HRPD Committee Meeting

STANDING COMMITTEE ON HUMAN RESOURCES DEVELOPMENT AND THE STATUS OF PERSONS WITH DISABILITIES

COMITÉ PERMANENT DU DÉVELOPPEMENT DES RESSOURCES HUMAINES ET DE LA CONDITION DES PERSONNES HANDICAPÉES

EVIDENCE

[Recorded by Electronic Apparatus]

• 0911

Thursday, 11 June, 1998

[English]

The Chairman (Mr. Reg Alcock (Winnipeg South, Lib.)): Could I ask the room to assemble? The first task today is to find your place in this relatively complex seating arrangement. Madame Bradshaw, you could even sit over here with our friendly critics.

Let me deal with both some of the logistical problems we have and with our need to be efficient this morning right off the top. We are experiencing already, before we have begun, a bit of technical trouble that is going to affect us right from the start, in that the two mikes on the tables where our first presenters are located are not working. Until that is resolved, I'm going to ask you, when I call you to start your presentations, to take either the mike at that table that has no number on it or mike 15 over on this side, and we'll start the presentations from there rather than delay the proceedings any longer.

Just for the benefit of everyone who has come, let me first welcome you. I appreciate you taking the time to be here this morning.

[Translation]

Ms. Christiane Gagnon (Québec, BQ): After your introduction, I'd like to raise a question of privilege.

[English]

The Chairman: What we are doing this morning comes out of a long-standing interest on the part of a number of members of the House, from all sides of the House, in the whole issue of children. People come at it from a variety of perspectives—prenatal, involvement of child care, some from crime prevention. A whole bunch of disparate interests have brought people together around this question of readiness to learn or certainly the period of time from conception, I suppose, right through to the entry into school.

What we have done today is we've asked five people to make some initial presentations to help us get focused on this topic.

• 0915

We have invited a number of people from a variety of programs right across the country, and we're going to ask you, after we've had the initial presentations, to respond and question in large the topic, and give us a sense of where this fits in your experience, in your province, in your city, in your region, in your program area.

We will sit until 1 p.m., when I think we'll be interrupted by the bells as we are all called into a vote, and that will end the session. We will go and vote, and you will all return to your parts of the country. We'll try to leave some time at about 12.15 or 12.30 p.m. for John Godfrey and others to kind of summarize and speak a little bit about where we go from here on this particular set of issues.

Dr. Mustard, before you start, there is a request for an intervention from the Bloc, so let us deal with that, quickly.

[Translation]

Ms. Christiane Gagnon: Mr. Chairman, I find it a bit odd that we're meeting this morning as a committee. I was a little surprised by all the brouhaha and the number of people invited to sit down. I never heard at the steering committee that there was going to be a session on the learning readiness of children 0 to 6.

The members of the committee had asked to study the impact of employment insurance reform. I wonder what sort of respect there is for the members of the standing committee when their requests are disregarded in this way. An MP who is not even a regular member suggested to the committee that this matter be examined, and we learned just two days ago that the committee would look at this issue. As a regular member of the committee, I feel somewhat aggrieved. I don't feel respected, and I don't like that. We haven't even been told how much it will cost.

Mr. Chairman, it seems to me that when you're part of a team, as a committee member... I'd have liked it to be brought up at the steering committee, and I don't think that my colleague, Paul Crête, who is on the steering committee, was notified. He's not here today, but I'm sure he wasn't.

We'd also have liked you to have taken the requests of the committee members into account before considering other work, particularly since it hadn't been discussed. We haven't even examined the angle to take on the various topics that could have been broached by the steering committee. That's my observation this morning. So I'm very surprised to see that all sorts of people from all sorts of regions have been invited to come and discuss something that wasn't on the steering committee's agenda.

[English]

The Chairman: Okay. Just for your information, Madame Gagnon, the steering committee is a creation of the general committee, and by consent, things can be discussed at the general committee. This was discussed on May 28. Your critic for youth, Mr. Tremblay, was present and participated in the discussion, and there was an agreement to proceed. That was two weeks ago, so I'm a little confused at the Bloc's response right now.

[Translation]

Ms. Christiane Gagnon: I'll check, but the members of the committee weren't advised. It was never discussed at the standing committee.

[English]

The Chairman: It is true there was not a special meeting of the steering committee, but there was a discussion at the whole committee about it, with your member present—a member who is specifically responsible, according to the information we have from your party, for this particular topic. Subsequent to that, the normal notices went out to all members of the committee. I'm a little surprised at the concern.

• 0920

[Translation]

Ms. Christiane Gagnon: Allow me, as a member of the committee, to say that I find it odd that the committee shouldn't be looking at the matter of employment insurance and the impact of reform when it's actually one of this committee's priorities. EI is a major issue for the Standing Committee on Human Resources Development. We members of the Bloc Québécois had to make the public aware of this issue because there are people who are affected by the impact of this reform, but we're presented with another issue.

I'm not saying it's not important to discuss a subject like this one, but I find that the committee's objective is a bit vague and that we're not too sure where we're going. I think it's strange that an MP who is not a member of the Standing Committee on Human Resources Development can suggest that we look at the issue of the learning readiness of children 0 to 6. We know who deals with education.

[English]

The Chairman: Thank you. I will take notice of your intervention. I have responded to it now.

This is an extremely large department. We have members on the HRD committee from all sides who are interested in this issue. They were consulted. They were asked to put forward presenters and in fact have done so. So I'm not going to take any more time on this matter. We can discuss it in more detail at the next steering committee, if you care to raise it. I'd like to get on, because we have a very short period of time to deal with this topic.

We are going to begin with a series of presentations. I'm told, Dr. Mustard, that your mike is working, so you can start, and hopefully by the time we get down towards Gillian, her mike will be working. If not, we'll ask her to go and sit beside Libby, and away we go.

I will attempt to ride herd on this. It's going to be an interesting process, given the very large numbers. We had quite a debate about trying to shrink the numbers of people who would be invited to be present, but there's such an interest in this topic and such a range of experiences that we wanted to try to crowd as much in as we possibly could.

So Dr. Mustard, could you get us started on the trail? We'll see where we go from there.

I can't hear him.

Dr. Mustard, why don't you move and sit over at that mike there? The choice of that side of the table is not significant.

Dr. Fraser Mustard (Founding President, Canadian Institute for Advanced Research): I'm not associated with a political party by sitting here, I hope.

Voices: Oh, oh!

Dr. Fraser Mustard: I hope this doesn't reflect the technological competence of the Government of Canada.

Voices: Oh, oh!

The Chairman: Already it starts.

Dr. Fraser Mustard: What I will try to do in the brief period of time is lay a base as to why the early period of brain development sets your basic competence and coping skills and risks in terms of learning, behaviour, and health throughout the life cycle.

