Below the Radar Transcript
Episode 10: Tirelessly advocating for child care in BC — with Sharon Gregson
Speakers: Melissa Roach, Maria Cecilia Saba, Jamie-Leigh Gonzales, Am Johal, Sharon Gregson
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Melissa Roach 0:06
You’re listening to Below the Radar, a knowledge mobilization project recorded out of 312 Main. This podcast is produced by SFU’s Vancity Office of Community Engagement.
Maria Cecilia Saba 0:17
Below the Radar brings forward ideas to encourage meaningful exchanges across communities.
Jamie-Leigh Gonzales 0:21
Each episode we interview guests on topics ranging from environmental and social justice, arts, culture, community building, and urban issues. This podcast is recorded on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples.
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Am Johal 0:42
Hi there, this is Am Johal from SFU’s Vancity Office of Community Engagement. For this episode, we chat with Sharon Gregson of the Coalition of Child Care Advocates of BC about policy change around advancing sustainable infrastructure to provide affordable child care for parents across the province of BC. Sharon’s a former Vancouver School Board trustee and a long-time advocate for child care in BC over many decades, currently working on the $10 a day child care plan. Thanks for joining us, and I hope you enjoy!
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Am Johal 1:20
Hi there, welcome to Below the Radar, we’re really excited to have Sharon Gregson with us today. Long time activist-advocate with the Coalition of Child Care Advocates of BC. In fact I first remember meeting Sharon somewhere around 1995 when I was on the student union at UBC at a Canadian Federation of Students conference where she was talking on exactly the same topic, so that would put it about 23 and a half years ago!
Sharon Gregson 1:55
Wow...wow. (laughs) And my life has hardly moved on, I’m still talking about exactly the same thing! Thanks for that reminder.
Am Johal 2:03
Yeah, it’s really great to have you here with us, Sharon, because you really have a sense of the long moment of policy change in the province, and there’s probably been moments where it didn’t feel like there was gonna be traction on the policy change during particular political periods and there was probably some private sector incentivization things in moments. And now we’re in this time period where there’s actually a finance minister in BC who used to be the director of child care for the province, spent a lot of time on the school board in Victoria, and you’ve spent a lot of time on the school board here in Vancouver, but I’m wondering if you can speak a little bit, before we get into the policy changes happening in BC now, in terms of when you were doing advocacy work back in the ‘90s in terms of what did that look like and what were some of the advances made then, just so we can contextualize kind of how big the changes are now that are happening and how they’re rolling out.
Sharon Gregson 3:05
So my advocacy started in the late ‘80s as a single parent with two young children, and at that time, so if I go that far back, there was almost no public support for quality, affordable child care. Government was barely involved at all. They had little bit of maintenance grant, and there was some subsidy available for very poor families, but it was a matter of if you have kids, you’re kinda on your own. It’s nobody else’s business. So from where we were then to where we are now is fabulous. We’re in the 21st century and actually thinking about and doing good public policy on these issues. But in the intervening years there certainly have been some dry periods around child care advocacy. But as Michael Campbell once called us, we are tiresome child care advocates, and the only way to really be an activist or an advocate and hope, I think, to achieve goals over the long run is to be tireless, relentless, and that is what the Coalition of the Child Care Advocates and our allies have been on this issue. And so, even in those arid periods where it didn’t look like we were making any progress, in fact we were taking steps backwards in this province, it really just solidified the need to continue to advocate. After elections where we weren’t as successful as we hoped this issue would be, the child care crisis, or chaos as we describe it, still existed the day after those elections, still existed despite bad public policy, and so there was no choice but to keep going.
Am Johal 4:58
In terms of how you looked at pushing for particular policy changes—there’s often times in Canada, Quebec is used as an example of something to aspire towards, but obviously there are areas in other parts of the world that you look to when you think about what a mature, child care policy, public policy would look like—and I’m wondering if you can speak a little bit to what are the places in the world that are doing this in a really innovative and interesting way that we ought to be aspiring towards in terms of policy here in BC?
