For our special 50th anniversary issue, Canada’s brightest, boldest, and most rebellious thinkers, doers, and creators share their best big ideas. Through ideas macro and micro, radical and everyday, we present 50 essays, think pieces, and calls to action. Picture: plans for sustainable food systems, radical legislation, revolutionary health care, a greener planet, Indigenous self-government, vibrant cities, safe spaces, peaceful collaboration, and more—we encouraged our writers to dream big, to hope, and to courageously share their ideas and wish lists for our collective better future. Here’s to another 50 years!

As I sat down to write this, I found myself thinking about the many aspects of child care that matter to me—from my abhorrence of the trend to “schoolify” very young children to my deep belief that child care should be an affordable not-for-profit publicly supported service. But my overall frustration is that for nearly five decades, politicians of all stripes have used child care to gain political points during both federal and provincial election campaigns but so far none of our governments, except Quebec, have been brave enough to comprehensively address the matter.

Since 1970, when the Royal Commission on the Status of Women proposed a national day-care act, it has been a two-steps-forward, one-step-back dance. On International Women’s Day in 1986 Brian Mulroney’s Conservative government released the “Report of the Task Force on Child Care.” That report, initiated by the previous Liberal government, called for “a universal system of child care, co-funded by federal and provincial governments.” It recommended a system of nonprofit services, designed and managed by the provinces, guided by national standards. The system would be affordable and enhanced through a gradual increase in supply until 2001 when it would serve all children.

Yes! Progress at last!

But alas, instead of acting on the report’s fine recommendations, the same Conservative government set up its own task force on child care and a year later issued “Sharing the Responsibility.” The report recommended tax breaks for parents, grants to for-profit centres, and business incentives to create workplace child care. This set the stage for the ideological shift from funding service providers to funding consumers and from a vision of child care as a community service to child care as a business.

Through the 1990s child care was off the national political agenda. It returned in 2003 when a national child care program came closest to reality under Paul Martin’s federal Liberal Party government. In 2004, Martin said he would make good on a pledge for national child care program worth $5 billion over five years and by late 2005, Social Development Minister Ken Dryden had finessed bilateral agreements with 10 provinces based on quality, universality, and accessibility, all through a developmental focus.

Unfortunately, many steps back followed all this forward movement. The Liberals lost the election in January 2006. One of the first things Stephen Harper’s new government did was terminate the bilateral agreements and “replace” them with a new taxable monthly allowance of $100 for children under six, disingenuously called the Universal Child Care Benefit (at best it paid for one or two days of child care a month).

Now 10 years later we are facing another potential step forward. In his November 2015 mandate letter to Jean-Yves Duclos, Minister of Families, Children, and Social Development, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau requested that consultations begin with provinces, territories and Indigenous Peoples “as a first step towards delivering affordable, high-quality, flexible, and fully inclusive child care.”

Our work must be tireless. All of us must put the pressure on. We must tell our political representatives, both federal and provincial, that children, women, families, communities, and the economy will all benefit when we have a system of quality affordable child care across the country—and that won’t happen through commercial big-box services.

In B.C. we are ready with a plan for public investment into a system of child care that will provide; affordable access for families, fees set at no more than $10 a day, more high-quality spaces for children, and better wages for early childhood educators. Any first steps taken towards delivering affordable, high-quality, flexible, and fully inclusive child care must be taken within the context of that B.C. Plan.

We don’t want—or need—false solutions. Tax transfers to families are useful—I gratefully accepted my baby bonus years ago—but tax transfers do not build child care services or make them affordable. We must not let history repeat itself. Instead, let us work to ensure our next steps are a foundation for a public system of integrated care and learning.

Illustration by Mariah Burton

Today’s skyrocketing daycare costs force many women to choose between work, children and poverty. Why Canada needs a national policy for affordable, accessible care

EMILY MLIECZKO HAS BEEN INVOLVED in the B.C.’s child care field since she was 19. Back then, she had no children of her own. “I just thought it would be a really nice thing to do,” she says. That was 22 years ago. Now, she has two sons, 19 and 16, both of whom grew up going to daycare. “I was a single parent who lived below the poverty level,” she says, “The support of my child care providers was one of the biggest assets I’ve ever had.”