The first key point is that we now know, from the revolution of neuroscience, that the billions of neurons you're born with have to form connections, and those connections amongst all those nerves are driven by the quality of the stimuli you receive. We use various descriptive terms to talk about this, but basically you only have eight sensing pathways, and they are the pathways through which love, nurturing, and everything else help form the connections in the brain. The critical period for these connections to form is in the first six years of life, particularly the first three, and this includes the late in utero period.

That's the background of the neuroscience field, given to you very quickly.

The hard evidence about this comes from initially the study of the visual sensing pathways, in which they learned in experiments on cats that if you block the signals passing from the eye to this part of the brain in the animal at birth of the kitten, the connections will not form in this part of the brain for the animal to see in his brain what the eye sees. When they release the block on the signals going from the eye to the brain when the animal reaches maturity, the stimuli coming in at this late stage cannot cause the wiring to occur. So in effect the animal is deficient in his capacity to see what the eye sees.

We're reasonably comfortable that all sensing pathways develop through the same critical, sensitive periods of wiring. So if you totally neglect an animal from all kinds of stimuli—and presumably a child—you're going to have serious problems.

• 0925

That's a summary of that very powerful story. A practical application of that is that with children born with a lens defect in their eye, if you want them to have normal vision, you must correct the lens defect before they get too old, because otherwise it's too late to get the right signals going to the brain—to get the right wiring connections—for normal vision.

The sensing pathways in the brain then become very important, and the terms we use to describe this culturally—such as attachment, emotional control and stability, arousal patterns, etc.—are all driven by these core developments that take place, based upon which a whole bunch of other things occur.

One of the key aspects of this is that we now have some sense that the core component of the brain, below the cortex—the limbic system and the midbrain, which are coupled in, like a central switchboard, to all your sensing pathway information—probably gets wired in the first three years of life.

The significance of this is that young children brought up in environments where there's violence or abuse between the parents—it could be physical or verbal—will actually start to confuse the wiring of this core function of the brain. This leads to children who get to, say, five or six and have very complex emotional and behavioural problems when they enter the school system.

That's a very frightening story, but just to emphasize the significance of that, we now know that you can do simple, direct, non-invasive experiments on young children, such as putting rattles in front of them or over them in a black room at the age of six months and then repeating it two years later. All the kids who had the rattle experiment at six months will go to the rattle right away in the black room and the kids who did not have the rattle experiment will not. So the signalling going in during this early period is very crucial.

We know that measures of how well the brain has developed during this period have substantial predictive power. For example, the term “readiness to learn”, which is the thesis of this thing, can be shown if you apply it, as they did in the United States, by state and aggregate the data for the state. If you link that to subsequent grade 8 math performance, there's a perfect correlation. The states that have the highest capacity of kids heading into the school system ready to learn have the highest grade 8 math performance.

A simple public policy aspect of this story is don't dump totally on the schools to improve mathematics education. As Dick Fuchs, who did the study, said, if you really want to improve mathematics, you have to invest preschool. That has very broad policy implications for wise governments.

We know from the work of Richard Tremblay, who's not here, that on the behavioural side, in male juvenile delinquency, you can predict that a high proportion of kids—not all—who hit the school system showing an antisocial behaviour characteristic will drop out of the school system earliest, even though the schools intervene to try to turn things around. We also know that about 30% of these children will be delinquent by the age of 13. So crime prevention has now linked onto this story, and as Richard Tremblay would say to you, it's what you do preschool that's probably more important than enhancing the capacity of these kids to stay in the school system and to not be delinquent when they become teenagers.

The more important aspect, in my view, since I'm educated as a physician, is that these early events have huge effects on the chronic diseases of adult life: mental health problems, such as depression, and even my pet subject, coronary heart disease. Indeed I could argue that an early childhood educator probably has more effect in preventing coronary heart disease than all the investment you make in cholesterol-lowering drugs. That's an interesting thing for you to think about. I can't take you through all the reasons for that information, but I've left a paper behind that summarizes it all.

To summarize this, the critical, sensitive periods of brain development are late in utero and the first five to six years. The first three years are critical. Probably the first year is dynamite, but we don't know enough evidence about that to put it in the proper context yet. That sets up a whole set of patterns for the future: your capacity to learn, your behavioural characteristics, and many of the risks for the chronic diseases of adult life. So if one is really interested in health prevention, this is an important subject. It's not just a learning subject; it's a very fundamental subject about human development and health and welfare.

Can you measure the first five years? Yes, you can—not with a precise tool, but if you think of readiness to learn, which is perhaps not a good term, because this measure is as much a public health measure as it is an educational measure, if you want to think about it....

The way you might like to think about it is the brain is the pathway to learning, to behaviour, and to health. How you handle those early periods is basically going to set your confidence and coping skills in relation to these throughout life, as you interact with various things, such as being a member of Parliament and being harassed by the opposition and all those things. I don't know whether members of Parliament get depressed, but we could read about that sometime.

• 0930

What does it mean in terms of an operational sense? We use measurement tools in society that are critical for our overall population health and well-being to guide policies. Birth weight is a classic example of this. I would put this tool in the same category. It's a substantial public health measure as well as a learning measure. It can be used as an important marker for how well societies are coping with change, because the most vulnerable groups in a period of change are women and children. It doesn't matter how you're reorganizing your society, etc. As you go through this very profound, in my view, technical and economic change that has been going on for 20 years, the trick is how do you maintain a stable social environment for the vulnerable groups during a period of complex change? We have very weak indicators for that.

I believe it's important with the knowledge we have now to put indicators in that tell us how well we're coping with the change so that at the community level, provincial and federal governments, sensible policies can be developed to help maintain high quality social environments for people for the future.

Remember, economic growth is entirely dependent upon the quality of your population. That's an extremely important thing to remember.

So the issue here is a substantial economic issue for the future, not for the immediate government but for 20 years from now, because how well you handle the early childhood question and brain development will determine the quality of the population.

As they know in the United Kingdom, 50% of the economic growth in the United Kingdom following the Industrial Revolution was a direct product of the better quality of the population, which was largely, interestingly, the effect of the Industrial Revolution on the conditions for early childhood.

So there's a bottom line to all of this if you really want to make this tool work, and I would close by saying it's extremely important that this be community-based, in my view, because its use will be most vitally applied within communities. For example, communities that understand that the brain does not develop in preschool and school periods, that the brain doesn't understand this, it simply keeps developing on a total pathway all the way along, will synthesize some kind of structure involving preschool and school systems for the future.

That concludes my remarks, Mr. Chairman.

The Chairman: Thank you, Dr. Mustard.

Dr. Keating, if you could now go to the mike....

Dr. Dan Keating (University of Toronto, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education): Thank you. A number of the observations I will make will touch on some of the same issues Dr. Mustard has already mentioned. But I'll try to summarize some key points in terms of thinking about this notion of readiness to learn.

