A long awaited shift is about to occur in the Canadian province of Ontario. Long sought after free daycare for the residents of this province will become a reality, what was previously only a dream, starting in the year 2020.
The Ontario government under Kathleen Wynne announced in March 27th of 2018 that they are planning to roll out a fully licensed child care initiative that will include all children in Ontario starting at the age of 2 and a half.
This is a tremendous change over the previous policy which included child tax benefits to parents, a sort of welfare checks that would cover the costs of expenses per child, in which thousands of single parents were purported to be exploiting in Ontario, while on the other hand many parents who could not afford to take care of their child were denied child tax benefits and instead threatened to have their child forcibly taken away from them by child social services, a policy many hard working parents say was frustrating and arbitrarily provocative.
While the $2.2 billion program will provide free daycare for all children up to kindergarten age, it is several years behind similar programs adopted in the European Union, particularly in Scandinavian countries. In the United Kingdom, coverage for government subsidized childcare programs was recently extended from 15 hours per week, a program initially rolled out in 2010, to 30 hours per week, for 38 weeks per year in 2017. Despite the UK’s extension of childcare coverage, the program still fails to include the lowest income brackets in the country, as it requires that both parents work at least 16 hours per week in order to qualify, eliminating those that most in need of the coverage.
The positive side to Ontario’s childcare plan will be that it will include all children despite what the parents make. It will also eliminate lengthy waiting times for benefits and subsidies that caused tremendous heartache for Ontario’s families.
Now, the only question will be whether or not the Ford government will attempt to roll back these changes, as many budgetary cuts and rollbacks have been made that were first incorporated by the Wynne government.
This change is a breath of fresh air for many parents, and has the potential to raise the birth rates in the province. Ontario has twice the land area of Germany, the European Union’s largest member state, yet only 1/6 of it’s population. Toronto, one of North America’s fastest growing cities, is set to add over 400 new skyscrapers by the late 2020’s, in addition to other planned development projects such as the Sidewalk Labs, which will add tens of thousands of additional residents to Toronto’s downtown core.
In addition to this, soaring house prices have been a burden on families, and many middle class families are holding back on having kids due to how expensive it has become. This program is estimated to save each family around $17,000 per year in childcare costs.
Many families are also moving out of Toronto towards the suburbs to curb the cost of housing, and the population is set to rise by hundreds of thousands of residents per year. Providing free childcare for citizens will ensure both a healthy population growth as well as economic growth, not leading to stagnation or decline in either field due to the inability of families to raise children due to excessive costs.
There are over 720,000 children under the age of 4 in Ontario, which is below the age of kindergarten. This means that just under half a million children in Ontario will be affected by this program. As of 2012-2013, around 300,000 spaces for childcare will allow this many children to be accommodated by the program in a fully licensed environment.
At $17,000 per child, this program is set to save parents a total of $5.1 billion per year in childcare costs, yet the program is only projected to cost $2.2 billion per year, meaning over an additional $2 billion in savings for parents that can spend the money elsewhere, contributing to the economy through taxes that will help cover the cost of the program in the long run.
The economic benefits of this program are staggering. Many parents who had children were forced to come out of the workforce for several years until their children reached kindergarten age. With one parent footing the bill, the population in Ontario would steadily decline over time. This could be remedied with immigration, but eventually even immigrants would feel the same restraints imposed by this cycle of systematic financial hardship and have less kids themselves with each passing generation.
Instead of one parent taking care of all the bills as well as feeding his spouse and child, now two parents could work, and can plan to have more than one child, increasing the population, saving an increasing amount of money and be able to reallocate financial resources that would otherwise be spent for the child in his early years to later on in life, such as collage and university. In the long term an increasingly educated workforce would sprout as a result, and Ontario’s 1 million square kilometers of land could be developed for the benefit of all Canadians, not just residents of Ontario.
Canada had been falling behind other highly industrialized nations for years in regards to it’s competitiveness. While this is not the complete solution to the problem, it’s still a fraction of the total solution that will add to Canada’s competitiveness over the years to come, without the risk of Canada experiencing a massive population boom that will be too hard to sustain at a steady, healthy rate.
There have been several policies rolled out by varying governments in Ontario designed to optimize education. This has lead both to applause from the general public as well as strikes by educational workers and the “one step forward, two steps back” paradigm. Many policies as they come are progressive, but nonetheless have not been fully tested, or when they are tested tend to give mixed results. All it takes is a specific segment within the political and judicial structure to amend and change laws, rollback changes and enact new laws, creating an ad hoc mixture that is sometimes effective but at other times chaotic and incompatible with itself.
There are many advocates of political change that favor the US system of privatized daycare services, as they are willing to dish out money to purchase a better daycare experience for their children. These commercialized educational institutions, functioning on financial incentive, do on average tend to outperform their public counterparts, in a culture where seeking more money to provide better quality childcare is not considered a taboo undertaking.
In order for wealthier parents to capitalize on this without using their money to lobby interest groups who will eventually rollback a public daycare system initially meant to cater to the lower socioeconomic classes, a dual system should be implemented that allows for both publicly funded daycare for those parents who either don’t have the money or would rather not spend extra money for their kids to receive preferential treatment, as well as those who have it and want to create a savant out of their children at an early age. Having both options on the table instead of unfairly forcing one will create a more prosperous society in the long term, and many solutions that are designed to circumvent whatever it is that prevents a country from moving forward in the present are short sighted, momentary patches that tackle an issue the wrong way. Many have ingenuity but that ingenuity is geared towards minimizing costs at the expense of progress instead of mitigating costs in order to optimize progress.
Private services that are profit motivated will always cater to quality minded customers. That is not to say that a public daycare system the same way the public elementary and secondary school system will be of a lesser quality – there are many public schools around the planet that offer top notch educational quality. Not all have the wear and tear you would expect of a publicly funded institution, and many are constantly optimized to increase the quality as time goes by.
Some would argue that giving children preferential treatment itself will turn them into spoiled adults that if their parents lose their fortune somewhere along the way, they will not be able to cope with the real world and will always expect everything on a platter. But the main argument is not in terms of this dynamic – it comes from the side advocating private daycare services. The main argument is that of the higher quality – the better textbooks, the newer classrooms, the shinier toys, the better educated and more mild tempered daycare staff, and so fourth. Everything in a profit oriented organization is geared towards figuring out a way to deliver a quality product or service. This means an emphasis on constant improvement.
When you are dealing with people, especially small children, this can be a difficult endeavor. Not all children are the same and therefore not all systems, techniques and material thought out and published will work the same across the board. It is true of what Einstein said – “If you judge an elephant by it’s ability to climb a tree, it will spend it’s whole life believing it is stupid.” This is where Canada can learn many lessons from Finland.
There is also a downside to the Finnish system as it singles out and judges kids for success early on. It’s a valid critical observation – as many people change their minds and often take years to figure out their calling in life, especially professionally. They would go from job to job and to many employers this would be an indication of their character instead of a very reasonable way for them to find themselves.