Sharon Gregson 5:34
So one of the things that we did in launching the $10 a day child care plan is a lot of research and fact-gathering around just that: what are success stories in other parts of the world? What can we learn from and incorporate into a made-in-BC model? And so, we looked at what happened around public policy in New Zealand, in France, we looked at the Scandinavian countries, we even looked at what happened in the UK, certainly looked at Quebec, even looked at Manitoba around the way they capped fees, and so we were able to take pieces of those success—because there are some places where they are doing extraordinary work that is impacting people’s lives very positively, and the outcomes for children are showing that—and so incorporated that into, what was called at that time “the Community Plan for a Public System of Integrated Early Care and Learning”, which very quickly became branded as the $10 a day plan.
Am Johal 6:38
It seems to me so interesting that when there are people who are trying to make economic arguments against supporting a kind of publicly subsidized model, that the amount of money that families are spending on child care in terms of their disposable income is being taken away from other parts of the economy that it could be spent in. I’m wondering about the various kinds of registers in which you tried to advocate or make these changes, because building a broad consensus is kind of complicated, but there’s, I’m sure, beyond people on the progressive left that there are conservatives and business groups that have supported these policies from time to time.
Sharon Gregson 7:18
So it’s very interesting, we look at the history of child care advocacy that it has moved from just being about doing the right thing for children and around children’s healthy development, it’s incorporating now research on brain development, for example, and the importance of socialization. But beyond that it’s also, of course, looked at women’s equality and human rights, and also brought in, very substantially, the economic argument, because there really isn’t an economic argument against child care anymore. It’s all about the benefits of investing in early childhood education. Whether you look short term around parents having greater income to spend in other ways in their communities and a bit of an economic engine for communities, or whether you look long term that we’re growing healthier people who are more likely to be productive as adults in the workforce. So whether you take the short view or the long term view, all the evidence is in favour of the benefits of investing in quality early childhood education. And the word quality is what’s important, because the research in Quebec, as they moved away from investing in the more publicly delivered, not-for-profit services and into the more for-profit services, they have had issues around quality and that is coming back to roost. So we really need to make sure that as we advocate for and support public expenditure into the early years for all the right reasons that we’re careful about spending taxpayers’ money in the right way where we know we get the benefits and that is into high quality, and we know all kinds of research around what we mean by high quality is more likely to be not-for-profit and good environments, play-based pedagogy, et cetera, et cetera.
Am Johal 9:14
Now, in terms of how the policy roll-out is happening in BC, it’s happening in a staged-way. So some people are seeing the benefits of the $10 a day, and in other places it’s gonna be rolling out a little bit later, but I’m just wondering for our listeners who may not have all the information in terms of how to describe where we are at in the process and where you see it going.
Sharon Gregson 9:39
Well where we started was that child care was almost entirely just left into the marketplace, and so child care really was—and in some places, still is, to some degree—a commodity. So if you had enough money to buy what you needed, then you maybe were okay. Unfortunately there was a massive discrepancy between supply and demand. So where most families need some form of non-parental child care, the actual supply was very limited, and so it just was a complete failure in the marketplace. And so, the $10 a day plan has provided the template for the government to follow as they start to build their plan, which they’re calling Child Care BC. So while it’s true that there are a number of initiatives that have happened. The first big one that started in April 2018 was called “The Fee Reduction Initiative”, and that was an excellent piece of public policy. It lowered the cost, lowered the fees, parent fees, in almost all licensed child care across the province for children 0-3 and children 3-5. It didn’t include preschool, the part-time program, or school-aged child care, but it covered a lot of child care, the most expensive kind of child care, and reduced fees by up to $350 a month for all families. Good public policy because it was universal, it covered all those age groups, and it didn’t require parents to fill out forms, it wasn’t income tested, just like elementary school. It applied to all children who are in those licensed programs, so that was excellent.
Sharon Gregson 11:22
And then in September of 2018, a sort of ‘super-subsidy’ was launched for families who have net incomes of under $111—no sorry, gross incomes of up to $111,000 a year. It eliminated fees for families earning $45,000 a year or less, and made child care really affordable. So for the first initiative, that impacted families of 50,000 children in our province, a massive, massive improvement. And then the affordability benefit, super subsidy that started in September impacted tens of thousands more families. So two very important affordability initiatives.
Sharon Gregson 12:03
The other thing that has happened is something called a wage enhancement for early childhood educators who are some of the poorest paid professionals in workplaces. So an average wage across the province of $17 or $18 an hour, some educators still working for minimum wage, and yet they’re caring for our children who we say are our most important resource. So, a $1 an hour wage enhancement was launched for September, and there’ll be a second dollar an hour coming in April of 2020 for early childhood educators, so that’s great because we need to invest in the workforce, and there’s kinds of other workforce investment strategies that are happening, which are very, very welcome.