First, in terms of a general concept or a general definition that has emerged, it does involve a range of competencies, and that these are generally defined as those competencies that are important to subsequent success in school has been the way that it has traditionally been defined. I want to point out, though, that these include not just cognitive or leaning capabilities; it's a broader construct than that because it includes also behavioural capabilities as well as socio-emotional competencies. One can also think of this as the readiness or ability to acquire school-relevant skills in the context of schooling. That's the primary focus of it. What we've discovered of course is that it probably has a much broader range of application than that, extending to areas such as health, as Dr. Mustard indicated.

I think the second thing that's important to emphasize is that there's a great deal of longitudinal evidence, an overwhelming amount of longitudinal evidence, that supports the conclusion that the things we tap into when we measure readiness to learn are very strongly predictive of subsequent success in school. Assessments, even very relatively poor ones but ones that are made in kindergarten and first grade, have strong predictors to success at the end of eight grade, success at age 18, and so forth. So children who enter with low levels of readiness, even using relatively weak indices or a relatively weak index of that, have relatively poor prospects for success compared with children who are better prepared to take advantage of the school context.

• 0935

A number of the things that lead up to learning readiness have already been touched on in Dr. Mustard's remarks. Clearly by definition they are developed in the infant and preschool period, but I think it's really critical to understand that many of them, probably most of them, are the result of this process that in a general phrase is referred to as neuro-sculpting, that is to say, where the proliferation of brain matter is sculpted by the individual's early experiences during that early period of development. It alters the brain's networks, it alters the brain's architecture, it alters the brain's chemistry. Those things become organizing principles for subsequent functioning, all the way from the capacity to learn to the capacity to regulate emotions and to the functioning of the immune system that provides health benefits.

So the point of looking at this is to recognize that when it is indexed well—and we do need to work on how we can index it better—it indicates very important aspects of the developmental integrity of the child at the point of school entry and it has these long-term implications for the individual's future health, competence, and coping capabilities.

Given that, it seems fairly straightforward to recognize that social indicators or community level indicators of readiness to learn are a potentially valuable resource for assessing the health and well-being of populations and groups at a point in time where we both might be able to do something about it, but more particularly that will indicate how well we have been doing as a community and a society in terms of preparing children for these important tasks.

The other thing I will point out is that as a social indicator, the steepness of the difference between individuals who do well and do poorly is itself an index of the well-being of populations. So we know that regions and societies that have very sharp differences between people at the upper and the lower ends of those distributions overall perform less well as regions and societies than those that have flatter gradients or less differences from the top to the bottom of the scale. So it's a very useful index in that sense as well.

Given the long-term nature of these outcomes, which I've already talked about, and their consequences for populations and their consequences for society, the opportunity to make use of a well-crafted index as children enter school really needs to receive additional attention and additional effort. It's the first universally available time for monitoring individuals. If we buy the story that the current neuroscience evidence provides about the importance of early development, this gives us a very useful and important first look in at a universally available point to see how well we are carrying out that important task.

Let me just conclude by saying that the implications seem to me to be pretty clear. Given the implications of what we know about how individual brains develop, the implications from what we know about population health, and population competence and population coping, and the relationship between them, drawing on that scientific basis, which is quite a strong one, we have to understand that these things do have long-term consequences that are quite broad and important for any society. What it suggests of course is that we need to make very conscious efforts to sustain and enhance the investments in early child development at a very major level. We need not just monitor to know how we're doing; we have to take that information and direct our investments in human resources, beginning at the earliest point in life, in a very direct way.

This is particularly important in light of the dramatic social and technological changes that we are going through. Many of the patterns—the family patterns, the neighbourhood patterns, the community patterns, the extended family patterns—that provided the supports that created healthy child development in the early years, that would then show up in things like a readiness-to-learn index, have changed. We have to take account of the fact that many of those circumstances have changed, and we have to try to figure out, in the phrase that we use, as a learning society, to understand how to address this important issue. For a society to be a learning society it obviously needs to have a feedback function to monitor things, and this is one of the most important feedback functions we could put into place.

The Chairman: Thank you, Dr. Keating.

• 0940

We'll now move to Dr. Janus.

Dr. Magdalena Janus (Research Coordinator, Centre for Children at Risk): I was going to start with a brief outline of theoretical bases of the measures we are developing, but Dr. Mustard and Dr. Keating have done that very well for me. So I'll summarize very quickly that the great body of research that's available now says the main wiring of the child's brain happens in the very early stages of development, probably by age three; at the latest by six years of life. It's a consequence of the child's genetic make-up and the environment and stimulation in which they grow. It shows itself in the child's behaviour and in a number of aspects that are directly relevant for the child's readiness to learn at the age of school entry.

There have been identified five general domains of the child's behaviour that are directly relevant to success at school, and these are: physical health and well-being, social competence, emotional maturity, language richness, and general knowledge and cognitive skills. Any measure that's going to be used to assess a child's readiness to learn should include all these five aspects.

In our development of a measure, we are looking at the outcome of the first four or five years of a child's life as they reflect the child's behaviour in kindergarten. Our general approach and philosophy is that if we can devise, in a simple and feasible way, a way to test a child's readiness to learn at school at the entry point, that is, before they enter grade 1, we may be saving a lot of effort and money by intervening when intervention is not only relatively cheap but relatively easy, rather than waiting until the advanced school years where the consequences may be too far gone for a successful intervention.

It is important also to note that our approach has the features of a bottom-up rather than top-down one. The instrument, as we developed it, is based on teachers' feelings and needs. It's driven by teachers' needs and comments. Although we are of course doing our best to ensure that our instrument is also scientifically and psychologically sound, the major driving force in its development is its acceptability by the teaching community. We want teachers to feel that our instrument is a good and useful one and not just another test that they spend their time completing. Therefore, we have set out to develop and field test a feasible, acceptable, and psychometrically sound measuring instrument that will assess the readiness to learn in the school environment of children at the junior or senior kindergarten level, just before entering grade 1.

As Dr. Keating has already said, the kindergarten level of testing was chosen as the first organized educational step obligatory to all children. The instrument itself is being designed to provide information for groups of children in order to—and these are our three major goals—assess the deficits in children, assess the effectiveness of early childhood interventions, and finally, predict how children will do in elementary school.

In order to make it feasible for teachers to use the instrument for all children, we have set out to make sure that it doesn't take more than about 20 minutes per child to complete. Our early reports say it usually takes between 7 and 20 minutes to complete the measure as it stands now.

• 0945

Our progress in work is being closely monitored by an advisory group consisting of national experts in the field, but for obvious reasons some of our goals have to wait for realization. What we have done so far is as follows.

After consultations with educators and managers in the education field, we have conducted focus groups with kindergarten teachers, and that has helped us enormously in clarifying the issues in the instrument and the importance of the content of the instrument.

