Angry in the Great White North

For the purpose of buildig up the sense of irony, I'd like to go back to this CBC piece:

It was first proposed in 1970 – a program that would provide affordable day care across the country. It was promised when Brian Mulroney and the Conservatives swept to power in 1984. And again four years later.

By the time Jean Chretien's Liberals did some political sweeping of their own in 1993, promises of a national day-care strategy had fallen victim to the realities of a government wallowing in debt. With budgetary knives sharpened and drawn, day care would have to wait.

But the economic climate began to shift – and in 1997, Quebec introduced its own day-care system, offering spaces at $5 a day. Demand quickly surpassed supply.

By 2001, there were nearly 600,000 regulated day-care spaces across the country. Just under 235,000 of them were in Quebec. While only one in five Quebec kids had access to these spaces, the rate was much better than the national average of one in eight children.

It was so much better that we were all supposed to emulate the Quebec model:

In October 2004, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development released a report that described Canada's child-care system as a chronically underfunded patchwork of programs with no overarching goals. It found that many centres were shabby and many workers were poorly trained. As well, staff turnover at many centres was very high.

The report also found a shortage of available regulated child-care spaces – enough for fewer than 20 per cent of children aged six years and younger with working parents. In the U.K., 60 per cent of children find regulated child care; in Belgium, 63 per cent; in France, 69 per cent; in Denmark, 78 per cent.

The OECD recommended that Canada boost its child-care spending to the OECD average of about 0.4 per cent of Gross Domestic Product. It's currently half that.

The OECD holds the Quebec system up as a model for the rest of Canada...

Add to that the opinion of the Child Care Advocacy Association:

There are calls for even more. The Child Care Advocacy Association of Canada issued a report of its own on the heels of the OECD report. It, too called for more money. The association wants Ottawa to commit at least one per cent of GDP – or about $10 billion – for day care within 15 years. The report argues:

"The amount is a 'modest and minimum' investment for the one-third of Canadian youngsters under six, compared to the six per cent of GDP now devoted to educating older children."

But the report also warns that devoting so much public money to child care would likely attract foreign corporate day-care chains, eager to be part of a growing market. The report recommends Ottawa ensure that the money it spends on day care be earmarked for the public/non-profit system.

Public/non-profit means, of course, government-run. And unlike the private sector with its focus on premium performance at the best possible cost, government programs are designed to protect the interests of, well, government programs.

OK, it's irony time:

Several [Quebec] day cares have shortened their hours of operation, imposed additional fees, demanded only cash payments and forced parents to sign new legal contracts.

At least one says it will continue to collect $12 per day per child, despite the new regulations that came into effect Thursday.

Premier Jean Charest's Liberal government has said day cares that defy the law could lose their subsidies.

The association of private day cares has gone to court to invalidate the regulation.

Private operators claim they have to charge parents additional fees because they receive $7 per day less in government funding for each child than do public day cares.

Imagine that sort of chaos across the country. Luckily we dodged that bullet.