkable.

As you mentioned, the amount of money involved is very modest in relation to what we spend on other initiatives in this country.

The Chair: I would like to welcome Ovid Jackson, who just came in, having dutifully done his stuff in the House for the minister. Ovid has had quite a lot of experience on the ground, as the former mayor of Owen Sound, and has done some very interesting initiatives of his own in his community.

Ovid.

Mr. Ovid L. Jackson (Bruce—Grey, Lib.): Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.

I'd like to welcome our guests and apologize for the poor attendance here today. I'm still feeling like I should be in bed, but I felt obligated to be here.

Ms. Judith Maxwell: We quite understand, and we're impressed with your stamina, as a matter of fact.

Mr. Ovid Jackson: I've always enjoyed your talks, Judy, since the first time I heard you.

We don't have a unitary government; we have the provinces. I guess there's strength in diversity, but across the country we have two things going on. We have political ideology and then we have political stripes. Every time the federal government tries to get a program, first of all we say that education, health care, and what not are provincial responsibilities, so we end up having to enforce the five principles of the health care act and sometimes end up in fights with the provinces. Obviously we have a bit of a money deficit, but when we invest the money we want to know where the money is going. I think that's where the fight is.

My questions to you two women today are as follows: How are we doing with those objectives you have formed, in terms of the critical amount of dollars spent in that particular field? On these episodic things where the centres are very important and so on, how are we doing? We have models that can be shared. Should the federal government be putting more money into child care? If it does, how are we going to account for it? How are we doing? Do you have a checklist of things we are doing? You said we've done some things that are good, the signal was good—the year for the women, getting time off.

Those are my questions.

Ms. Judith Maxwell: Unfortunately, we don't have access to good costing numbers, in terms of what the total amount would be to implement the full comprehensive package we've kind of mapped out in qualitative terms here. I argued, even before the budget, that this was a long-term set of goals and we weren't going to get there in one budget. It would take a combination of many budgets, not only federal budgets but provincial budgets, in order to put in place the whole infrastructure that's needed.

The national child benefit approach kind of opened up a new era in federal-provincial relations, where it was possible for the two orders of government to come to an agreement where the federal government used its tax transfer lever and the provinces used their services and support levers, and they used them in a kind of complementary fashion in order to make a difference for families. I think that is the model for the future.

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It's not as clean-cut to apply that model when you get into the questions of financing child care, because the federal government instruments are so indirect and the provinces do very clearly have this responsibility, however you want to cite passages in the Constitution.

It seems to me what we need to aim for is a kind of common core of programs that are acknowledged to be the essential infrastructure for early childhood. Certainly child care would be on the list, but it wouldn't be the only thing, by any stretch of the imagination.

Let me stand back and talk about provinces for a minute. First of all, they're all at different starting points in terms of what they have in place and probably what they would like to put in place. Secondly, they have quite different political philosophies about the role of the state and the appropriate balance of responsibility between the state and society at large, or the state and families. But even allowing for that diversity, which we value most of the time—

The Chair: What are our options?

Ms. Judith Maxwell: —we certainly respect it; let me put it that way—and allowing for the fact that the federal government does have this residual responsibility to ensure that Canadians have access to roughly similar programs at roughly similar costs across the country, so that children born in Nova Scotia have opportunities for growth and development that can compare with the opportunities that exist for children that are born in Saskatchewan and Alberta, and so on, within that framework I think it is possible to create what I would call the “menu”, the pieces of the infrastructure that we all want to create over, say, the next five to ten years. You need some rules for the kind of financial contribution that the federal government would make, for the kind of visibility or recognition it would get for the contribution it is making. The provinces would have a certain amount of freedom about which pieces of the menu they would push ahead first, and clearly there would need to be some flexibility about whether or not the provinces would choose to do this through more market-oriented versus more state-oriented mechanisms to make things happen.

But in fact a large part of the infrastructure is quite naturally community-based and can be achieved in a cooperative and grassroots fashion. The question is whether you want to stand back and somehow leave people to struggle on their own, when we know the resources in many communities are limited, if not impoverished, or whether in fact there is a way in which federal and provincial governments can enable these community-based initiatives to begin to happen on a stronger and quicker basis than would otherwise be the case.

