By Rachel Clun
More than 25 years ago, the Canadian province of Quebec introduced universal, $5-a-day daycare.
Fast-forward to today, and Canada’s federal government is introducing $10-a-day universal early childhood education and care to the rest of the country.
The Australian government is currently looking at how to improve the country’s childcare system, and there are two broad reviews of the existing system being undertaken by the Productivity Commission and the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission.
Canadian economist Professor Gordon Cleveland said in Canada, Australia is used as an example of what not to do in childcare policy.
“We would say you’re funding on the demand side, you’re funding parents rather than funding the services. That’s a bad thing to do,” he said.
“You’re enhancing the for-profit sector, which in general is not a great thing to do, and you haven’t done enough on the workforce.”
In Australia, the workforce participation rate for women aged 25 to 54 is 84.4 per cent, according to Australian Bureau of Statistics data – almost identical to the participation rate for the same group of women in every Canadian province bar Quebec, at 84.3 per cent.
But in Quebec, according to the May figures from Statistics Canada, the participation rate for women aged 25 to 54 is 89.4 per cent.
“Quebec has the highest base of labour force participation of women with children, I think in the world,” Cleveland said.
He said the workforce benefits were even greater when the type of work was considered: in Quebec, 75.7 per cent of all 25- to 54-year-olds worked full-time, while in the rest of Canada it was 67.2 per cent.
Unlike Quebec’s universal, fixed-fee childcare, the rest of Canada had a system more similar in many ways to Australia’s, with subsidies for low and occasionally middle-income families.
Quebec also has a for-profit stream for childcare that operates on a tax credit system, but Cleveland says parents prefer the fixed-fee system. A lot of the preference comes from its simplicity, he said.
“If you’re trying to plan your life, you’re trying to plan to have children or have another child, you know, and try to decide whether you can afford to take a job or not, that certainty is enormously appealing,” he said.
Annabel Brown, deputy chief executive of the Centre for Policy Development, said the Canadian example shows the simplicity and reliability that a fixed-fee system can provide families.
“The complexity of Australia’s early childhood development system, writ large, and then early childhood education and care system is a real factor, and it’s impacting accessibility, equity, quality and affordability.”
In its submission to the Productivity Commission’s review of early childhood education and care, the Centre for Policy Development said the system must be accessible for all families and must be high quality. For that to occur the current funding model must be reviewed, the submission said.
The Australian government has started the work of trying to ease cost pressures on families, committing $5.4 billion over four years to expand subsidies for childcare, starting from this month, but many facilities are also raising their fees to meet rising costs.
“Of course the investment into it is very welcome, [but] this subsidy is too blunt an instrument,” Brown said.
The certainty of the fixed-fee system in Quebec has helped convince politicians to move the rest of the country onto a similar system.
Due to the policy change – which is costing $30 billion over five years, then $10 billion a year after that – all Canadian families should have access to $10-a-day childcare by 2026.
Brown said the Australian government was taking steps towards universal childcare, through tasking states and territories to work on a vision for early childhood education and care and consulting with the sector.
”There’s a tremendous amount of work going on, it’s probably just not happening in the kind of co-ordinated and joined-up way that we need it to,” she said.
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