We have produced several permutations of the instrument. The current version has already been tested briefly with several teachers for length and clarity. We are now in the middle of a field test in which we validate the teachers' responses on the measure with the parental perception and parental interviews, as well as cognitive tests that we do directly with the child.

For the next school year, we are planning a whole round of validation of our measure against the multicultural background. We're going to do that in Toronto, which is a good place for multicultural testing, and we hope also to expand that testing to make sure that our instrument is acceptable to other ethnic groups.

In the course of our work, we have encountered a great interest from various school boards and organizations across Ontario and Canada, as well as even from the United States. We are utilizing the resources of some of these as far as we possibly can to validate and generate feedback on our instrument. As it stands now, some places will help us with the cultural validation. With others, we are going to conduct some collaborative studies once the final version of the instrument is in place, and that, we hope, is going to be by the fall of this year.

Thank you.

The Chairman: Thank you, Dr. Janus.

Now, Dr. Doherty.

Dr. Gillian Doherty (Adjunct Professor, University of Guelph): I'd like to start by observing that children are born ready to learn, and when we talk about readiness to learn, maybe we ought to be talking in this context, my understanding of what this meeting is about, of school readiness, which is a very different context and construct.

As the previous speakers have pointed out, children arrive in this world with a neurosystem that is pre-programmed to some extent to develop various skills and neuropathways, depending on the experience it receives.

School readiness, in contrast, the more narrow definition, refers to the child's ability to meet the task demands of school, such as being cooperative and sitting quietly and listening to the teacher, and to benefit from the educational activities that are provided by the school.

I would also like to observe that equal attention should be paid to the extent to which the schools are ready for the children, the extent to which the schools are receptive and responsive to the fact that children have varying backgrounds, varying cultural ways of processing information, and various levels of ability.

There is quite a body of research that shows, for example, that children learn to read more easily and successfully when the teaching approach mirrors the cultural learning style of the child. So I want to leave that as a second thought.

The U.S. national education goals panel, which has spent considerable time debating this issue, has identified six components that are crucial for a child to be ready for the school experience.

One is health and physical development. This goes beyond simply freedom from disease or freedom from some disability to include adequate energy levels so that the child can focus and participate in what's going on, some basic physical abilities that enable a child to hold a pencil, for example.

• 0950

The second component is emotional well-being. Self-confident children are able to reach out and become fully engaged in classroom activities. Children with good emotional well-being have the ability to wait when necessary, take their turn, and cope with momentary failure without bursting into tears.

In contrast, the fearful, unhappy, or angry child is preoccupied, and that preoccupation lessens their ability to pay full attention and to fully engage in classroom activities. Therefore, they do not benefit as much from what is being offered.

A third crucial component is a positive approach to new experiences and to learning. Dr. Keating has done a lot of writing and work in this area, and he talks about there being a range such that, at one end, you have the person who is very withdrawn, reluctant, and wary of new experiences, and at the other end, you have somebody who jumps in with both feet, which may be too impulsive.

Ideally, when a child enters school, they're somewhere in the middle. They're prepared to take a positive view that this is a new experience and that they're going to go for it. They are open to new experiences. They're willing to take some risk in engaging in this new experience. They therefore gain much more from the learning opportunities than do children who hold back and are too shy. So a positive approach to new experiences and to learning is very important.

Fourth is social knowledge and competence. The school environment has some behavioural demands. It requires that the child understand what is acceptable behaviour in a public place and is able to control his or her own behaviour reasonably well. The ability to get along with others is also important. Children who have this knowledge of what is acceptable behaviour and who are able to get along with others and cooperate form good relationships with teachers and with the other children. This in turn enables them to be able to engage in and benefit from the school activities, rather than being preoccupied or having difficulty because of poor relationships.

Fifth is communication skills. The ability to understand as well as the ability to express one's ideas, feelings, and wishes is very important. In the course of their communication with teachers and with the other children, children construct an understanding of how the world works and how numbers work. They thereby acquire knowledge by interacting with their environment.

Finally, there are age-appropriate general knowledge and cognitive skills. Knowing that a story has a beginning, a middle, and an end is a very important part of learning how to read. It's a general knowledge thing. Familiarity with board games that involve numbers, for example snakes and ladders, assists a child to master basic adding and subtracting. Being able to understand similarities and differences among groups of objects is also necessary.

This listing of essential components is important for two reasons. First, it takes us way beyond the traditional idea of whether the child knows his or her letters. Can he count up to ten? Fine, he's school-ready.

It instead includes the importance of self-confidence, social understanding and competence, emotional well-being, and a positive approach to learning and new experiences.

I would also like to point out to you the order in which I discussed these components. The first one, health and physical development, obviously, is not surprising. But instead of then talking about language skills and cognitive skills, the national education panel talks about emotional well-being, a positive approach to new experiences, social knowledge, and competence.

• 0955

Slides have been handed out to members sitting here. At the top of slide 1 is the title. Slide 2 is on determinants of school readiness and later school achievement.

The slides are available in both English and French, and they were handed out to you.

This slide simply tries to document and demonstrate that school readiness depends on an interaction between the child's innate abilities and temperament, the child's early experience both within the home and outside the home, and the child's physiological maturation.

For example, a cheerful, outgoing baby is much more likely to have people stop and talk with the child and smile at the child than one who is cranky and withdrawn. So that's how temperament influences the experiences the child has. Temperament seems to be inborn. A fairly large component of it is an inborn characteristic.

Physiological maturation refers to the development of the neural system. There are some things that children simply cannot learn until the neural system has developed to a certain level. For example, most children at age four can count up to ten, and if you give them two piles of blocks, one small and one large, they'll say that's a lot or that's a little, but not many of them can tell you whether four is smaller or larger than five.

What we have here are two pieces of knowledge. There's the ability to count and the ability to say it's large or it's small, but there's no ability to merge the two concepts so the child can say four is smaller than five.

By the age of six, most children can do that. What has happened in the interim is an actual physiological change in the brain. The structure of the brain has changed. This has been demonstrated in a variety of ways. So children need physiological maturation.

What are the crucial early childhood experiences? We know a tremendous amount about what helps children to develop good emotional health, good social skills, a positive approach to life, language, etc. One of the most basic elements is the protection of health and safety. Again, this goes beyond making sure they're not playing in the traffic. It includes adequate rest and nutrition. It includes protection against illness, neglect, abuse, or accidents. One of the earlier speakers pointed out that we now have evidence that being exposed to abuse is bad for the wiring of young children's brains.

Second, children need warm, responsive, and sensitive care. That jargon means that children need caregivers who pick up on the child's non-verbal, as well as their verbal, cues in terms of what the child needs and how the child is feeling. They need to respond quickly to the child's needs and do so in an appropriate fashion. If a child falls down and hurts his knee, telling the kid he's stupid is not caring, warm, sensitive care. But sympathizing with the child and helping the child to get up is appropriate, warm, sensitive care.

