You can hardly tell by their actions. BC did introduce full-day kindergarten in some communities this fall, but other than that the family policy front has been rather quiet lately.

The latest childhood vulnerability numbers won’t tip you off either as vulnerability has grown over the last decade, reaching 30.3% in 2009/10.

Don’t get me wrong. Setting goals is an significant first step and the government should be commended for taking a stand on this important issue.

However, without changing policy and taking action goals remain nothing more than laudable aspirations.

This is precisely the point that the Human Early Learning Partnership (HELP) at UBC makes with their new BC Smart Policy Report Card, released earlier in September. The report card assesses government actions in the area of family policy and compares them to benchmark recommendations developed by HELP in their 15 by 15 report, which was commissioned by the BC Business Council last year.

The findings? There has been some movement on the family policy front over the past year, but the BC government has only made about 5% of the recommended new investments in family policy. At this rate, the researchers estimate that it would take 20 years to reduce early childhood vulnerability to 15%, or 15 years longer than the government’s stated goal of “15 by 15.” It seems that the provincial government is well on its way of failing to achieve their goal unless they take decisive action on family policy and soon.

Many would have been satisfied to end it here with calling current government family policy a failure and making a call for bolder action. But HELP’s report card moves beyond name calling and assigning failing grades to analyze what it would take for smart family policy changes to be implemented.

HELP researchers recognize that politicians are rarely leaders; they follow what they perceive to be the popular mood among their constituents. So HELP’s report card looks beyond the need for political leadership and explores the role of the broader community in pushing for increased investments in smart family policy. Here’s their read on where the broader community is at and where it needs to be:

HELP’s recommendations for moving forward? An broad-based, frank discussion about priorities and trade offs around family policy.

British Columbians need to talk about how to find new funding or reallocate existing dollars in order to invest in the social and economic benefits that smart family policy will promote.

HELP researchers end their report card with an appeal to all British Columbians to take responsibility for changing the status quo:

Please start talking about [the key questions and trade offs] at your dinner tables, among your neighbours, in your offices and with your political leaders.

I fully agree that starting the conversation is how we move forward. So why not start by posting a comment here on the blog and, as I’ve noted before, by participating in the 2011 BC Provincial Budget Consultation?

As a young woman in Canada, I have not felt discriminated against. Throughout my university career, my gender didn’t seem to matter and professors encouraged me to pursue a PhD and the life of an academic as much as any of my male fellow students. Growing up in Bulgaria was a different story – my own mother stopped me from going to a physics-based high school program at home because she felt that physics in not for women (those were her words). As an electrical engineer herself, she obviously had experienced discrimination and wanted to prevent me from going down that same road.

In Canada, however, I didn’t get any of that. Maybe it’s because I live in Vancouver, but what I hear Canadians tell their girls is that they can grow up to become anything they aspire to — rocket scientists, surgeons or presidents. Many of the young women I meet feel similarly – they feel that they are free to make choices and say they are as much in control of their career paths as their male friends.

Yet, when we look at the numbers, women are not growing up to be rocket scientists, surgeons or presidents. Nurses, teachers and social workers is more like it. Women are woefully underrepresented in “non-traditional” occupations such as high-level management and natural sciences. Even in the public sector, where women make up the majority of the workforce, they’re less likely to hold senior management jobs than men.

Yes, there are some women in leadership positions in areas that were previously closed to our gender in politics, business and academia. But they are few and far between.

So, if young women feel that gender is irrelevant for economic success, then why are women’s average annual earnings for full-time, full-year work in 2007 only 71 .4% of men’s? Why are average hourly wages so different: in January 2010, women got paid on average $20.59 per hour, compared to men’s $24.49? Why do women continue to be overrepresented in low-wage jobs? Over 60% of minimum wage workers are women and the proportion of workers earning under $10 per hour is similar.

It would seem that something happens somewhere along the line between school, when the sky’s the limit, and the demands of real life which pushes women into traditional sectors. The older I get, the more convinced I become that this something is children. Or rather, that it’s the outdated family policy that we have in Canada (and the US) that forces women to choose between motherhood and career or economic success.

