Liberal Child Care plank splintered

[a_majoor]

Universal child care is only good if you are not a child, but an employee of the system:

http://phantomobserver.com/blog/?p=273

The Librano Child Care Plank Gets Splintered

Remember how, during the election, the Liberals and the NDP kept bellowing that child care needed to be a universal plan? That idea has just taken a hit, courtesy of the C.D. Howe Institute. (You can find a PDF version of the study at the Institute’s website, here.)

Here’s a quote from that report:

Particularly in the early years of primary school, most studies conclude that children who have passed through quality childcare programs perform significantly better than the control group of children. At higher grades, the benefits tend to fade: the proportion of studies finding significant gains for the treatment group over the control group declines.

Translation: Child care programs work best for kids in the early years of primary school, but not so well as they get older.

Professional care givers legitimately command a higher income than informal care providers, such as those who take a few children into their homes. But unionization of employees, as in the case of Quebec CPEs, has created an additional source of rising costs. The union has become an effective monopoly with the ability to extract high wages by threats to shut down the entire system. In the summer of 2005, the union threatened to close all CPEs at the beginning of the school year, a time chosen to inflict maximum disruption on parents. To avoid such a strike, the Quebec government allocated additional revenues to the CPEs (SRC 2005).

Translation: A high-quality program is going to be expensive, and will get even more so once unions get involved.

But what about “non-risk” children in stable middle-class, two-parent families? Do they benefit equivalently from childcare programs? Many insist the answer is yes but the authors of an important recent study of Quebec experience since the inauguration of CPEs say no.

The study quoted above is an earlier study called “Universal Childcare, Maternal Labor Supply, and Family Well-being,” the text of which is available here. Quoting from its abstract:

. . . we uncover striking evidence that children are worse off in a variety of behavioral and health dimensions, ranging from aggression to motor-social skills to illness. Our analysis also suggests that the new childcare program led to more hostile, less consistent parenting, worse parental health, and lower-quality parental relationships.

The current C.D. Howe study argues that the data quality of the Quebec child care study is excellent enough that its findings can’t be arbitrarily dismissed. That’s a pretty bold assertion — a different team analysing the data set might come up with a different result — but even so, advocates of the universal childcare concept are going to get a hard time with this one.

Authors John Richards and Matthew Brzozowski argue that Ottawa should help the provinces fund targeted, not universal, child care. This is the type of attitude that falls quite neatly in with the Tory plan of child tax credits, but it’s also, logically, a cheaper alternative; limiting the target audience will also limit the size, scope and costs of the bureaucracy needed to administer such a program.

And remember, this is the C.D. Howe Institute, a think tank less politically engaged than the Fraser. So its findings can’t be so easily dismissed as partisan raving.

If you consider yourself informed on the child care issue, then you need to look at both this report and the Baker study. You’ll then be better equipped with a weapon to counter the “universal childcare” mantra.

 

[cplcaldwell]

Interesting to read the blogs on the Globe and Mail on the related story. Some posters there are branding the CD Howe study as conservative tripe. Too bad they fail to see that the CD Howe study takes the government to task on some of its policy by asserting that money would be better targetted at 'at risk groups'. Sounds to me that CD Howe has pulled bits and gobs out of all three partys' strategies to come up with a cogent, non partisan, and somewhat enlightened set of ideas.

Now, if they would publish a paper on the role of the CF sometime soon, and using this level (IMHO) of enlightenment we might have something

 

[begbie]

It's not that the CD Howe study is conservative tripe (I say this without reading the report).  But as far as think-tanks go, when compared to other think-tanks, it is considered to have an economic philosophy that is aligned with typical conservative economic policy.  On the other end of the spectrum, I think of, as an example, the 'Canadian Center for Policy Alternatives' as having an economic philosophy that is aligned left (some Liberal and NDP thinking). 

 

[HDE]

The so-called "universal childcare plan" would turn out to be a massive drain on the public purse; apparently "advocates" are using  $12 billion, per year, as a reasonable estimate.  Strangely there's been little explanation, by anyone, of where/how the money will be found.  Kinda puts the Liberal $1 billion per year in "seed money" into perspective :