The reason this is so important is that children who experience warm, responsive, sensitive care develop a basic trust in themselves, their own ability to influence the world, and in the world in general. This enables them to explore their environment with confidence, which is how children learn. Anybody who's had a two-year-old messing around in their pots and pans knows that this is how children learn to stack one pan inside another.

Exploration is a key requirement for learning. There's a lot of research that has been done in the last ten years, not only in Canada and the U.S., but in other countries as well, that has consistently found that children who received warm, responsive, sensitive care as infants and toddlers are more willing by the age of four and five to explore, are more independent, and are more able to tolerate frustration and to control their negative feelings. All of those things are important for school readiness.

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Third, children need consistency—consistency in people, consistency in routines. It helps them to learn what to expect and to understand their environment, which again contributes to a sense of emotional safety.

Fourth is exposure to language in all its forms. Children who are born deaf go through the cooing, babbling, nonsense-word stages that all children do, but children only begin to articulate real words if they have heard real words.

At a later age, after children have acquired some words, they need to hear language in order to learn the rules of grammar, how to ask questions, and things like that.

The 1994 Ontario Royal Commission on Learning, and I quote, said:

Children who are being readied for future learning (and, therefore, for school) are spoken and listened to; have their questions answered; are offered explanations; and are encouraged to try new words and ideas....

The commission could have also added that children should be read to and have songs sung to them as well.

A colleague of mine once referred to the importance of language by saying children from their earliest months should be “bathed” in language. I would like to point out that there is also research that indicates that passive exposure to language—simply being shoved in front of a TV that happens to be on—is not adequate. There is something about the interaction that goes on when an adult is talking with a child that is important for the development of language.

Fifth, they need opportunities to explore and play. Touching, smelling, and tasting a banana are all part of an experiment by the child to understand what this thing is. When children are playing and exploring their environment, they are actually engaged in science, mathematics, and social studies.

Between the ages of 18 and 24 months, children begin to engage in what's technically called “pretend play”. A child will pretend to feed a doll using a doll cup. With experience, they learn to substitute, and a pillow may become the baby. This is one of the earliest examples of learning to use substitute objects when a real object is not available. That is the basis for symbol, for the use of symbols, and it occurs somewhere between 18 and 24 months and a little after that period. Very early on, children who have the opportunity to play start learning to understand symbols.

Last, they need guided experience with peers. Relationships with adults provide instruction and guidance, but they are not equal-status situations. When you are an adult, you need to be able to deal with equal-status situations. Children need other children in order to learn things like reciprocity, negotiation, and handling competition. Therefore experience with peers is very necessary, but such experience with very young children—toddlers and young preschoolers—does need to be guided, or else you're going to have two or three kids hitting each other. Toddlers and young children do not learn appropriate peer skills simply by being thrown together.

Slide 4, entitled “Crucial periods for some components of school readiness”, shows a series of bars going across the page horizontally. To the left-hand side of each bar is a dark section that gradually becomes lighter and lighter as it goes across the page. What this slide illustrates is the importance of the period before age six for the development of some of the critical components of school readiness. Those of you who have the slides will see that for binocular vision, the critical period is up to age two. Emotional control is also at about age two, as is the component of habitual ways of responding.

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For peer social skills, the critical period starts at about age three and goes through to age seven, but gets weaker and weaker as it progresses. Similarly, language, the use of symbols, and the ability to understand relative quantity, which is, “is this bigger or smaller?”, all happen before age seven.

I probably should backtrack and put this in context. In the first years of life, there are a number of specific times when the child is at a particular biological development level and is biologically primed to develop a more advanced neural structure and/or more advanced skills, provided that appropriate stimulation is available.

Dr. Mustard referred to an experiment done on kittens around the development of visual paths. That's an example of a critical period. There is a particular point in time when, if you can get the skill developed or the neural structure developed then, it's the best possible time to do it.

Some compensation can be engaged in later, but again, research has clearly indicated that the most benefit for efforts to compensate for an impoverished home occur during the height of the critical period for language, which is between nine and 24 months, and during the critical period for switching from purely concrete to symbolic reasoning, which is between two years and five years. Some benefit can accrue in language and symbolic understanding from compensatory education after those periods, but the benefit is much less.

I realize I have gone over time, so I will close. Thank you.

The Chairman: Thank you, Dr. Doherty.

I will now ask Martha Friendly to pick up the theme and take it where she wishes to take it.

Ms. Martha Friendly (Coordinator, Childcare Resource and Research Unit, Centre for Urban and Community Studies, University of Toronto): I'm going to talk about this on a somewhat different level. I want to talk about the social context in which much of this occurs, because that's the area in which I work.

There are three main points that I want to focus on this morning, which relate to the concept of readiness to learn, or, as I prefer to think of it, school readiness, as Gillian described it.

The first thing I want to discuss is that children's development, including school readiness, is most effectively considered within an integrated context that includes the whole child, the family, the community, and the larger society.

The second point I'd like to discuss is that we know a considerable amount about the context of school readiness. I think Dan Keating referred to this, but I'm going to elaborate on that to some extent. There's a lot of research about the conditions that create school readiness in children.

The third point I'd like to make is that enhancing children's development is a very complex problem, and I want to argue that it requires a complex and multifaceted approach, not simple solutions.

First, I want to talk a little bit about the idea of what Urie Bronfenbrenner has called the “ecological perspective”. What we know is that children develop within the context of their families, their communities, and the larger society. At the same time, the child's mini-ecology is connected to the social, economic, and political landscape, the ecology of the larger society. The child in the family is connected to the larger institutions of our society.

It's clear—and we've had quite a lot of discussion about how individual innate differences play an important role in determining how development and learning unfold—that children who spend their early years in positive environments with sufficient resources are more likely to thrive and thus be ready for school at the age of six than are children whose developmental needs are not being met.

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So what we believe, and I think most people would agree with this, is that a holistic approach to meeting the needs of young children is most likely to be successful. This means not only meeting the needs of the whole child—physical, social, emotional, and intellectual—but also placing the child within the larger context.

I'm sure most of you are familiar with the report of the National Forum on Health, which reported on innovative ways to improve the health of Canada's people. The National Forum on Health identified healthy child development as a determinate of lifelong good health. I agree with Dr. Mustard that the public health nature and the educational nature of this are quite related.

The forum identified family income, communities and schools, family stress or lack thereof, family support systems, and early childhood care and education services as key elements that are related to healthy child development. These contextual factors, which have primarily to do with resources, are known to have an impact not only on development in a general sense but also on whether young children arrive at the beginning of formal schooling ready to learn.

I would like to talk about the social, economic, and policy context just briefly, with particular reference to five elements of the context. I'm going to talk very briefly about where we are and then I'm going to pick up on some of it a bit later.

It's obvious that the resources that support young children's development come from two main sources: their families and their communities. In turn, it's obvious that the community and the larger society affect the family.

