No. It’s a simplistic, false remedy
Giving parents money to help fix their daycare problems doesn’t work. Never has and never will. It might be good electioneering; promises of financial aid are understandably attractive to parents struggling to pay high daycare bills, but that doesn’t make it the right or responsible way to spend public money.
The experience in Canada and elsewhere shows the best, most equitable, most effective way for governments to help parents is to fund child-care services directly. It’s the best way to lower parent fees, and the only way to expand services to offer child-care choice. It is also the only way to raise program quality to give real meaning to the idea that children deserve the best start in life.
If cash-to-parents was good child-care policy, Canada wouldn’t still be in the mess we’ve been in since mothers entered the workforce in large numbers in the 1980s. Truth is, the predominant Canadian funding approach has been to give money to parents directly through cheques, tax deductions and credits, or indirectly through parent fee subsidies for the few who qualify and can find child care.
The results: parent fees, already unaffordable, go up each year, often faster than inflation. Large swaths of rural and urban Canada are child-care deserts with three or more children competing for a single space. Tens of thousands of children are on wait-lists. Child-care programs struggle to cover operating costs and avoid closure.
This failed funding approach has also contributed to the staffing crisis in child care. Funding to parents doesn’t translate into higher pay for early childhood educators, who earn far less than their worth. Consequently, recruitment and retention of qualified staff remains one of the biggest barriers to opening new programs and to raising child-care quality — because you can’t have more and better child care without enough properly paid, qualified staff.
Why then does cash-to-parents get advanced over and over again as a childcare solution, election after election? In his recent interview with the Toronto Star editorial board, Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer restated the familiar but false argument: because “parents have different needs” and “government daycare is one-size-fits all,” best to give parents money to spend on whatever they want.
He mischaracterizes Canada’s licensed child care, which is neither government-run nor one-size, but rather a mix of centres, nursery schools and home-based services, primarily operated by community non-profit providers.
Additionally, he wrongly suggests — ignoring all of the evidence to the contrary — that licensed child care can’t be shaped and funded to include parents now shut out because there isn’t child care where they live, or because they work non-standard hours, or because their children’s needs aren’t being accommodated.
The promise that putting more money in parents’ pockets would allow them to buy their choice of child care is disingenuous: he knows giving money to parents won’t create more safe, highquality licensed child care. He ought to know, as research shows, this is the child care most parents would choose if it was better funded to make it more available, affordable and designed to meet their needs.
Scheer, Premier Doug Ford and others who advocate for cash transfers don’t do so because cash-in-pockets will solve child-care woes. They do so because mailing a cheque to voters, or giving tax breaks, is easier than building a proper child-care system.
They can say they’re giving something to everyone, although they know their cash payment — inevitably too small, even if non-taxable — won’t buy much child care.
They prefer cash-in-pockets because they reject a long-held Canadian belief — one that gave us medicare and public education — that the role of government is to organize and fund collective solutions to problems individuals alone can’t solve.
Parents need the federal government to step up. Yes, many rely on income support, like the Canada Child Benefit, which has without a doubt lifted thousands of families out of poverty. New parents also need better paid parental leave and will be looking for bigger improvements on that front beyond taxfree EI benefits.
But income transfer payments are no substitute for expanded and improved child-care services — parents and children need both adequate income and quality services. They are tired of waiting.