It would take a fair amount of political will for a deal like that to be put together, but in regard to childhood and family life, while there are different views in the country about the role of the family, I do feel that it also can be a rallying cry. Certainly, as I said in my opening remarks, we all claim in our hearts to be very much in favour of investing in children. It's something that is both top of mind across the population and sustainable through much more deliberative techniques of discussion among citizens.

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Mr. Ovid Jackson: Is there a dilemma? Basically, as you say, when a person is young and they're given the children, unless they get some support from a group of professionals... It happens, as you say, and we all respond to it; we have the kids and we start to farm them out to the babysitter, and heaven knows. With my own kids, I was lucky they didn't get somebody who abused them or dropped them on their heads, or something like that. Then we pass through that phase and we're into something else.

How are we doing in terms of educating, and so forth? To some degree, I think each generation needs to be educated, and the communities themselves. The first thing that happens to us is that people will say, oh, yes, you Liberals, you're—what do they call it?—“social engineering”, and that kind of stuff. But to me, it's a real sad shame, because we know if the children have the good treatment of the mothers and support in those first five years, in fact we're going to be investing less in crime, health care, education, and so on.

People talk about the education, universities, colleges and stuff like that for their child. Through my life—I'm a teacher, of course—I've had the opportunity to see the kids, some kids who have come from Montessori schools, and so on, and I know they're all different. There's some place where that child is playing, with a group of other kids, with various kinds of elements, where the thing gets fixed. Parents will tell you that when they talked to their kid and asked when they did calculus, they would say, oh, that was when I was playing with this thing or that thing, and that's when it came home—x multiplied by y equals whatever. Yet kids miss that kind of stuff. How can we use that data and that information to make sure all the kids are exposed? They're all going to be different; God bless us if we aren't, because that's what makes our country great. Everybody brings their own strength.

It always bothers me that there's a waste. We talk about it. We know a lot about it. We may need to solicit your help in whatever grouping or whatever form of disseminating the information to make sure people are reminded and grandparents are reminded, “Hey, maybe you missed it, but don't let your kids or grandkids go through that.”

Ms. Judith Maxwell: It's very striking to me—and I guess I've actually experienced it in my own family life—how inadequate parents feel. This showed up in the poll that the Globe and Mail did when it launched its series on family matters. That was one of the strongest messages, that parents are not confident that they're doing the right thing for their kids.

I think we have to understand that in an earlier time, for which many people would be nostalgic, people grew up in extended families where there were many different age groups in the family, and there were aunts and grandmothers, and so on, and you tended to see different styles of parenting. I guess you had more role models to observe as you grew up and then took on your own parenting.

Also, I guess in those days you didn't worry too much about whether you were a good parent or not a good enough parent. There wasn't all this information around that suggested that if you didn't do the right thing, you might screw things up for your kids. There's a lot of guilt imposed by this new knowledge base, but it's also quite striking to see how even very simple presentations of information or the chance to interact with other parents who have experience they can share, those informal networks, those informal types of information, are extremely important and valuable and actually will give a parent new energy, new perspective, and new confidence.

I guess it's a sad comment on the way our society has developed that we have become so isolated and so fragmented that those connections aren't always there for parents, or it may be that they're kind of fearful about asking the question in some cases. That's why the stories that come out of these family resource centres or parent resource centres are so interesting: this notion of peace of mind or of a conversation that makes something click so that you know, then, how you're going to deal with a situation with respect to your child.

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It seems like a long way from federal public policy to this kind of tangible but qualitative type of stuff, and certainly we're not talking here about having the federal government start to run parent resource centres in every community across the country. On the other hand, if that is an express need on the part of parents and of citizens generally and if we're beginning to see experiments around the country that are demonstrating how to do it, then the question is, how do you facilitate that, how do you encourage it, how do you enable that kind of thing to happen? It may be that there is a knowledge gap. It may be that there is a financial gap. There simply may be a mobilization effect that's missing. But those are things that leadership can provide and that don't end up creating massive costs for the public purse.