Recent studies from the US show that in corporate America, childless women’s earnings are on par with men’s, and the earning discrepancies appear when women start having children. Research by Statistics Canada shows that having children is associated with an earnings loss that persists throughout a woman’s working career. At any given age, women with one child earned about 9% on average than childless women, while those with two children earner 12% less, and those with three or more children earned 20% less. The earning gap was larger for women with higher education than for those who only had high school diplomas. Curiously, this parental penalty does not seem to apply to men – men with children earn more on average than childless men.

The more I dig into the research, the more it seems that women with children earn less because they end up taking years away from work. And the reason that they are often forced to do so is that women remain the primary caregivers for children and we lack the social supports to allow women to work and care at the same time. Changing this would require a concerted effort by governments and the private sector.

What governments have control over is Canada’s family policy, and it is sorely in need of change to catch up to social realities of the 21st century – many women with children work, whether by choice or by necessity, and we need to put in place adequate programs to support these women and their families.

Providing accessible childcare that families can afford is an obvious one. Improving parental leave provisions is another way to improve many women’s lives. Statistics Canada quotes a recent survey showing that 40% of new parents could not take the entire parental leave because their family’s financial situation required them to go back to work. Increasing benefit amounts to reflect costs of living would be a great start.

Employers will also have to adapt, and we’ve already started to see some of that. More and more employers allow flexible working hours, opportunities to work from home and an increased availability of part time work. These are all changes that make it possible for women to care for children without having to completely withdraw from the workforce for years at a time.

Some companies are even in the business of raising awareness that women have not achieved nearly equal representation on the top of organizations both in the private sector and in government. McKinsey & Company is probably the largest and best-known professional services firm that is calling attention to the shortage of women in leadership positions in America’s businesses. Their reports, Women Matter and Women Matter 2, demonstrate some important relationships between the presence of women in corporate leadership roles and the financial performance of organizations and explore why that may be the case. This is a good start, but more work needs to be done.

The need to support women to work and to care would only become more pressing as the population ages and we start to experience labour force shortages. We need the women to fully participate in the labour market, as workers and as decision-makers. Changing family policy and making workplaces more flexible is the way to do it.

So go ahead and continue telling the girls that the sky’s the limit, but let’s also make sure that it’s really true.

Happy international women’s day to all.

It’s hard for me to see friends struggle financially, so I’ve tried to encourage Emily to get a better job. Though she doesn’t have a degree, Emily is bright and a hard worker — she should be able to do better.

But Emily doesn’t want to get a better paying job. There is no point, she tells me, because she’s close to the cut off point of many of the government subsidies she relies on and if she made even $1,000 more per year, she’d lose so much in government benefits that her net income would end up lower.

She’s calculated that she needs to earn thousands of dollars more per year to compensate for the value of the lost benefits and she figures that she can’t get such a job without finishing her degree. Which she can’t afford because her low income doesn’t allow her to save up for school. But she can’t get a higher-paying job to help finance her education because if her income went up she’d lose her childcare subsidy, her housing subsidy and will have to start making payments on her student loans.

It seems like the system is stacked against her.

And she’s not the only one. Many low-income people find themselves in a similar position as the majority of government benefits are targeted to the lowest income categories and phased out quickly as soon as the family’s income gets above the bare minimum. A recently released CCPA brief addresses the problem of benefit “stacking” and presents some possible solutions. You can read more about it here.

It’s a classic case of unintended consequences: policy-makers start with the laudable goal of helping the most needy first and they try to avoid spending scarce resources on those who are able to pay for themselves, but in targeting benefits narrowly to the lowest income families they make it very difficult for people like Emily to break out of the low-wage cycle of economic insecurity. For those who need to obtain further post-secondary education or training to be able to move up, the system becomes a catch-22 when BC’s high tuition fees are taken into account.

Benefit stacking is a real problem in BC and it needs to be considered carefully in the design of all new low-income tax credits and other benefits. I haven’t run the numbers, but my guess is that the new low-income credits the government just introduced in the last budget (the HST credit and the new premium assistance) are only compounding the problem.

These cuts have been devastating to many service delivery agencies and will result in the cancellation of programs that benefit the least fortunate in our society: children growing up in low income families, women at risk of violence, the poor. In a recent news release, the CCPA has called for the government to repeal all the cuts made since the February budget.