Sharon Gregson 12:47
So that’s the affordability piece for families is being dealt with, the investment in the workforce is being dealt with, and then the third piece is we need more licensed spaces, because there’s still such long waiting lists in every community around the province. And so, there’s a significant call out now, particularly funding available for public partners, so school districts, local governments, First Nations, health authorities to start creating those new spaces for families. So lots happening, and really good news happening.
Am Johal 13:21
For parents who aren’t fitting in the current programs or the aspects of the rollout that are happening now, what are things they can look forward to as it moves into a more universal model over the next few years?
Sharon Gregson 13:38
Right, so the other important thing that’s happening now is prototypes, so I should just touch on that first. So as of November 1, 2018, government announced 53 sites that are being called ‘prototypes’ of universal, $10 a day child care, and so that’s the children, impacting children of 2,500 families across the province, and where in those prototype sites families pay no more than $10 a day, so really testing out the $10 a day model in a variety of different auspices, so the not-for-profit sector, public institutions, for-profits, and First Nations, so that’s fabulous.
Sharon Gregson 14:23
But for parents who aren’t in one of those prototypes and experiencing $10 a day child care, or they’re on a waiting list for child care, what can they look forward to? So that really comes down to the explanation of why advocacy doesn’t stop because we had one great year in public policy change. So we really framed what has happened in British Columbia as year one of a ten year plan. So it’s really important that the momentum continues and that, as advocates and supporters of quality affordable child care, that we continue to create that political space for politicians to continue the investment and continue building a system. We always said you can’t fix child care chaos in BC overnight, it’s going to take more than one year to fix it. We have a ten year plan to get from where we were, the complete chaos that was allowed to happen in this province, to where we need to be, to serve all families. So I would encourage, then, families who don’t yet have access to make sure that they’re talking to their local MLA, talking to their local mayor, and talking to the local chair of their school district to say “hey, we want our public partners to be working to create more child care in our communities.” There’s funding available in order to create more spaces but we need school districts and local governments and take advantage of those grants to make those happen. And we need to continue to put pressure on the Premier and the Finance Minister to make sure that in Budget 2019 and Budget 2020 and on and on that child care is prioritized. We’re looking for $200 million a year, until we get to that 10 year mark, so that we’ve actually got the ability to create the system that meets the needs of families.
Am Johal 16:12
Yeah, I was just gonna ask about the budget. Is that the level that you’re looking at from each level of government, or is that a total amount of funding? And my third sort of question was just gonna be around what is it that municipalities can do to lay the groundwork for the policy roll out to be better, because around zoning to other types of things, and some cities are involved directly, at least partially, in the provision of child care, or at least advancing it. What is it that at municipal level governments can be doing as well to advance this?
Sharon Gregson 16:44
See, because child care was really a non-system, it isn't really the long term solution to think about the provincial government giving grants to municipalities or school districts or even to individuals or not-for-profits to create child care spaces. So we really go to the analogy of an elementary school. So when a new community is being built, new houses being created, and it’s known that families are moving into a neighbourhood, creating a new neighbourhood, you don’t have to get a bunch of parents who come together and say “hey, we really need an elementary school, let’s apply for a grant, and we’ll find some teachers, and we’ll hire an architect and we’ll talk to the city and get some land, and between us all we’ll create an elementary school and hire teachers and find a curriculum and we’ll make that happen in our community.” That doesn’t happen, right, we have a system where it’s identified by a district that we’re gonna need a new school here, there’s provincial funding to apply for, there’s a system that has a template for what schools should look like, and a process for hiring teachers, and on and on. So we really need to move towards systems building for child care, and so, right now there is a role for school districts and municipalities ‘cause of course, the $10 a day plan calls for the governance of child care to be through school districts and the Ministry of Education.
