Social-service types have a dream about what B.C. could do to help young kids: extended paid leave for parents of newborns followed by publicly funded child care and full-day kindergarten for every child. To many this might evoke visions of a socialist paradise, guaranteed to suck the life out of the taxpayer. Were it proposed in the U.S., certain of our southern neighbours would surely be in the streets with assault rifles the next morning.
But researchers in B.C. are changing the tune of the child-care debate: they’re saying it can also make us money, and lots of it. That’s what B.C.’s business crowd heard when Clyde Hertzman, one of B.C.’s lead researchers on the topic, was invited to share his theories at the Business Council of B.C.’s Outlook 2020 summit in September this year. A big investment in early childhood education and care, he insisted, would help our GDP grow an extra 20 per cent in 60 years by enhancing our workforce. This is an astounding amount of money: tens of billions of dollars a year. Sure, it would be expensive, but the return on investment – and now imagine a ballroom full of besuited professionals and politicians all perking up – is in the realm of six to one.
Paul Kershaw is an assistant professor working with Hertzman at UBC’s Human Early Learning Partnership (HELP), and he’s the lead author of the report commissioned by the business council. There aren’t many social issues that have a direct, predictable dollar-value payback, he insists, but this is one of them. “Businesspeople are practical,” he says. “The Business Council of B.C. deserves some credit for being at the leading edge of a cultural shift, trying to think longer term.”
Researchers in B.C. have tracked the progress of “vulnerable” children entering kindergarten, those who for one reason or another are not prepared for the learning they’re expected to do. This group makes up nearly 30 per cent of B.C. kindergartners, and the research shows that many of them simply never catch up, Kershaw says. They are significantly more likely than their peers to be poorly prepared for the workplace, wasting their potential contribution to the economy.
Compared to other developed nations, Canada has a dismal record in supporting kids and families, Kershaw says, frequently ranking at or near the bottom in child-care comparisons by organizations such as UNICEF and the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. On top of that, this province has had Canada’s highest level of child poverty for five years running.
But there’s a bright side, he says: by investing in government-funded support for kids under the age of six, we can lower the number of vulnerable kids by two-thirds. Of course, it won’t be cheap. For B.C. to enjoy the full payback of childhood development, HELP is calling on the government to invest $3 billion a year. The problem lies in convincing a government bound to a four-year election cycle to make an investment that won’t pay for itself for 30 or 40 years. “We need business leaders to demand that our political leaders think more medium-term about this issue,” Kershaw says. “That’s the cultural shift we need.”
Martha Friendly, the co-ordinator of a Toronto-based group called the Childcare Resource and Research Unit, has been pushing for just such an investment for more than 30 years. She says the debate is undergoing a paradigm shift toward this economics argument, whereas previously the focus was mostly on human rights. “I think it’s helped the debate, and I think it’s also a danger,” she says. “Framing it entirely as an economic argument is kind of ugly.... Children are not purely commodities.”
But based on the research alone, HELP’s findings resonate with the projections of economists in other countries, Friendly says. Still, the question remains: What happens next?
In B.C.’s case, the answer is mixed. The government committed to spend $44 million this year to start rolling out full-day kindergarten. That will grow to $107 million a year, enabling full-day kindergarten across the province by 2011. That’s far from HELP’s call for $3 billion, and it includes nothing new for before-school child support, one of HELP’s key recommendations. In fact, the B.C. Liberals made cuts this year to the Minor Capital Funding Program, reducing the amount child-care facilities can get for repairs from $5,000 a year to $2,000 a year.
Still, for a government wrestling with a deficit it at one time vowed it would never allow, any investment must seem like a small victory for proponents. The rest is up to policy makers. As Kershaw says, “We now have really conclusive evidence that strong economic policy rests on having strong family policy. I think we’ve made that quite clear, and I think it requires a shift in the way we think.”
