Recently, Prof. Bob Brym invited me to join others in exploring the issue of equality in contemporary Canadian society. The occasion was the inaugural S.D. Clark Symposium on the future of Canadian society. My topic was to assess how good a job child care is doing in Canada in improving different types of equity – gender, child and family. I’ve attached my (rather lengthy) notes for the talk. You should look for the volume based on this Symposium to be published soon by Oxford University Press. It will contain chapters from each of the authors, including my own.
Speech: Assessing Family Policy in Canada
Speech to the Institute for Research on Public Policy Roundtable – “Assessing Family Policy in Canada”.
- Download the IRPP speech in PDF format.
- Download (from the IRPP web site) the audio web cast or the roundtable program.
Download Winnipeg conference materials
From the ‘Child Care for a Change! Shaping the 21st Century’ conference
Slides for a Presentation to the “Winnipeg” Conference (in the form of a letter to Minister Ken Dryden)
Financing Canada’s Child Care System: A Letter to Ken
Conference Paper: Financing Early Learning and Child Care in Canada
Download a PDF of the paper or read the summary.
REPORT on Nonprofit and For-Profit Child Care Centres in Canada
This is the final report of a 3-year project studying nonprofit and for-profit child care centres in Canada, by Gordon Cleveland, Barry Forer, Douglas Hyatt, Christa Japel and Michael Krashinsky. The focus has been to establish whether and under what conditions nonprofit operation of centres will lead to higher quality services. The authors use four different data sets to answer the question. Here is a very brief summary. And here are a few chosen excerpts from the Final Report. However, Chapter Two of the report provides a more fulsome summary. The report analyzes data from You Bet I Care! (six provinces and one territory), Grandir en Qualite (Quebec), the Quebec Longitudinal Study of Child Development (or ELDEQ; Quebec), and data from the City of Toronto. It includes a reasonably comprehensive survey of relevant literature and information about nonprofit and for-profit child care in other countries.
You can download a PDF of the Final Report.