I'm not suggesting that's all of the answer. To get the kind of child care we need in place in all the places where it's needed and to have it accessible to parents—that's a big investment. There's no question about that.

The Chair: Just before Libby goes, I want to say that this is a rather unusual committee. Generally speaking—not entirely—I think it operates more on the lines of a conspiracy towards a common goal, so that what has brought most of us to the group, including absent friends, is a genuine interest and a pretty much shared core set of values, I'd say.

We were talking about this when Libby and I found ourselves on a plane going to Vancouver the other day. I was meeting with some of the early childhood development folk, and I said at the end of the meeting that they had to get Libby in there because I couldn't be there all the time. It's in that spirit that we've invited you. I think what comes through is that it's a marvellously rich subject in terms of things like social cohesion, which I know you have also worked on and critiqued.

I also think you've put your finger on something that is really going to be a crucial social marketing tool: there's not only a nostalgia for a certain kind of family that is gone—and I mean the intergenerational, extended, stable family that is a rarity these days—but I think there's also a nostalgia for community. It can be expressed in the way in which people search out neighbourhoods when they're buying a house or an apartment or whatever. They have certain markers they're looking for, certain tests, like tricycle tests or basketball backboard tests or whatever else. In terms of using new tools to rebuild old institutions like community, I think this can work for us very well.

Now, I'm curious about the role your organization can play in this conspiracy, because we want you to be part of it, obviously. There has been discussion about the difference between program and policy. Clearly, even if one has a five-year plan, one has to be opportunistic about seizing moments. The moment to be seized would seem to be arising out of the budget. If one took the budget and checked off the points that are in the best policy mix, one could give some half-marks and one could say we're making some progress on fronts like the parental leave fronts and so on and so forth.

The most obvious opportunity we have—all of us in the conspiracy, from whatever party—is this repeated commitment on the part of the feds to try to get a “national action plan” in place by the end of the year, in the context of a social union framework, using the national children's agenda but focusing on the early childhood development piece at the community level.

So I guess this is as much a question about the future direction of your work as it is to understand your place in the policy ecosystem. When one sees that time-limited, specific opportunity to get a deal, how do you... For those of us who are struggling to get not only a deal but the right kind of deal, one that would have more structure, say, than the reinvestment strategy for the national children's agenda money, which, as you know, is varied, frankly—the results are varied—one that has to somehow be, maybe with the exception of homelessness, the first piece through the social union agreement, where do you go from here on this file?

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How much can you think about program and the sordidness of getting... You've given us marvellous materials in all of the things that have fed into your final product here, like opportunities at the provincial level, but where are you going with this stuff for the next nine months?

Ms. Judith Maxwell: Well, I'm like everyone else, I think. We're in a reconsidering mode, given what did and did not happen in the federal budget and what is and is not happening in the federal-provincial dialogue at this point.

Our research strategy has been, first of all, to study the policies in six provinces, and we're in the process of completing that for the other four provinces so that we can have tables that cover all ten. In a sense, I think that will be useful if these discussions go forward, because it's a description of where we are now and it is very up to date, province by province.

The next step in our strategic plan, then, was to move on to the next age group, the 6- to 15-year-olds, and do an analysis of what the array of policies and programs are for that age group across health, education, social services, recreation, and culture, and again, because we are a federation, to try to give that sense of what is the starting point, where are some jurisdictions ahead, and where can we learn from jurisdictions that seem to have a richer mix available, for example.

If we get enough financing for this work, we would also do some community case studies so that we could see the texture on a more detailed basis, vertically. Even as we begin the first part of that work, we're beginning to understand how important community is for the 6- to 15-year-olds, in terms of making the package look comprehensive. I think there's still a lot we can do to tease out more detail from the work we've already done in order to continue to support the public debate around these issues for early childhood as well.