The first of these five contextual elements is family income and, to some extent, income security and income distribution. Let me just say very briefly that in the 1990s, an increasing proportion of children living in Canada are living in poverty, as many as one-fifth, and in Metropolitan Toronto, where I come from, as many as one-third. Family income is directly linked to meeting children's most basic needs for nutrition and housing, and these in turn are linked to illness, cognitive development, and ultimately to school readiness. Poverty is strongly associated with failure to be “school-ready”.

Family poverty has a direct impact on children through lack of resources but also has an indirect impact on children through their parents. As school readiness is enhanced by parental responsiveness—as Gillian pointed out, spending time, talking, reading—parental anxiety or even depression about income or employment insecurity is likely to have a negative impact.

The second contextual point has to do with family stress. A lot of evidence suggests that today's families are experiencing considerable stress, and we know that this stress has an impact on how families interact with their children. There are three main factors that appear to be associated with family stress: income and employment insecurity; difficulty balancing work and family responsibilities; and lack of social and community supports.

Family stress affects young children to some extent through parenting style. Stressed parents are more likely to be disapproving, harsh, and less responsive to children. And these approaches are likely to have adverse affects whether or not the parent is in the paid labour force.

Community institutions like schools and health and recreational facilities can be a source of security and resources for families and children, especially if more traditional supports like the extended family and churches have diminished. But in the 1990s, communities and their institutions are being eroded in many parts of Canada. Schools, health care facilities, and recreational opportunities are suffering under cutbacks.

Another important aspect to this is cultural, lifestyle and ability diversity, which is very much a part of our life in Canada today. We welcome immigrants and refugees from every corner of the world and for many of us this tolerant multiculturalism is one of Canada's most positive features.

I just want to mention this for people who have young children in a place like Toronto. It can be quite wonderful, as the report that was just released this week observed.

But in order for this situation of tolerant multiculturalism to work and for children from these diverse populations to achieve equity and school readiness, we need resources like English or French as a second language. Things like interpreter services for parents are quite key in order for it to work.

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Another aspect of diversity, other than cultural diversity, is lifestyle diversity. The kinds of families that children come from have shifted enormously. I don't have to list single parents, gay and lesbian parents, older parents, and blended families. But these things require resources for the people who work with families in order for them to be able to deal with them sensitively and well, and not least—and I think this committee is particularly knowledgeable about this—is the inclusion of people with disabilities, inclusion educationally and in recreation, which adds another dimension to an already diverse society.

So in the 1990s, although diversity is a fact of everyday life in Canada, what we're finding is that the resources to ensure that children with diverse needs are school-ready at the age of six are frequently not available enough.

The last but not least point—because most of you know that this is my area of work—is early childhood care and education, which was identified by the National Forum on Health as a determinant of healthy child development.

Deborah Phillips, an American developmental psychologist, observes that high-quality “childcare is now perceived as an environment which should prepare children for school”. And if school-readiness is a goal for Canada, we do have cause for concern, because in much of Canada, with the exception of Quebec, early childhood education and care services are becoming increasingly fragmented, eroded, and fragile—and they were never strong in the first place. I'll come back to this point.

I just want to comment on the policy landscape that supports this context. As we all know, in the 1990s our public policy arrangements have been undergoing exceptional changes. The first shift that occurred in the 1990s was the shift of responsibility between the federal and provincial governments for the development and maintenance of health and social programs, and it shifted sharply in the direction of the provinces. For people in some provinces, that has created enormous difficulties, both fiscally and ideologically.

A second shift shaping our social programs in the 1990s has been the shift away from universal programs to more targeted approaches, and this has been especially obvious in children's services in most provinces, again with the exception of Quebec. From the point of view of readiness to learn, I think this is a very important point when we look at the possible policy responses.

The third factor forming part of the policy landscape is the downloading phenomenon. This has been manifested not only by devolution of responsibility from the federal government to the provinces and territories, but ultimately to local governments and to regions in some places, and through shifts in funding and policy arrangements from government to individual families. Again, we're seeing this particularly in provinces like Ontario.

So what these shifts mean from a practical policy point of view is that improving the social and economic context for school readiness requires new and as yet undetermined approaches to policy making, because it appears that currently the established approaches are not available to us.

The last point I want to make is that central to this whole consideration of school readiness, from my perspective—and this is why I've handed you this overhead at this point—is the consideration of early childhood care and education services.

I've given you this overhead to demonstrate that school readiness is one goal, one possible outcome of a good coherent system of early childhood care and education. There are many others. Some of them are things that have an effect on parents and ultimately on their children, for example, balancing work and family responsibilities, reducing poverty, and so on.

The point I want to make is that this concept is central to any consideration of school readiness or readiness to learn. Central to this concept is what I think is the vision of many of us, the vision of one service delivery system that could meet these goals simultaneously, of course using a provincially delivered and maintained service delivery system with the involvement of local communities in planning, in setting priorities, and in parental involvement.

I've been here before. I've seen many of you before. We've talked about the other things on this chart before. Now we're talking about this little piece of it, school readiness.

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I'm thinking, though, that we've been focusing for many years on the private potential outcomes to parents and children of the early childhood care and education system. Lately the perspective has arisen that supporting children and families has value to the public. This has become part of our current discourse, and I think it's part of the discussion of this committee when we're talking about school readiness. It's not just a private consideration; it is also a public one.

A recent Canadian economic study calculated that $ 2 could be gained in future benefits for every dollar invested now in high quality early childhood care and education services, mostly in enhanced child development. You could think of this as the “readiness to learn” benefit. This study is available, and I will table a copy of it with the committee. But I think this idea of investing in young children as being in the public interest economically and socially is a very important one and has contributed enormously to the current debate and to the work of this committee.

I'd just like to propose an additional idea that I think has become part of the public discussion, particularly in the European countries that have already established the value of their early childhood programs for young children. This perspective is much more about the idea that children, even those younger than six years, are citizens with citizenship rights, and that as citizens, they have a claim to a fair share of our society's resources.

This perspective assumes that children have a value here and now, not only for what they might become later on—whether they might become better students or better citizens or less inclined to criminal behaviour. These things are all important, but the idea that the child as a citizen has rights is one that I don't think we've considered yet in Canada.

I think I've run out of time. I'm delighted that this committee is taking up the issue of early childhood, and I really hope to see something come out of this morning's event, and I hope to participate in it. Thank you very much.

The Chairman: Thank you very much, and I'd like to thank all of you for getting us started down this road.

What I would like to do is call on some specific comments, responses, and reflections from the folks at the successive series of tables sitting behind the people who have just presented. I in fact have a little agenda for this, but I'll try to give you a bit of advance notice. So I'm going to call upon, just to get a sense of your reactions, feelings, and thinking about what has been stated so far...from some various parts of the country.

I'll start with Pierre-Marie Cotte, who is from Montreal, and then Lois Yelland from Vancouver.

