WE MUST DO MORE FOR OUR CUTE LITTLE PRODUCTION UNITS

Canada's child care is failing, OECD says (Margaret Philp, Globe and Mail, October 25th, 2004)

Canada's child-care system is a fragmented, money-wasting patchwork of programs that provides babysitting for working parents but disregards a growing body of global research that shows educating preschool minds provides lifelong dividends, says a new OECD report.

At a time when other industrialized countries are pouring money into early-education systems for children younger than formal school age, Canada is languishing in terms of quality and investment in education and care for children, the OECD says. [...]

The review of Canada, one of 20 nations whose early-learning policies have come under OECD scrutiny, paints a picture of a child-care system adrift, with no overarching vision. It is underfunded, with pitiful staff salaries and subsidies inequitably doled out to a small number of the poorest families. The premises of child-care centres are often shabby, workers are poorly trained and frequently quit. Many centres catering to aboriginal families are low-quality with "tokenistic concessions to indigenous language." And waiting lists are long, with more than half of Canadian children stuck in unregulated care.

"Canada certainly would not be as energetic about young children and the development of young children as the Nordic countries, countries like Finland and Sweden," Dr. Bennett said.

"They are more concerned about young children and giving the best that a country can afford to young children. Even today, the U.K. is making huge investments in children that Canada is not matching, given the size of the population.

"There needs to be some sort of a policy agreement about the services for young children to give them as high a quality as possible." [...]

The report calls on the federal and provincial governments to draft a coherent vision for a publicly funded, universal system of early-childhood learning and care, based on the latest social science, with hard and fast steps, benchmarks, time frames and budgets for putting into place a program in every province that would be the cornerstone of Canadian family policy.

These days, it takes an uncommonly clear-thinking parent to overcome the neurotic fear that two-year old Johnny is underachieving and ask how a comprehensive policy on pre-school childcare can exclude any consideration of parental rights, duties and wishes. Those who do can expect to be told they are selfishly blocking the efforts of very important experts to serve their children through an overarching vision marked by hard and fast steps.