Make no mistake: these cuts are made because our provincial government wants to end up with a smaller deficit at the end of the fiscal year, not because we cannot afford to help vulnerable groups during a serious recession. Despite the recession, BC is one of the wealthiest provinces in this country. Our provincial debt is relatively low. We certainly have the capacity to cushion the blow of the economic downturn to the more vulnerable individuals and families among us. But our government is choosing not to.

In fact, in their obsession with minimizing the size of the deficit, our policy-makers are pushing people into further hardship. And those who have to endure the pain are those who can least afford it. Kudos to Bill Good for recognizing this simple fact on his CKNW show this morning.

The savings from reduced government grants to social service agencies are $354 million, a mere 0.9% of the overall $40 billion provincial budget for 2009/10. These cuts could easily have been accommodated in only a slightly higher deficit.

The recession is temporary, and so are the current deficits, but the lost educational opportunities for children would never be recovered. It’s penny wise but pound foolish to cut funding to programs that have already been pared to the bone and that provide services with long-term payoffs.

The government is trying to create the impression that cuts are concentrated among “nice to have” but non-essential programs. This is simply not the case. Many of the initiatives that are now being cut have been set up to fill a need that exists because the government is not providing adequate social services and supports out of its core budget. Literacy initiatives, supports for violence against women and children or seniors’ activity programs that keep people healthy and out of hospitals should not be left to the whim of discretionary grants funding. We need to ask ourselves questions such as whether we prefer to pay for programs that enrich the lives of disadvantaged children as they grow up, or for policing and anti-gang measures a few years in the future.

The secrecy with which these cuts have been implemented is also egregious. Without knowing exactly what is being cut, we cannot evaluate the impact of the cuts, and without openness and transparency it is simply not possible to have an honest public debate about priorities. This is why we’ve launched our own effort to track the cuts and we are asking affected groups or individuals to come forward and share their stories.

A new Early Childhood Learning Agency will be established. It will assess the feasibility and costs of full school day kindergarten for five-year-olds. It will also undertake a feasibility study of providing parents with the choice of day-long kindergarten for four-year-olds by 2010, and for three-year-olds by 2012. That report will be completed and released within the year.

If you can’t seem to recall ever hearing about that report, you’re not alone. The report was quietly posted on the BC Ministry of Education website just before Easter this year (a little behind schedule) and left for interested web-surfers to discover for themselves. With no government news release announcing the report completion (that I could find), it’s hardly surprising that it received virtually no media attention. The only mention of the report that I have seen so far is in this article by Pieta Woolley in the online version of the Georgia Straight, and it came almost a month after the report’s release.

This is a pity because the Early Childhood Learning Agency produced an excellent report. Expanded Early Learning in British Columbia for Children Age Three to Five draws on the latest research on early child development and a year-long consultation with parents, childcare providers and other stakeholders to conclude that expanding early learning programs in BC is both desirable and feasible.

The Agency estimated the total operating costs to about $615 million per year for full day programs available to all three, four and five-year-olds. The report recommended that the program be introduced in stages over several years and even outlined next steps for the government to take right away, taking into account the fiscal constraints that the current recession imposes. Next steps include:

1. carrying out a detailed facilities analysis and starting to prepare space for programs;
2. creating a human resource strategy; and
3. developing program standards for full day kindergarten for five-year-olds and pre-kindergarten for four-year-olds

Yet, you won’t find any of the reports’ recommendations reflected in the BC Liberals’ election platform. The closest the current government comes to committing to action is this paragraph on the BC Ministry of Education website:

Based on the findings of the feasibility work and its commitment to expanding early learning, the British Columbia government is still committed to pursuing the vision for full day kindergarten and other enhanced early learning opportunities for our youngest learners as soon as reasonably possible. [emphasis added]

The NDP is not doing much better on the childcare front. Their platform states that they will introduce full day kindergarten for five-year-olds “as finances permit” (where have I heard that before?) and promise to create “targets and timelines to build an affordable, accessible, quality child care system” (but we are left to wonder what these targets and timelines might be).

Both parties have made it clear that childcare and early childhood education are not priorities for them, hiding behind the recession as an excuse. But there is no need to make children wait for quality early learning programs until after the recession. $615 million is not a trivial amount of money, but it is only about 0.3% of provincial GDP and, as a society, we can easily afford it if we make it a priority.