Sharon Gregson 18:16
Your first question, I think, is what are we looking for? So it’s $200 million a year, that’s from the provincial government. Some of that might end up being federal dollars, because of course, the feds have a role to play in child care. And let’s not forget that when parents go to work, and still, we’re predominantly talking about when birth parent mothers go to work, they are paying federal as well as provincial income taxes. So it’s quite appropriate for the feds to step up and invest in early childhood education—which they’re doing now, we had no investment when Stephen Harper was the Prime Minister. Under a Justin Trudeau government, we’re getting $51 million a year, which isn’t much but it’s better than zero. And so that;’s all very helpful, so we need the feds to continue or to step up their investment. The $200 million a year, on top of what was committed in Budget 2018 over a ten year period, will get us to where we need to be. So right now child care in British Columbia looks a lot like meeting the needs of families who work Monday to Friday, 9 to 5. There needs to be an expansion in child care that is Saturdays and Sundays that accommodates people doing shift works, early mornings, late evenings, families who only need occasional child care, people who just need mornings, people who just need evenings—we don’t have the flexibility in the system to do that yet, and so continued budget investments allow the system to grow, not just to meet the 9 to 5 families but to meet the needs of families in diverse communities. It might be in Tumbler Ridge, where families work, you know, parents work 12 to 12 in the mine, and so, we’ve got a lot of growth that needs to happen. That was a long answer, sorry.
Am Johal 20:02
No, it’s a very good answer! The question also that I had was around you having sat on school board as well. We have examples in Vancouver like Strathcona Community Centre and the elementary school, or Britannia where child care services are right adjacent to the school or sort of part and parcel, built in as part of the model, and the kind of ease with which parents can function in day-to-day lives in terms of accommodating their kids and pick ups and drop offs. You know, my sister has a 2 and a half year old, soon to be 3, and just, all of that kind of complex-ness and busy-ness and the daily lives of parents. What more could school boards be doing in relation to advancing the child care agenda for those who aren’t yet in kindergarten? Could there be public infrastructure used in a way that advances the broader direction of the child care agenda in the province?
Sharon Gregson 20:59
Well, smart school districts already see the writing on the wall. They know that child care is moving closer and closer to their world. The School Act is already responsible for early learning, and so to move early childhood education into the Ministry of Education through the governance structure of school districts and school boards is absolutely going to happen. That’s the way that child care is delivered through most of Canada now. Most provinces and territories have a child care department or division within a Ministry of Education. There’s First Nations on Vancouver Island, the Chemainus First Nation, who have already put child care into their department of education—it’s the way of the future, and we’re calling on the Minister of Education to announce the date where that would happen in British Columbia. So many school districts are stepping up. If we look at Victoria, they’re building their own portables to accommodate early childhood education, so children 0 to 5 on their school grounds. If we look at Revelstoke, for example, they’ve got a school where they’ve got child care programs and early learning programs happening right in their elementary school. We already look at what’s happening with high schools that have got young parent programs right on site. And so, it’s very much has been an organic kind of growth that school districts have recognized what happens to children before they start kindergarten matters on how successful they’re going to be when they start kindergarten, and so have moved more and more to invite and welcome early childhood education programs, child care programs into school buildings and onto school sites. And of course, school-aged child care for children in kindergarten through grade 1, grade 7, has long been on school grounds and school property.
Sharon Gregson 22:52
The difference, though, with the system that we’re suggesting is that, it isn’t just a matter of “well, we’ve got an empty classroom this year, so we’ll put some child care in there, and then when we need it back for grade 3 or grade 6, the child care program will have to leave.” We’re talking about actually embedding early childhood education into the school system. And so, when the school population goes up, the principal doesn’t say “Oh I’m sorry, we’re too full. We can’t do grade 5 here anymore. Grade 5 kids will have to go somewhere else.” The school accommodates that growth, or another school is built nearby to accommodate the growth. And so that’s the way we need to start thinking about child care too. It’s long past the time where child care was just in church basements or in crappy portable buildings that weren’t good for anything else. It’s being recognized now as an integral part of lifelong learning, and its proper home is within the Ministry of Education.
Am Johal 23:53
How would you, you know, looking at advocating for child care the past few decades, Sharon, how would you see the differences in terms of what the urban and rural needs are for child care? Obviously there’s a lot of similarities, but just the nature of the province, the geography, in terms of are there particular needs in rural areas that need modification to fit those local contexts that are different from urban centres?