Today, more than 75 percent of Canadian women with children under the age of six participate in the workforce—making child care an essential part of the labour puzzle. And yet, as Mlieczko says, Canada’s child care system is in crisis—and has been for the past four decades. High costs and few spaces in daycares across the country keep many mothers in poverty, at home or working several jobs, and federal and provincial governments have done little to address this. Affordable, accessible child care is a pressing feminist issue, but Canada is failing.

Mlieczko is now executive director of the Early Childhood Educators of B.C., and one of many fighting for more accessible child care. “Child care can cost more than post-secondary education,” she says. “There are some programs here in the lower mainland that charge close to $2,000 a month per child. That’s a lot of money.” Such fees aren’t unique to B.C. A recent report from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA) revealed some shocking facts about child care costs in Canada. The study, dubbed “The Parent Trap,” found that Toronto parents, for instance, spend an average of $1,324 per month on child care for their toddlers—often accounting for over a third of the mother’s income. This, too, is not uncommon. But think about it: that’s four months of labour to pay for a year of child care.

“The Parent Trap” is a stark on-paper reinforcement of something long known by child care advocates: the negative costs of child care mainly affect women. Child care costs are directly tied to women’s labour force participation, says David Macdonald, CCPA senior economist and co-author of the report. “The cost of child care has an impact on women’s labor force participation,” he adds, “but it doesn’t on men’s.” When child care costs are too high to afford, in other words, women, so much more often than men, stay home—even if they want to return to work. Others may be forced to work multiple jobs.

Even more simply put: child care costs keep women from working well. For example, 49 percent of women in Alberta cite child care as their reason for working parttime rather than full-time. These women, says Macdonald, are doing the same type of calculation he did in the report, which is: Does it make sense to go back to work? Would a woman pay more in child care fees than she would make working? Too often the answer to the latter question is “yes”—making the answer to the first a “no.”

Overwhelmingly, though, women want to work (a fact that should come to no surprise to anyone who isn’t living in the 1950s). The positive effects that affordable child care has on women in the workforce can be seen easily in Quebec. The province has been subsidizing early childhood education to $7 a day since 1997. As a result, child care costs are only six percent of a mother’s salary in Quebec City and Montreal, and only four percent of her salary in Gatineau. Women’s labour force participation in Quebec is eight to 12 percent higher than in provinces without affordable, accessible child care, according to a 2012 Université de Sherbrooke study. “It used to be that Quebec was significantly below the Canadian average in terms of labor force participation,” Macdonald says. “With the introduction of inexpensive child care, however, you see that Quebec has moved to slightly above the Canadian average.”

And yet, despite this success, few other provinces have broached subsidized child care. The federal government, for its part, has actually promoted policies that have the opposite effect. Take income splitting, for example. This allows families with children under 18 to split a household income of up to $50,000 for tax purposes, giving a tax benefit to the lower-earning spouse. Unfortunately, this is usually the mother—and, perhaps even more unfortunately, policies like this only reinforce the encouragement for her to stay home. As well, income splitting, a key part of 2014 Family Tax Cut, mostly helps higher income families. In fact, more than 85 percent of households won’t benefit from the plan, according to a 2014 report from the Caledon Institute of Social Policy. The CCPA calculated that the top five percent of families would gain more from this policy than the bottom 60 percent.

Feminists and child care advocates are not willing to accept such an outdated and unequal solution. Joined by progressives across the country, they are demanding a plan that will make child care more affordable and accessible for everyone. Mlieczko is one of those working to develop such a plan. With the Coalition of Child Care Advocates of B.C., she helped create the $10-a-day plan for B.C.—a concrete solution to tackle this growing problem. The proposal, first introduced in 2011, would subsidize child care in B.C. to $10 per day for full-time care, and $7 for part-time care. It would also make child care free for families with an annual income under $40,000.

While initial supporters were mainly other mothers and those in the progressive political sphere, the $10-a-day plan is now receiving increased support from the business community, whose members are finally starting to realize that not only is affordable child care good for women, it’s also good for the economy. “This will actually stimulate the growth of the economy,” says Mlieczko. When more parents are able to work, more jobs are created in the economy. It’s just basic math: Subsidized child care more than pays for itself in the aggregate, adds Macdonald, as the additional income tax gained is greater than the cost of the program.

