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Minding our future: Canada's largely informal child-care system falls far behind what is offered in several European countries.

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A report released in October 2004 described Canada's child-care system as underfunded, inefficient, and failing, with a patchwork of fragmented services. The report was published by the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). It says that, while other industrialized countries are pouring money into early-education systems for pre-school aged children, the only province in Canada not faltering is Quebec.

Researchers found that Canadian programs focus more on providing babysitting than early development and learning. By contrast, they said other OECD countries "have been progressing toward publicly managed, universal services focussed on the development of young children." They found, for example, that while more Canadian mothers with young children work outside the home than in most other countries, our governments invest less than half what other developed nations devote, on average, to early childhood education. There are too few regulated child-care spaces in the country--only enough for about 20 percent of children under six with working parents--while other countries are providing publicly funded systems of early learning for growing numbers of children: in Belgium 63 percent of young children are in regulated child care; in Denmark, 78 percent; in France, 69 percent; in Portugal, 40 percent; and, in the United Kingdom, 60 percent. While the research team saw several Canadian child-care centres that were top quality, they found many others that were not.

And, those who work in the field often are underpaid, poorly trained people working in badly equipped centres. Meanwhile, only 42 percent of graduates in early-childhood education work in their chosen field. The rest opt out largely because they don't want to work for low salaries at second-rate child-care centres, according to one report. In Winnipeg recently (March 2005), the Manitoba Government and General Employees Union delivered 10,000 postcards to the province's family services minister to focus attention on the plight of early childhood educators. The postcard campaign pointed out that "The ECEs (early childhood educators) who care, nurture, and educate tens of thousands of Manitoba children are leaving the early childhood education system in droves because of substandard wages and poor benefits."

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