Joanne Crofford, Saskatchewan’s minister of community resources and employment, could scarcely contain her enthusiasm last week as she talked about the revolution in child-care development she sees coming for both rural and urban Canada.
She was fresh from an Ottawa meeting with new federal social development minister Ken Dryden and other provincial ministers where a five-year framework was accepted and a $5 billion, five-year federal commitment made.
It will mean $30 million a year in extra funding for Saskatchewan and a significant expansion of registered day-care spaces and early childhood learning services, said Crofford.
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“This is a lot of money,” she said in a Nov. 4 interview. “That’s more than double what Saskatchewan invests now.”
Crofford said Dryden’s national vision is flexible enough that the new program will be able to accommodate the special child-care needs of rural areas and farm families.
“Absolutely, rural needs will be part of this,” she said. “There will be money for training and money for spaces. Probably in rural Saskatchewan you’ll see more home-based centres with a more formal centre in the nearest larger community, a hub and spoke model.”
In an Ottawa interview, Dryden said ministers at the day-long closed meeting had spent time discussing child care in rural Canada.
“There was a lot of conversation about that,” he said Nov. 4. “We know there will be different answers, whether they are in bigger places or smaller places, and our challenge is to set a standard that you do the best you can within the principles of quality, universally available, accessibility and developmental.”
He said as health care and education developed differently in rural areas, so will the national child-care system.
“Over time, they begin to become more the same. The small one-room school got larger, the small medical facility became something larger. I suspect the same will happen with respect to child care and rural communities.”
Dryden said that although the federal funding commitment is just five years, it should not be considered a short-term program.
“We will build an expectation among the Canadian people that no government in the future will be able to walk away from,” said the Toronto MP.
At the Ottawa-based Childcare Advocacy Association of Canada, researcher Kerry McCuaig said program implementation must include enough flexibility to allow innovation in rural areas, including situations in which farm families need short-term child care during seeding and harvest seasons, but not as much at other times of the year.
“This is not a rural-urban split issue but just a reality that there are different needs in different parts of the country,” she said.
The ministers agreed that the goal of the new national strategy is not simply to find day-care spaces but also to provide early development programming for children.
Dryden said federal money must be spent to create licensed and regulated day-care spaces.
Crofford said Saskatchewan will continue to have some unregulated spaces but it will try to tighten up the system to increase supervision and licensing.