Still, provincial governments are reticent. Under the current strategy of provincially-subsidized child care, provinces arguably don’t reap the benefits. Quebec, for example, spends most of the money to pay for child care, but the federal government sees most of the benefit in increased income tax. This weird balance can give provinces little incentive. To change this, argue advocates, Canada needs to treat child care like other social services; it needs a national child care plan. Just like with health care, say advocates, the federal government could work with the provinces and split the costs, leaving the provinces to implement the services.

Many hope the looming federal election will lead to more interest in a national child care policy. It certainly seems likely. The NDP has recently announced a $15-aday plan as part of its platform, though the Liberal plan remains unclear. Meanwhile, the Conservative government has increased the Universal Child Care Benefit. While this will provide parents with a few extra dollars, it won’t make child care more accessible or more affordable.

It’s now been 45 years since the Royal Commission on the Status of Women first recommended a national child-care program, and yet little has changed outside of Quebec. “It’s time for us to do this,” says Mlieczko. “We’ve seen other countries do this. We’ve seen other provinces do this. We’ve seen the success of Quebec and other provinces that are moving towards helping families, and I think every family in Canada deserves to have that kind of support.”

G8 Leaders meet in L'Aquila, Italy, July 8, 2009.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced on January 26 that he was going to use Canada’s Group of Eight presidency to push for an annual G8 summit agenda focused on women’s and children’s health. Former UN Special Envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa Stephen Lewis said it best when he called the announcement an act of “chutzpah.”

First of all, Canada lacks credibility on this issue internationally, having consistently failed to meet our own humanitarian aid targets for decades. Secondly, and even more galling, we lack credibility in our own backyard. Consider that aboriginal infant mortality is markedly higher than the general population—Inuit infants are three times less likely to make it to their first birthdays. Among 17 peer countries, one study found, Canada is tied for second-last place when it comes to infant mortality (only the U.S. level is higher). Consider this is the same government that cut funding to the Court Challenges Program, the legal fund that since 1978 had supported legal challenges by minorities, including women. And the same government that heavily cut funding to Status of Women Canada, closing many of its offices across the country. The same government whose pay-equity legislation disappointingly maintains the status quo by encouraging public employers to consider “market demand” when determining wages (the same demand that caused the inequity in the first place). And this is the government that replaced a popular national childcare program with clumsy $100-per-month cash payments to parents. The resulting system isn’t just functionally inept, it’s ideologically offensive: it needlessly tops up budgets for families who can already afford quality childcare, and squeezes the ones who can’t. Since $100 won’t realistically cover the actual cost of quality childcare, the options become choosing not to work—the Ozzie-and-Harriet fantasy that social conservatives prefer, which is only available, of course, to two-parent families with one earning a sufficient living—or covering the difference between the government’s payment and the actual cost.

In other words, the prime minister’s call for the G8 to boost human rights and development for women and children around the world fits both dictionary definitions of chutzpah: unbelievable impertinence and worthy audacity. No one doubts that urgent action is needed to prevent hundreds of thousands of deaths among women and children worldwide, and if the G8 and G20 listen to the PM when they meet in Muskoka and Toronto in June—and more importantly, take real action that will save real lives— then it will be a great accomplishment, domestic criticisms aside.

But given the G8’s stunningly poor record on exactly these issues, there’s no reason to expect that’s how it will go. The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development recently announced that the collective aid pledges the G8 nations made at their 2005 Gleneagles summit remain unmet five years later—by the outrageous margin of more than $20 billion. If the prime minister really wants to make a splash at this year’s summit, he should leave his platitudinous speech at home and show up with a signed cheque instead.

Providing midwifery in a public health system presents challenges, but they're worth it. Creative Commons photo by Flickr user limaoscarjuliet.

In March 2009, Nova Scotia became the seventh province to incorporate midwifery into the public health care system. Instead of paying and arranging for the service privately, residents now have it covered and regulated by the provincial government.