I think something that would really enrich the debate at this point—and you hinted at it at the beginning of the hearing—is to identify some of these community resource centre types of places that already exist in the country and get to know more about what's inside them, what makes them tick, how they got started, and what they see as their major obstacles, challenges, etc. I don't know whether you, as a committee, would feel that you could invite people from those resource centres to perhaps come and give you briefings. I think it would enrich the debates quite considerably to have a deeper and more organized sense of what is going on in these resource centres.

We've learned a bit, but I don't think we're the best positioned on a short-run basis to actually do... There are evaluation studies that have been done, and we've tried to look at them, but in terms of understanding what's out there now, I think the committee would be best placed to seek out that detail.

The Chair: Well, there are a number of very suggestive examples. The one demonstration project and five pilot projects, like the Understanding the Early Years project of HRD's applied research section for instance, and all that community mapping, is extraordinarily useful. And there were five demonstration projects in Ontario identified—including Ottawa-Carlton—plus CAPC projects themselves, which are small but interesting.

• 1715

But am I to gather from what you're saying that in a sense, in terms of what it is you do as opposed to what others do, you've done the bulk of the work on zero to six at this stage, and you're thinking of moving on and building on that base, rather than... I suppose the work of others is to try to figure out what would a deal look like that would actually allow on the ground the right things to happen, the menus to be correct. Is that the work of others?

Ms. Judith Maxwell: I think we could contribute to that, but I don't see it as being the kind of thing we would do on our own, if I could put it that way.

If it is a nine-month timeframe, then you're going to have to be very pragmatic in terms of gathering information and doing brainstorming to conceive of what—I described it as the menu—would describe the infrastructure that's needed over the long term. I think some of the detailed work we've already done is a baseline that can be built upon, and we should not try to use our resources for that detailed policy development.

The Chair: Right.

Ms. Judith Maxwell: We could provide a table where that kind of conversation could take place among other people.

The Chair: I think that's probably what's going to have to happen. What is striking about this is—if I may make a comparison, and also a political observation—it's clear that any claim for program dollars down the line will always have to confront the 850-pound gorilla of health care, because a province can always say, before you go down that road you have to... And sophisticated arguments about population health and the reduction of demand down the road and all that sort of stuff just gets swept away by flu epidemics and emergency room crises.

And so the challenge is both to do something that deals with it in the sense of thinking about it in a way that allows you to make a positive contribution so you're not ignoring it, but you're also trying to limit it so you can get on with other subjects.

The question really is almost conceptualizing at the end of the road what is the thing these folks sign—you know, the Prime Minister is there, and the premiers—and what would that document look like? How would it capitalize on the vision statement of the national children's agenda? There are at least five of the six specific items in there, with the possible exception of reference to adolescents, that are well covered off. How would it play into the language of the Social Union Framework Agreement, with particular emphasis on things like outcomes and accountability, which all seem to be very positive, and a very useful way of helping to define the menu and keep the menu honest so people can't just go around claiming things by assertion and anecdote without actually proving it? Would it look like the Canada Health Act? I don't know if you saw the document Ken Battle produced, but there were three options for what an early childhood development program might look like, and option one was a fund that would grow over time, which would be tapped into.

There are issues such as should communities... Although this will grow to be universal, should the way in which it grows initially be on a voluntary basis? That is to say that a community has to define it. It has to get its act together sufficiently to apply to a fund that is somehow fed by federal-provincial money and is administered under some agreement. Is that the way in which we bit by bit construct this national framework? If you don't have that sense of a community wishing to opt in, then you can't impose it.

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These are some of the practical questions this deadline imposes. I don't know if you've done any thinking about any of this or whether your work suggests certain approaches that might be helpful.

Ms. Judith Maxwell: I wouldn't say that I've done sufficient thinking about it to be able to put more on the record today, but it's certainly an area where I personally would be interested in having further conversation.

I think one thing I would bring into this conversation, and it's something I've become increasingly concerned about in the last couple of years, is what's happening in inner cities in Canada. We know that's where neighbourhood is weakest and we also know it's where income is lowest. It seems to me, given that in some of these inner cities there's also an accumulation of social pathologies like substance abuse and violence, and so on, one can assume that there are probably some weaknesses on the parenting side as well.