Then we have the pleasure of having with us today Mitch Murphy, who is the attorney general for P.E.I. We're very pleased that you're able to be here with us. We hope the education you got in the House last night has not sullied your opinion of how we function around here. You are here with Ann Robertson, and I suspect between the two of you, you can sort out how you're going to make your intervention.

Then we'll hear from Clara Will. So I'll start with that group.

Mr. John Godfrey (Don Valley West, Lib.): And then there's a third...those guys.

The Chairman: Oh, I'm sorry. Let me start with those five, and I'll come back.

Now, Mr. Cotte, if I can start with you, when I call you, could you make your intervention from the mike nearest to you?

[Translation]

Mr. Pierre-Marie Cotte (Project Director, Initiative 1, 2, 3, Go!): My reaction, of course, is strongly coloured by the fact that in everyday life, I'm called the director of Initiative 1, 2, 3, Go!. It's not really an initiative that we direct, but that we try to coordinate as well as we can. We try to make it possible for stakeholders from various walks of life and various levels to get together around the same table and develop a shared vision of the welfare of children and the best ways to ensure they develop harmoniously in their environment.

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In what I've heard this morning, what matters to me the most is the way the local communities are going to be used as an essential and major lever to provide parents in underprivileged environments with the support they need to give their children the best possible conditions for their development.

For the past three years, we've been active in six communities and we've observed a number of things. First, our action relies on the dynamism of the communities, on the players that are there, the institutional players, the community players, the parents themselves, who are considered to be full-fledged partners, and citizens.

At the very beginning, it wasn't easy, but we realize more and more that community action isn't just the business of institutions. It's not just the business of community groups, nor is it the business of parents alone. These three sub-groups of the community have to get together.

We've also found that there were three primary strategies used in the communities, and it might be interesting to elaborate a bit on these strategies.

The first strategies developed by local stakeholders are strategies for reinforcing individual potential, strategies whereby we try to reach the very little ones themselves through early stimulation, reading stimulation, activities and so on. Also parents are invited to parenting workshops and support or self-help groups.

There's a category we don't think of spontaneously, and that's the community stakeholders, who often feel isolated, who themselves need support, who themselves need stimulation, who need training and various things. So local strategies are primarily strategies for development of potential.

There's a second series of strategies. These are local improvement strategies. In underprivileged environments, there's often a lack of resources, day care centres, drop-in centres, parental respite, food resources and adequate housing. In underprivileged environments, there's a whole series of factors which mean that we need to invest to improve the quality of the community in which children and parents live.

The third category of strategies that we see emerging in the communities, still for the children's welfare, is that of mass influence or environmental influence strategies. It's not everything to work on developing individuals' potential or creating resources or improving them. There's also a culture, values and behaviours to promote. That takes all sorts of forms. If we want a child to be valued in a local community, to become someone important, to whom we pay attention, that has to become the norm. There has to be a sort of consensus that says children are one of the community's major riches. For us, this is something never to be forgotten in community intervention.

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In communities where there are initiatives to gather stakeholders around early childhood, we see that an environment and ties among stakeholders are formed, whereas in communities where there is not a table for early childhood workers to gather round, the stakeholders don't know one another. So there's a whole synergy and series of gains when there are places for all early childhood stakeholders to gather and mobilize in a community.

What's interesting in the case of Initiative is that we're in six neighbourhoods and that the neighbourhoods are interested in one another. What do you do in this regard? What do you do to create a drop-in centre? What have you done to mobilize your police force, you city hall, your chamber of commerce? Communities become interested in one another when they identify with the welfare of their children. They tell each other their success stories and they live them out in their communities.

Of course, what we've heard this morning about the development of the brain is very important, but my point of view is as follows: how are we going to get support from local communities, how are we going to equip them, how are we going to support them and how are we going to mobilize them so that in the communities where the children live, there's a dynamism acting for the better-being of the children. Those are my comments. Thank you.

[English]

The Chairman: Thank you, Mr. Cotte.

Ms. Lois Yelland (Medical Health Officer, East Health Unit, Vancouver/Richmond Health Board): I'm Lois Yelland and I'm a public health doctor in Vancouver. I have been involved in the development of a proposal requesting funds from the federal government for a comprehensive early intervention program in Vancouver for both children and youth. But it's the children piece that I really want to speak to you about today, because it's the focus of the proposal. We're talking about conception up to school age and we're looking at readiness to learn or school readiness as our outcome indicator.

This proposal was born out of a situation last fall where the federal government was considering how to invest their surplus. We said, what better way than to reinvest in children. We have a model that we feel has national significance, that could be a model used across the country, and one that we in Vancouver are ready to run with.

The vision of this proposal has drawn together a number of players in our community: the Vancouver school board; the health board; the social planning department; the City of Vancouver, because we're hoping to get the police, the libraries and so on, on board; our new Ministry for Children and Families, which used to be social services; Parks and Recreation; neighbourhood houses, family places; the B.C. Council for the Family; and the list goes on. It's a really broad coalition of community agencies, and we're all committed to seeing a community-based hub of services across our city, particularly in the areas where we have so many families and children at risk.

We've outlined a model that consists of three components. The first is family resource centres; the second is child care services, and this is a whole range of child care services; and the third is a home visitation program. We really see these three components of our model linking very closely together and operating from a hub where communities will actually define what these core services look like.

We believe this will pay big dividends in the long run. It's not a short-term investment; it's a long-term investment, and a significant one in terms of the funds we're asking for. But it has all kinds of implications in health, in justice, in social services, and in education, with savings down the road, not to mention the enormous savings in human terms.

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What we would call on the government to consider is a partnership in the same way that we're partnering at the community level to provide these services. We would ask the government ministries to consider partnering in funding such an initiative. We have a very strong evaluation component to it that would make it useful for other communities across the country to use a similar kind of model. We've already shared our proposal with several centres across B.C. and there's been a lot of interest.

I have copies of the proposal, if any of you would care to connect with me at the break. Thank you very much.

The Chairman: Thank you.

Now Mr. Murphy and Ms. Robertson. Ms. Robertson, from a small island to the east of here.

Ms. Ann Robertson (Executive Director, C.H.A.N.C.E.S. Inc.): I work with a program called C.H.A.N.C.E.S. Family Resource Centre, caring, helping, and nurturing children at every step. We're funded by Health Canada under the community action program for children and the Canada prenatal nutrition program. Our mandate is to work with children from conception to age six.

In terms of the information that's been provided this morning, our work is mostly in the context of children within their families, their communities, and society in general. The programs we offer are pre and post-natal programming and parenting programs, and in terms of our evaluation results we understand that we've been very successful in what we do. We also understand that we are only a piece of the puzzle; we can't address all of the needs of young children by ourselves.