It is not only possible but also desirable to invest in early childhood education in times of recession. Because as Susan Prentice points out in Old Dollars, New Sense: Recent Evidence and Arguments about Child Care Spending, childcare is better seen as “a productive investment instead of an economic drain on the public purse – one that will more than pay for itself in the future.”

As an added benefit in these hard economic times, setting up a universally available province-wide preschool program will create jobs when they are most needed. New classrooms/early learning centres would have to be built, employing construction workers in the process. Additional teachers and early childhood educations will be required to staff the programs, creating jobs (which, incidentally, would be mainly filled by women – a group that has been largely ignored in the government’s stimulus package so far).

What surprises me is that we don’t hear more outraged voices on this issue, considering the large number of people who stand to benefit from an expanded and improved childcare system. Pieta Woolley reminds us that:

Given that about 30.4 percent of British Columbians live in a household with kids 12 or under, the child-care issue theoretically affects more citizens than seniors’ issues (14.6 percent of B.C. is 65 or older), aboriginal issues (4.8 percent of the B.C. population is status), and public transit (4.7 percent take transit to work; all numbers according to the 2006 census).

UBC’s Paul Kershaw, assistant professor of political science, proposes an interesting theory as to why childcare is neglected in this year’s party platforms:

1. The costs scare politicians.
“By today’s standards,” he said, “it’s relatively expensive. And by that I mean we haven’t had to create a new social program in quite some time, as we did having to create health care and unemployment insurance and pensions. These are very expensive programs, but they’ve become normalized so we don’t view them as such. Health case is $15 billion, and childcare is $1.5 billion, so it’s no small chunk of change for any provincial budget. That’s one of the key reasons it’s a hot potato.”

2. Politicians won’t fund health promotion.
“We’re wonderful about treating illness after the fact. We will spend hundreds of thousands—if not millions—to save one preterm baby, but we are very uncomfortable about promoting housing for families with children that is affordable, or making the case that no one goes hungry in our province, or is homeless. Even when you get into the middle class, and childcare is largely a middle class issue, we don’t seem too concerned that we get these kids off to a good start in life. We let parents put together a patchwork of inadequate supports. We could really do so much to promote health if we go it right in the early years.”

3. Feminist arguments are considered fringy by politicians.
“No one wants to talk about gender inequality anymore….Even when both parents work full-time, women shoulder the responsible to shoulder childcare alternatives when regular care falls through, they stay home when the kids are sick. That’s just how houses are making decisions. Just 15 percent of people taking parental leave are men….Public policy seems content to say, women, figure it out yourselves….We are content to burn out women.”

4. The baby boomers are a “Canadian blight”.

“We are unwilling to ask tough questions about generational inequality….This is the generation that has their hands on the levers of power that’s tolerating 30 percent of our school-age population showing up vulnerable. These intergenerational justice questions are getting sidelined, because the dominant question seniors are wanting to ask is how much money is going to be there for me to get that next knee replacement. We need to make sure people are comfortable and cared for, but before we start debating whether people are eligible for three knee replacements, I think we really do want to think about what it means to promote health over the lifecourse and get that part right.”

I find the last point particularly interesting, as it starts raising questions about generational inequality. Can it be that politicians pay more attention to seniors because unlike children, seniors can vote? Consider also that seniors traditionally have high voter turnout rates, much higher than those of young people, the group that includes most parents of young children.

I hope I’m not being too cynical here. But it would be nice if the parties running for election would do something to dispel that cynicism. (if I may borrow from the conclusion of a recent Paul Krugman blog post)

For more excellent coverage on childcare in the election campaign, check out Ms Woolley’s articles Parties mum on time lines for child-care plans, Political parties ignore recent government-written plan for childcare and UBC prof gives four reasons BC isn’t delivering childcare.

In urban areas like Vancouver and Victoria, childcare fees can account for 20 percent of families’ total expenses—the second highest cost after housing. A Vancouver family with a four-year-old child in full-time childcare and a seven-year-old child in after-school care will pay at least $982 a month or $11,784 a year for childcare.

A large Vancouver-based childcare provider reports that without a significant increase in provincial funding, next year fees could be as high as $1,000 a month for three- to five-year-old children

But this is not just an urban issue. From 2001 to 2006, annual child-care fees for preschool-aged children in B.C. went up by $672. For school-aged care, the increase was more than $800.

The crisis doesn’t stop there. There still aren’t enough quality spaces.