One could mobilize around some of the most severe situations in cities that were prepared to step forward and contribute some of their resources along with the province, and one could get some fairly significant larger-scale pilot projects—if I could put it that way—or demonstration projects where the array of levers that are held by federal, provincial, municipal, and community-based organizations could be mobilized in ways that would be tailored to specific circumstances.

On all of this stuff, there is a dimension of place that means the notion of national standards or some of that language we've used in the past becomes quite problematic because the nature of the place will demand certain things that are different, say, in Edmonton, where there's a large aboriginal community, versus Toronto, where it's quite different, where the history and the culture and the potential sources of income, etc., are very different.

The Chair: You're always trying to balance out the specific with the universal. Are you a fan of what used to be called the readiness to learn index and probably as of next week will be known as the early development indicator—I think that is what it is currently called—this thing that HRD has been developing, and Dan Offord and so on? Are you a fan of that in terms of its ability to help do community mapping, to identify domains, and to suggest strategies for getting at the problems that are revealed? Is it universal enough to take into account the universal human development story and flexible enough to take into account local conditions? Or do you have a view of it?

Ms. Judith Maxwell: I haven't seen it for some time, so I don't know quite how it has evolved and what mix of factors are now included in there. But I think it was always designed to include quite a mix of fundamentals, if I can put it that way, that were summarized as an indicator. I don't feel I should comment on it here.

Something we learned from the North York school board, actually, when they did their school profile, is that it wasn't a question of measuring one school against another, it was measuring each school against where it was two years ago, if you were going to understand whether you were making progress and if you were to understand what the needs of the specific children might be.

It was interesting that within that one school board there were such enormous differences from one school to the next. So I think that indicators, however they're designed and whatever is in them, need to be used in a very nuanced way; otherwise you just end up creating stigma. If they're used constructively by the community as a way of measuring their progress, because their kids have now progressed from where they were to where they are now, first of all, you start to celebrate earlier and the progress is more noticeable. But also I think you're staying focused on your main task, which is the needs of the children or whoever the citizens are you're targeting programs on.

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The Chair: Of course the irony is that it's never a test of the schools as such, it's always a test of the neighbourhood feeding into the school, because the indicator is administered within months of the child's first arrival at the schools. So one of the reasons teachers like it a lot is that it doesn't test them; it tests the raw material coming in. Therefore, when they are in turn tested by, as in Ontario, grade three for reading and math scores, it now gives you a baseline against which to say: given the fact that the kids were like this when they came into kindergarten, have we been able to help them?

Ms. Judith Maxwell: I think it's very clear what the school, in combination with others, is achieving if you look at how the indicator progresses for a specific group of children. But of course the best of teachers will always say “I didn't do it, the kids did it.”

The Chair: Yes.

Ms. Judith Maxwell: Nonetheless, I think—

Mr. Ovid Jackson: They got lucky. They made their own luck.

Ms. Judith Maxwell: But also I think what you find—and I know you're aware of this—is that the most effective schools are the ones where there is a connection to parents—

The Chair: And community.

Ms. Judith Maxwell: —and community, especially in some of these neighbourhoods where we're most concerned about the conditions under which the children are living.

The Chair: Reading between the lines, I can see Mr. Jackson is looking like a man who's—

Mr. Ovid Jackson: We have the national caucus at 5.30 p.m.

The Chair: I thought we were having a vote, actually.

Mr. Ovid Jackson: No, there's the national caucus starting at 5.30 p.m.

The Chair: How confusing. That's the latest news.

Mr. Ovid Jackson: It's a true story.

The Chair: I would be the last to dispute it.

I think what we will do is be thankful that we've found an oasis of calm and reason in a world of folly and noise. I want to thank you for coming to see us, and to say that in wearing whatever hats we may, I'm sure that formally or informally we will stay in touch on this subject. It's been very helpful, and I hope that the written account will be very useful in guiding the future work of the committee. As we progress, we shall stay in touch with you. So thank you for coming and putting up with our tardiness.

Ms. Judith Maxwell: Thank you, Chairman.

The Chair: The meeting is adjourned to the call of the chair.