Midwifery should be seen as the progressive (yet traditional) and cost-effective method of childbirth in Canada. But the upfront cost of creating a regulatory body for midwives, especially in smaller provinces with few practitioners, is offputting for governments. Still, this community-based model of birth, with its decreased hospital time (due to homebirths, shorter hospital stays for hospital births, and less frequent obstetrical interventions) and on-call services, creates significant long-term savings for the health care system.

Nova Scotia’s example offers important lessons to New Brunswick, Newfoundland and Labrador, the Yukon, and Nunavut, all of which will soon regulate midwifery. (New Brunswick will institute legislation and begin hiring midwives in just a few months.) Nova Scotia’s transition hasn’t come without kinks: there remains a shortage of midwives, a lack of public funds allocated to midwifery and the entire health care system faces geographical challenges—rural communities still have trouble accessing public services.

On the positive side, the change means that midwifery services will now be free in Nova Scotia, as they are from British Columbia to Quebec. “Just the very fact of covering midwifery in a provincial health plan and making that known will attract women of all different backgrounds,” explains Aimee Carbonneau, a Toronto midwife who has only ever worked in a public system. Ontario was the first province to regulate midwifery, in 1994. “If it is not supported and paid for by the government, you end up seeing a clientele that is mostly white, middle-class and up, with post-secondary education,” she says.

Maren Dietze, past president of the Association of Nova Scotia Midwives and a practicing midwife in Nova Scotia’s South Shore District, says regulation also gives midwives a new level of legitimacy: “Before we couldn’t deliver in hospital and we couldn’t order ultrasounds. Now we are accepted as part of the team.”

Midwife groups in Nova Scotia have struggled with successive governments since the early ’80s for public care, yet it remains available in only three of the province’s nine health districts. The other six District Health Authorities did not respond to the province’s call for model midwifery sites. According to Jan Catano, co-founder of the Midwifery Coalition of Nova Scotia, “The province didn’t want to roll out midwifery to the whole province at once because there were not enough midwives.”

Instead, a two-year budget for seven fulltime midwives was created. They work from sites in Halifax, Antigonish, and Bridgewater, leaving most of the province without access. Even if more midwives become available to Nova Scotia, from new graduates and a strong pool of internationally trained talent, the money isn’t yet budgeted to hire them.

Consequently, some midwives were essentially forced out of business in the transition.

To create universal access, Dietze says, “We would need more funding for midwives and we would need to be promoting midwifery to all the health districts,” so that local District Health Authorities demand the service and funding.

In the meantime, any Nova Scotian mother living outside the model districts in the centre of the province will lack access. And the situation is not unique to Nova Scotia. “I think for most of Canada, geography represents a big challenge,” Carbonneau says. “Many northern and especially Aboriginal northern communities are trying to bring birth back, but it’s quite tricky juggling the low numbers with the allocation of resources.” The Association of Ontario Midwives, for example, estimates its members serve only 60 percent of their demand.

Meanwhile, the three midwifery centres in Nova Scotia are swamped. And demand seems to be skyrocketing in some areas, such as Dietze’s South Shore District.

“A year ago we had five or six births here; now we have 40 on our books and we’ll have 70 or 80 people next year,” she says.

But, despite the increased demand regulation brings, midwifery is still not a financial priority in the province; compared to other health issues such as senior care or, more recently, H1N1.

The irony is that midwifery is less expensive than the medical model of childbirth, which treats pregnancy as an illness requiring costly medical interventions like drugs or surgeries. Further, midwives have a rich

Canadian history of catching babies in the most remote locations, especially when doctors weren’t available. In that traditional system, midwives went where doctors couldn’t or wouldn’t.

Now, as more provinces regulate midwifery, those remote areas are being left behind. Midwifery can’t properly be called “public” until access is universal.

To make that happen, more midwives are needed and that requires more Canadian midwifery graduates and greater integration of internationally trained midwives. Provincial governments need to make a special effort to promote midwifery to rural health districts and back up their words with trained midwives ready to live in and serve rural communities and First Nations reserves. And a culture change is needed in the medical institutions hosting midwives. To do their jobs properly, midwives need the freedom, flexibility, and mobility to provide homebirths and travel significant distances when necessary.

