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If the Childcare Resource and Research Unit has their way, Canada will have a universal childcare system. It's the kind of advocacy that pushed the previous Liberal government to offer $5 billion over $5 years to kick off a new national daycare program. Once complete, it would have cost $12 billion per year, or 1% of Canada's GDP. In such a system, how would children, parents, and society fare?
As Peter Shawn Taylor demonstrated in The Taxpayer (a publication of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, children would either fare no better or actually worse under a universal child care system. Studies show that children under three learn better if at home with a traditional parent, and that they are also less aggressive and more attached to their parents. As for those older, a 2003 Statistics Canada report said that daycare children have no advantage over those raised at home when it comes time to start school.
Children in full-time daycare have been shown to have higher levels of cortisol (a sign of greater stress) in their brains than children at home. Daycare children also tend to have higher illnesses such as ear infections.
In the Encyclopedia on Early Childhood Development written by respected child development expert Dr. Jay Belsky: "children who spend more time in child care centres [display] higher levels of problem behavior" and "mother-child interaction from 6 -36 months are somewhat less harmonious when children spend more rather than less time in any kind of child care."
Nevertheless, nationalized daycare advocates would like Canada to go the Quebec way. The province provides 190,000 childcare spaces, subsidizing at least $33 dollars, leaving the parent only paying $7. This has convinced twice as many Quebec parents as other Canadians to have their children raised by the state. Perhaps ironically, no one has taken better advantage of the services than those MOST able to afford it. Half of the spaces are taken up by families in the top 30% income bracket.
In December 2005, the San Francisco Chronicle noted that Quebec's daycare is so deeply subsidized, people consume more of it than they would otherwise (something economists call "the problem of the moral hazard." In their article, "Universal preschool is inviting universal disaster," authors Shikha Dalmia and Lisa Snell revealed the program's misplaced and inefficient social engineering: "Such low co-pays have encouraged mothers who might otherwise have stayed at home with their newborns to return to work. But any hope that the program would be able to meet the demand that it created was doomed right from the start, because it banned new centers and barred existing ones from participating, decimating the private day care market. (It has since reversed this policy). Literally overnight, long lines of desperate parents vying for a "free" day care spot emerged. Parents registered babies yet to be conceived. And when they did land a spot, they paid their $7-a-day to hold it -- even if they were months away from using it."
The economic result? The Quebec daycare program that was supposed to cost $230 million over five years now costs $1.7 billion annually-33 times what was promised! Unionized workers, threatening a strike, negotiated a 40 percent increase in wages over four years. The cost of care has doubled since the program began, now costing $15,000 per infant per year.
No wonder then that Dr. Belsky writes, "Tax policies [should] support families raising infants and toddlers in ways that afford parents the freedom to make childrearing arrangements they deem most appropriate... thereby reducing the economic coercion that pushes many to leave the care of their children to others."
It sounds like the Conservative government took a page out of Belsky's book. One hundred dollars each month for parents to care for children under six means more choice and better cost-efficiency through the private sector. In fact, money put into parents' pockets instead of taxed out may be just enough to allow some families to raise their children at home. Could having their children and money stolen by the state be better?
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