Sharon Gregson 24:25
Well I had the great fortune last summer to visit the Peace Region working on a project with the Union of BC Municipalities, and we visited Fort Nelson on the Alaska Highway, and Fort St. John and Dawson Creek and Tumbler Ridge and Taylor— small rural and remote communities. And there definitely are more similarities than differences. Those communities have not enough licensed spaces, they have fees that are unaffordable for many families, and they have difficulty attracting and retaining qualified, early childhood educators. So those are the similarities.
Sharon Gregson 25:06
The differences are that, in some ways, those problems are exacerbated by being rural and remote and small. So, even more difficulty attracting and retaining early childhood educators when people don’t have any way to get their ECE education in their local community and they leave to get that ECE training, and then they don’t come back. Or transportation, for example. So, in the winter where there’s school buses to take children to their local elementary school, you can’t put a 2 year old at the side of the road waiting for their school bus to take them to their child care program. So transportation is pointed out in Dawson Creek as a potential issue. And I think we, one of the reasons why we’re advocating that the provincial government do a second round of prototype announcements—the $10 a day, universal, child care models—is because in their first announcement, there aren’t any prototypes that are north of Burns Lake, and so we want to make sure that as we are testing universal child care in the province that we are making sure we include northern communities as well. So, more similarities than differences, but we’re cognizant of the additional challenges.
Am Johal 26:27
Yeah, you’ve touched on this a little bit, but since we are going into a federal election year, if we had Prime Minister Trudeau and Finance Minister Bill Morneau here, and Premier Horgan and Finance Minister Carole James, what would you be telling them in terms of what they need to do, in terms of advancing child care—not just provincially, but nationally—in terms of policy direction and kind of what you’d like to see in the budget.
Sharon Gregson 26:55
Well, for Premier Horgan and Carole James, I would say keep up the good work. They’re definitely on the right track. During the provincial election, John Horgan committed to implement the $10 a day plan and the Child Care BC program that we’re seeing developed is based on that plan and is heading in the right direction. It’s not perfect, but it’s definitely heading in the right direction.
Sharon Gregson 27:23
To Trudeau and to Finance Minister Morneau, I would say, you need to step up. There are some great things happening across this country, like in British Columbia, like in Quebec, like in PEI, and there are some terrible things happening. We’ve just seen in Ontario an announcement where child care providers who are unlicensed and unregulated can now start taking in more children, with a profit motive. So this is an area where that would really benefit from the national organization Child Care Now’s recommendation, which is around some standards across the country. Because it doesn’t matter which province or territory you’re in, there are more similarities than differences around needing fees to be more affordable, there to be quality, licensed spaces, and educators to be appropriately educated themselves in child development and appropriately compensated for their important work. So those three fundamentals are the same wherever you go in this country. So having these national standards and having some provincial funding and territorial funding that allows provinces to augment what they’re doing with some dedicated funds would be very appropriate.
Am Johal 28:47
If our listeners wanted to get involved in supporting the efforts of the Child Care Advocates of BC, how do they get ahold of you, and how can they get involved?
Sharon Gregson 28:56
Right, so we—I have an online petition at 10aday.ca—so that’s number 10. 10aday.ca. And for people who aren’t going to go to rallies or send letters to the editor, what everybody could do is go online and add their name to that petition which helps us speak with a louder voice. And it is really significant to take those actions, so these days it’s so easy to do with one click the letter to the editor or the emails to politicians, and as a former politician, I can say that those things do make a difference and it’s a way to have the voices heard on this very important issue.
Am Johal 29:41
Sharon, thank you so much for joining us here at 312 Main. It’s a pleasure to see you again in person, and I just want to say, you’re such an inspiration to be around in terms of the incredible work you’ve done on this issue.
Sharon Gregson 29:54
So I would just add that it isn’t of course me doing it alone, I work with a brilliant feminist collective, and this is a group effort.
Am Johal 30:04
Thank you.
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Am Johal 30:10
Thank you for listening! That was my conversation with Sharon Gregson from the Coalition of Child Care Advocates of BC. You can learn about Sharon’s work on 10aday.ca, that’s 10, the number 1-0 a day, dot c-a website. You can find the link in the description of this episode as well. Thanks to our production team: Jamie-Leigh Gonzales, Melissa Roach, and Maria Cecilia Saba, and to Davis Steele for our great theme music. Thanks to our listeners for tuning, and we’ll be back in two weeks with a new episode.
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