Wait lists for quality childcare are years long. Only 14 percent of B.C. children under the age of 12 have access to a licensed childcare space. Despite government’s claims that they are creating new spaces, this is only a two percent increase since 2001 and still falls far short of the need.

And, low wages have created a staffing crisis in child care.

A recent survey of B.C.’s early childhood educators reports that almost half of these college-trained professionals earn less than $16 an hour. This includes people with 20 years experience in the field.

The B.C. childcare crisis didn’t fall from the sky. The seeds were planted in 2002 when the newly elected provincial government scrapped the $7-a-day school-aged childcare program that funded 15,000 affordable, quality spaces and cancelled plans to extend funding to care for other age groups.

Then, the government cut $40 million from its own childcare budget. These dollars were only replaced when the federal government transferred funds to B.C. that could only be spent on child care. The reality is that B.C. is spending fewer provincial dollars on childcare than in 2001.

As a result, long-time providers are teetering on the brink of closing their doors because of lack of funding. The tragic irony is that despite demand, not all spaces are filled because parents cannot afford the high fees.

It is children and families who pay the price. Some children have already lost their only chance to get a good early start. In fact, the number of children entering kindergarten who are vulnerable went up in B.C. over the last nine years.

Communities also paid the price as they were unable to attract and keep young families or fill vacant jobs because of the lack of quality, affordable child care.

Rather than implement a plan with targets and timelines for meeting B.C.’s child-care needs, the government held out the promise of all-day kindergarten but backed away because of the cost. Even this stalled initiative ignored the childcare needs of the majority of B.C. families who need full time early care and learning so that they can work.

The good news is that there are solutions. Other developed countries have systems that meet children’s developmental needs and the needs of working families. Shamefully, Canada ranks last amongst developed countries on our investment in child care.

This provincial election is an ideal time to put this issue front and centre on every party’s agenda and to find solutions for B.C.

B.C. families are looking for candidates who are committed to solving the crisis. They are looking for candidates who understand that investment in childcare is an essential part of an economic recovery strategy. It creates jobs for women and men, helps families during stressful times, and promotes healthy child development which reduces costs down the road.

For any enlightened politician, it should be a no-brainer. This election, let’s make sure that it gets done!

(First published in www.straight.com, april 28/09)

Reflections on the Citizens’ Assembly

By Wendy Bergerud

Have you ever had your name pulled out of a hat? I did! And it gave me a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity: to be one of the 160 members of BC’s Citizens’ Assembly on Electoral Reform. In 2003, one man and one woman were chosen at random from the lists of voters in each of BC’s 79 ridings to form this assembly, along with two members from the aboriginal community. This innovative process created a group of people that closely mirrored the population of BC.

The Assembly worked throughout 2004 to learn about voting systems, consult with our fellow citizens, and decide if we thought a change would be appropriate and, if so, what that change should be. Like most assembly members I knew very little about voting systems when I started. I did know that I wasn’t happy with how negative our politics had become.

I was puzzled how a party could form government with less of the popular vote than the other party got, as happened in 1996. Or how, in 2001, a popular vote of almost 58% gave the former opposition most of the seats while the former governing party got only two seats with 22% of the popular vote. Huh? Our voting system wasn’t creating legislatures that mirrored how we voted. I didn’t know if there was a better voting system out there, but I hoped there was at least one.

Our common goal was to make a decision, whatever it might be, that most, if not all of us, could agree on. We met at the Wosk Centre in downtown Vancouver in a room with tiered circular rows of seats, similar to the parliaments of many European countries that use proportional representation. It was a great place for 160 people to work together in a truly democratic fashion. We met every second weekend during the learning phase. During plenary sessions we would learn about voting systems, then engage in smaller breakout group discussions.

At the end of the learning phase we were asked to produce a preliminary statement that would include which alternate voting system we were considering. We didn’t feel this was appropriate – how could we honestly say that we were listening to the public if we had already made a choice before attending the public hearings scheduled for April and May! So our report instead discussed our criteria for judging voting systems. It included a description of our process, as well as encouraging people to come out to our 50 public hearings – about 3,000 people did! And during the summer, we received 1,600 written submissions. Most commissions hold only a few public hearings and might receive a hundred or so submissions. So the response to our work was incredible!