All of these changes require upfront investments, but collectively they will save taxpayer dollars currently being wasted on unnecessary birthing interventions and hospital stays that only hurt women and their families.

The diaper issue is a messy one, especially since your baby will demand 5,000 to 7,000 changes before his second birthday. Currently, 85 percent of Canadian parents use disposable diapers, making them the third-largest landfill item (after newspapers and food containers), accounting for 250,000 tonnes (1.7 billion diapers) per year of solid waste that will take centuries to decompose. One study showed that one year’s worth of disposables requires about 88 kilograms of chlorine-bleached paper fibre. By comparison, six kilograms of cotton will yield enough cloth diapers to cover your baby until she is potty-trained.

However, cotton is the most pesticide-intensive crop on Earth and requires 175 litres of water to produce one kilogram, meaning that while cloth diapers have the greener edge, they aren’t sporting the shiniest halo. Home laundering requires an additional one or two loads of hot-water-only laundry a week, so expect your energy use to increase, along with your detergent bill. If you go with cloth diapers, choose a green detergent that is phosphate-free, unscented, and biodegradable.

Then there are the new additions to the diaper market, like gDiapers, a disposable-cloth hybrid made of flushable inserts for cloth pants. They tote the “biodegradable” label, but like anything else will only break down if exposed to air, something that doesn’t always happen in landfills. According to Samantha Leeson, co-founder of BabyReady.ca, the green disposables are often less absorbent than cloth nappies, which means more changes and more products weaseling into our sanitation system.

So the best choice really depends on your neighbourhood. Landfills overflowing? Use cloth diapers. If water quality is an issue, choose disposables. Personally, the Progressive Detective suggests cloth diapers, to minimize chemical exposure. However, you may want to pick up a few planet-friendly disposables for long car trips, or you might run into a messy situation.

Although Flaherty claims to have introduced a budget that is “Canada’s response to the challenge of our time,” many groups, including the Centre for Policy Alternatives, are saying Flaherty’s plan is “too little too late.”

This had us wondering if anyone, or anything, will benefit from the almost $40 billion stimulus package being pumped into our economy over the next two years. Here’s what we found.

Tax Cuts

Personal income tax reductions will give Canadians of all economic stripes between $21 to $53 a month extra to play with. But this $2 billion per year in tax cuts is essentially just a shallow crowd-pleaser that’s widely seen as an ineffective way to jump-start the economy. Instead, the government should have pumped that money into health care, for example, where it could have created more than three times as many jobs as broad-based tax cuts.

Mid- and upper-class homeowners

The 15 percent home renovation tax credits, for renos between $1,000 and $10,000 and available only until February 2010, will benefit only those who happen to have extra money to spend on redecorating.

Infrastructure

The government plans to throw $12 billion over the next two years into infrastructure, mostly through construction projects. But while this is a major job-producing move, it benefits sectors that are still largely dominated by men, leaving women out in the cold in terms of job creation. And while the government likes to boast that its stimulus package equals 1.9 percent of the GDP, CPA economist David MacDonald points out that that figure includes the matching funds that provinces and municipalities are expected to put up for infrastructure, meaning the feds are effectively counting “what other people are spending.”

Unemployed Canadians

Though only 40 percent of unemployed Canadians can access EI, no really significant EI reforms were made in the budget, with the stimulus package granting a mere five extra weeks of available benefits for the unemployed. And of the 1.5 billion set aside for retraining, only one third is available to unemployed Canadians not accessing EI.

Parents needing childcare

Under the stimulus package, low-income parents are able to earn a little more under the Canada Child Tax Benefit, but those earning less than $20,000 will see none of the increases they might have hoped for.

First Nations groups

Although the $1.4 billion allotted to First Nations communities for skills training and on-reserve housing might seem impressive, off-reserve First Nations people won’t benefit from much of this cash.

Affordable housing

Although the government is putting $1 billion over two years into social housing renovation projects, accessing these funds requires a 50-50 commitment from the provinces, a demand that may be difficult for poorer provinces to meet and may mean they miss out on housing they need the most. This money also can only be spent on already in-place affordable housing units—no new units are part of the stimulus plan.