Child Care Now urges Finance Committee to properly address child care in 2019 budget
Child Care Now has submitted its recommendations to the House of Commons Finance Committee in advance of the 2019 Budget. The committee requested that this year’s submissions focus on measures to ensure Canada’s competitiveness.
Titled Universal Early Learning and Child Care: Essential to Canada’s Competitiveness, Child Care Now’s recommendations urge the government to increase public spending on early learning and child care as essential to economic growth, to women’s equality and economic security, to the positive development of children and well-being of families.
Child Care Now’s recommendations:
Recommendation 1:
In 2019-20, transfer $1 billion to provinces, territories and Indigenous communities for the purpose of building accessible, affordable, high quality and inclusive Early Learning and Child Care (ELCC) systems.
Recommendation 2:
Earmark additional funds in the 2019-20 federal budget and subsequent budgets to implement an Indigenous-led framework agreement on ELCC.
Recommendation 3:
Funding to provinces and territories must be conditional on subnational action plans meeting evidence-based standards for accessible, affordable, high quality, inclusive ELCC.
Recommendation 4:
Increase Canada’s ELCC budget significantly each year until it reaches at least 1% of GDP—an international benchmark for government spending on child care and early learning—by 2029-30.
The recommendations echo those supported by and previously made by:
- the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)
- the International Monetary Fund, the Governor of the Bank of Canada Stephen Poloz
- the report of the House of Commons Standing Committee on the Status of Women: Women’s Economic Security: Securing the Future of Canada’s Economy and
- countless other Canadian studies dating back to the Report of the Royal Commission on the Status of Women was tabled in the House of Commons in 1970