As some of us read through these submissions, we discussed them using a private online forum. This inspired some intense discussions that informed our weekend deliberations. Without the online forum and its debates I wouldn’t have been able to develop my thoughts as well as I was able to.

At the beginning of the deliberation phase, we had two clear contenders for the alternate voting system: STV and MMP, or Mixed Member Proportional (a system that looks like the current system of ridings but gives additional seats to parties in order to achieve proportionality; Ontario voted on and rejected this system in 2007). We built a specific model of each one, debated their merits and finally chose STV over MMP by a ratio of four to one.

An important issue for us was rural representation. It got a lot of “air time” during our plenary sessions. How could we design a system that was fair to all, regardless of where we lived? This led us to ask what local representation was. We decided that it had two different meanings: 1) the constituency work of the MLAs; and 2) the partisan representation of voters in the legislature, that is, the ability of your MLA to represent your point of view about how government should be run and how it should handle the big issues. Given that only about half of us who vote get the MLA we chose means that most of us don’t feel represented in this second way, even if we have an MLA who does great constituency work.

As we studied STV we realized that it would improve local representation. Even in a two-member district we are likely to have one MLA in the governing party and one in opposition. This gives us a choice of MLAs to approach about our concerns. And, since STV is a proportional voting system, the numbers of seats each party receives will closely match how we voted, further improving our partisan representation in the legislature.

Women’s representation was another important issue. We learned that people vote as willingly for women as for men; the main stumbling block in the past was cultural. As culture has changed, countries with proportional voting systems have responded faster and elected more women. With our current system, the nomination process has been a roadblock for women getting on the ballot. But with STV, parties can easily create gender balance within the lists of candidates they put forward in each district.

After lots of debate, our final decision was to recommend BC-STV to our fellow voters: 146 voted yes with just 7 against. We had reached our original goal: that most of us would support our final decision, whatever that might be.

We now have a second chance to consider which voting system is more likely to produce legislatures that actually reflect the way we vote. While my personal choice is clear, I urge you to study both systems based on the issues most important to you, choose one or the other, and support it with your vote on May 12, 2009.

Wendy Bergerud has worked for the Ministry of Forests since 1981. In 2003 she was chosen at random to be a member of the Citizens’ Assembly on Electoral Reform from the Victoria-Hillside (now Victoria-Swan Lake) riding. She is now a director with Fair Voting BC (www.stv.ca) and is on the national council of Fair Vote Canada (www.fairvote.ca). She has been a member of CCPA for many years.

Almost all of the increase was among two groups – women and young people. The overall unemployment rate jumped from 6.7% to 7.4%. The increase for men over the age of 25 was 0.2%, from 6.5 to 6.7%.

But for women the jump was nearly a full percentage point, from 5.0% to 5.9%. Among young people 15 to 24 the unemployment rate jumped from 11.6% to 13.5%. Young people and women made up 80% of the increase in unemployment last month.

That doesn’t mean men over the age of 24 are not being hit. They have been hit very hard in the last six months. Now it looks like substantial numbers of men over 25 are leaving the labour force, while women are entering the labour force. And these are just the numbers for one month. But it does suggest that the recession is reaching down further in the economy, well beyond construction and resource jobs.

And it also raises questions about the solutions being proposed. We do need infrastructure investment, but how much good will this do for women and young people not trained in the trades?

If this trend continues, it is just one more reason why, no matter who wins the election, we will see a new provincial budget in a very short time. The unemployment rate this summer for young people will be enormous. And no government will be able to just ignore continually rising rates of unemployment for women.

And while we’re at it, how about a commitment to an affordable, universal child care program ala Quebec, so more parents, especially women, can join or stay in the workforce?

These would be two of the best investments and economic recovery policies, if we’re thinking long term. Any takers candidates?

But, to stimulate the economy, surely we need to invest in both social and physical infrastructure. Lets take child care as an example. A provincial commitment in tomorrow’s budget to begin building a universal, quality publicly funded child care system will create construction jobs – just like other traditional infrastructure investments. But, it will also create jobs for women - who are the overwhelming majority of BC’s early childhood educators. nvestment in child care will also make it possible for parents to work or go to school to train or retrain. And, most importantly, an investment in child care will support children’s development – something that is even more important now that families are stretched and stressed. 

I can’t think of a better way to stimulate the economy and build strong communities.  Can you?