FRIENDLY, Martha, CHILD CARE POLICY IN CANADA: Putting the Pieces Together

Abstract

FRIENDLY, Martha, CHILD CARE POLICY IN CANADA: Putting the Pieces Together. Don Mills, Ontario: Addison-Wesley, 1994, 294pp., $32.95 softcover. In the mid-nineties in Canada, child care is a topic on which there has been much scholarly and policy thinking, but virtually no political action. A plank of three federal election campaigns (in 1984, 1988 and 1993), child care is more of a predicament now, according to Friendly, than it was in the 1980s. The contradictions apparent in contemporary concern about balancing work and family, about equality of women in the workplace and in society, and at the same time, the policy neglect of child come alive in Friendly's book, the essential thesis of which is that Canada needs a system of child not as a welfare program, but as an essential public service. The book is organized into four sections: Part 1 addresses what child care is and is not, and how high quality child care benefits children, families, women, and the broader society. Part 2 explores how the absence of a national child care policy in Canada has contributed to uneven and unreliable availability of services. Part 3 provides a history of the development of child care in Canada from the nineteenth century, through the advocacy groups of the past few decades, and into current national debates. Part 4 brings together the pieces of a proposed policy framework for a Canadian child care system including universal accessibility, public funding, comprehensiveness, and high quality. Care Policy in Canada consists of twelve chapters in addition to preface and introduction. The book's cover shows several advocacy buttons including one that captures the essence of the need for a child care system in Canada, as argued by Friendly. It simply states, Child Care Keeps Taxpaying Parents Working. A 1991 Daily Food Bank of Toronto survey, cited in the book, indetifies child care responsibilities as the reason for not working among almost one-quarter of food bank users. With eroding social services, including child care accessibility since 1991 with cuts to programs in several provinces, it may well be that those not working because of problems with child care has risen. It has become clear in recent years, paralleling the Social Policy Review, that those not working create a double challenge to the Canadian economy: they do not contribute income taxes which public coffers much need in the 1990s, and they often need public support (unemployment insurance and/or social assistance) which create demand on those same public coffers. If the reason for unemployment for such a significant proporation of food bank users is lack of child then providing child care would be a cost-effective solution to an expensive, and likely growing, social problem. Equality for women cannot be achieved without access to child care, states Friendly, without equivocation (p.22). She provides compelling evidence and argument in support of this conclusion throughout the book. For example, analyses of the National Care Survey find in 1993 that despite the dramatic increase in women's labour market participation in recent years, even among mothers of young children, the rate of labour market participation among single mothers with pre-school children remains considerably lower than comparable rates among married women. This suggests that it is the presence of children younger than school age who do not have child care options that prevents many single mothers from working for pay. A telling graphic (p.43) reveals the degree of potential need for child care in Canada (numbers of children with mothers in the paid work force) in relation to the numbers of regulated child care spaces (where governments establish, monitor and enforce legal requirements)-- a quick calculation suggests that the need/supply ratio is about 5.411 for children aged 0-5. Among children aged 6-12, the ratio of need to supply is 22/1. Friendly is careful to caution the reader that need for child care and demand for it are not identical, with need being assumed if both parents are in the paid workforce, but demand being a function of other options for care and the family's values. …