Robin Sears writes that universal childcare has been on Canadians' radar for a long time:
Childcare in Canada has a long and twisting history — from pre-Confederation days when informal day nurseries were set up in some larger communities, to 1942 when subsidized daycare spaces were created for mothers working in war industries, to the boom created by the first feminist wave of the 70s. Like capital punishment, abortion and marriage equality, the cause was litigated brutally on each side, gaining traction slowly until one day becoming “inevitable.”
Events have now made universal childcare inevitable:
Why now? Because the fundamental economic logic of childcare has become overwhelming — not as a social justice card, but in purely liberal capitalist terms. More working women means a larger labour force, producing greater output and tax revenues, along with a stronger and more skills-diversified economy.
The evidence is no longer debatable: childcare, done well, really does make a nation richer, as well as fairer. And no, it is not a socialist plot to indoctrinate young children with poisonous ideas while trapped for hours every day in the hands of lefty propagandists — a claim one regularly heard whispered back in the day.
And, as was the case with Medicare, there is a working model in place -- not just in one province, but in two:
In Canada, it was partly the success of the Quebec subsidized system over more than 20 years, and B.C.’s more recent success since the election of the NDP under John Horgan. The pandemic sealed the case.
There will still be a lot of wrangling between the feds and the provinces. There always is. But universal childcare is in the pipeline.
Image: cbc.ca
4 comments:
But Conservatives haven't admitted that they've been wrong yet.
And I don't expect they'll make that admission any time in the near future, thwap.
There is another issue that most politicians don't want to discuss, Owen, and that is the looming problem re what the make up working Canadians is and what the current trend will probably be in the future. I'm talking male vs. female
The more we hand over our raw resources to a foreign country, rather than employ Canadians to put a value added component to resource extraction, the less of our male population will find any kind of work that will support a family (in terms of earning power). That leaves the "little woman" to head into the workplace - and in a large percentage earn barely minimum wage in addition to more than likely facing part time hours (so employers can avoid shelling out for any benefits) as well as in work that does not offer the old 9-5 situation.
My father came home from WWII in 1946 and I was in Grade 1 at the local elementary school.
The vast majority of my school mates' fathers worked at the local sawmill which ran 3 shifts a day Monday to Friday and all of their mothers were "stay at home". No, we weren't wealthy, but we could walk to the local school and our fathers could walk or ride their bike to work (not all could afford a car) but it was a small town and walking to buy groceries, go to the local bank, post office or drug store was not a problem.
I'm not implying that these were the good old days, but the one thing we learned was that if you wanted something (didn't all us kids? especially when we got to the teen age?) we had to earn it and there were no fast food restaurants so we picked strawberries, beans, and blueberries to earn our money as well as (us girls) could also baby-sit on Saturday night for our parents' friends.
So, we've come a long way since those heady days when everyone was happy to see the end of the War, but it seems that now we a "war" on just about everything: between politicians and their supporters, on poverty, on how to divvy up the spoils to them that has and them that wants and them that needs.
Frankly, I am so tired of these whiners that shrilly holler "I don't want my hard-earned money going to look after all these losers". Good grief, aren't we supposed to be, as human, the superior bunch as opposed to the animal kingdom? It all boils down to one thing: are we man(kind) or just another beast?
My father came home from the war and got a university education, Lulymay. There was no money in his family to pay for an education. His mother was a widow and he was one of six children. The government paid the tab. Talk about "value-added!"
He was lucky enough to be part of an enormous change -- and it made all the difference to his wife and children. We are at another such inflection point. Child care will make a huge difference in the lives of millions of Canadians.
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