To that end, we've begun an initiative called Child Alliance on Prince Edward Island in an attempt to have children on everyone's agenda: government, the community, and business. To that end, we currently have four government departments that are partnering with us. I think it's important to understand that the process of responding to the needs of young children creates a healthy, strong community in and of itself, so it's critically important to respond to the needs of children.

We understand that, but in doing so we create communities that are healthy and stronger, which is another critical part of the puzzle. It's like a barn raising; we know we need a barn. We know we need a continuum of support for young children. The process of raising that barn creates a community that's healthy and strong and can respond to many other challenges.

An indicator of how successful our initiative has been has been the support of the provincial government. The Hon. Mitch Murphy, our Attorney General for Prince Edward Island, has provided leadership in this initiative within the provincial government forum. He's presenting this basic information about what we're trying to accomplish.

There are programs similar to ours across this country, as you know, and I'd like to have Mr. Murphy come forward and talk about, from his perspective, what our Child Alliance initiative has meant to the provincial government.

The Chairman: While Mr. Murphy's getting to the mike, I will say that the range of departments and interest groups that get drawn into it has been fascinating to us as we've explored this whole topic. It classically has been in the purview of the social services and health community, but it has broadened rather dramatically in these last few years, and I suppose for some, such as Dr. Mustard, in the last decade or so.

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Mitch.

Mr. Mitchell Murphy (Attorney General, Government of Prince Edward Island): Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, honourable members of the committee, and other presenters.

Right off the bat, I want to let you know I wasn't discouraged at all by what I observed last night. In fact it's kind of nice to sit back and watch as opposed to participating. I did enjoy the session.

I want to take a couple of minutes just to briefly go over the concept of Child Alliance and why we think it's such a significant step in our province.

The presenters this morning talked about child development—how children develop neurologically, socially, etc.—and about the necessary support mechanisms that must be in place to allow that process to unfold.

I think Martha made the comment that all children are born ready to learn. Well, before I got into this business, I was a public school teacher, and I had a professor tell me one time that to be successful as a teacher, you do not teach the children anything. If you're a successful teacher, you prepare a path to allow the children to learn for themselves. Really that's what we're trying to do with the Child Alliance initiative: remove the barriers or the obstacles to allow that child development to take place.

When Child Alliance was first formed, it grew out of a community group, C.H.A.N.C.E.S. Ann and another gentleman by the name of Rob Paterson, whom I had met on an excursion to Iceland, came to me and said, “We want to try something different. We would like to try a new approach to things. Would you have a look across government and see what programs the provincial government in Prince Edward Island is currently providing with regard to support for children?”

So we looked across the various government departments, and we found indeed there were numerous programs, but often those programs were separate. There might have been a program being run out of Health, another one out of Education, and another one out of Justice. They were sitting in silos off by themselves. There wasn't that integrated, interdepartmental approach that is so necessary to look at. So we sat down and, with the help of people such as Dr. Mustard and others, came up with the concept of Child Alliance.

A simple example of what the concept is about and what we're trying to achieve is as follows.

When people are born in this country, they're given an immunization card, on which they have scheduled check-offs along the way to make sure they receive the necessary immunizations.

If you picture a circle, that circle represents a child's development from conception to age six. Yes, part of it is school readiness, but it's more than school readiness; it's life readiness. It's almost society's checklist, or a societal contribution checklist. If you could look within that circle, what are some of the things that have to be checked off within that circle before that child starts a formal schooling program?

Well, let's take the example mentioned this morning: vision. What happens to a child if their vision is not good, if they have poor vision? If they start school, obviously that is a detriment; it's a difficulty in them learning to acquire language skills or learning how to read. Also, out of a sense of frustration, it may lead to other difficulties for that child, who may intervene or act up in class, which leads to difficulties for other children.

So in that simple example, in making sure we have a screening process in place so that for every child, before they enter the formal school system—and, I would argue, at a much earlier age than that, perhaps twice before they get to the school system—their vision is checked and screened, we make sure that is addressed.

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Well, what about the socio-economic background of that child? We do not have to be reactive all the time. We can take many proactive approaches to addressing some of those concerns. We can anticipate some of the difficulties that are going to come about.

Let's take the concept of parenting. Perhaps the best way to intervene in that child's life is to offer some type of parenting counselling or parenting course to that child's parent or parents. That is another thing that would be in the circle. Certainly the things that are there now—the development of fine and gross motor skills, the socialization aspects of development, etc.—would be in there. But our concept would be that by the time that child was ready to enter formal schooling, those concerns and issues would be addressed.

The model we have put out to address those must be and is based on community. Raising children is a societal and a community responsibility. We are all parts of that society and community, but it only works if the community adopts it.

In summary, I'm just going to provide an example from the Ottawa-Carleton area that illustrates how powerful that is. In the last two or three weeks, the federal government has announced a $ 32 million program on crime prevention. In my opinion, as Attorney General for the Province of P.E.I., it's an excellent program, not only for the financial component but also for the process by which that program is set up.

The process is this. They are inviting community groups to submit applications to the federal government, through a steering committee, to do crime prevention initiatives in that community. When the announcement was made, the example of what happened in the Ottawa-Carleton region was used all across the country.

We had a community that was basically taken over by gangs and drugs, and the police, despite utilizing a lot of resources, were at their wits' end as to how to deal with it. But the community intervened. They started neighbourhood patrols, they started escorting their children home from school, and they sent the message that their community was not going to tolerate the way their community had become. They stepped in; they made a difference in that particular community.

We can do the same thing with regard to intervention and making a difference in children's lives from the ages of zero to six. If it is a poverty problem in that particular family, let's work in partnership with the community and the municipal, provincial, and federal governments to address the poverty. If it's a vision problem, let's put a screening process in place to identify that. If it's a nutritional problem, let's identify that. We have mechanisms in place through the Child Alliance program that are attempting to do that.

In conclusion, Mr. Chairman, I want to commend your committee for holding this public hearing. I can think of no other issue facing the country today than the development of the next generation and of children that is as important to the future of this country.

Thank you for giving me the opportunity to appear. It's much appreciated. I certainly look forward to working with your committee on future developments. Thank you.

The Chairman: Thank you, Mr. Murphy. I'm now going to ask Clara Will to come up, and I'll put on notice Gordon Bullivant, Kenn Richard, and Sharon Hope, please.

Ms. Clara Will (Chair, Early Years Action Group): When I realized I was doing this, I made a note to be brief, because otherwise I could go on forever. You've been here two hours, so I think you'd be happy if I were brief, right? So I'm going to try to do that.

I'm going to talk about an initiative that's been working on the ground for the last two years. Really we're doing everything you people are talking about, and I'd just like to give you an idea of how it's moving along.

The Chairman: I'm sorry. I hate to break in on you in mid-train, but just for the clarification of everybody here—and I should have done this earlier—as presenters get up to present, could you first tell us what group you're involved in, what your organizational involvement is, and where you're from?

Ms. Clara Will: I'm from Toronto, and it's called the Early Years Action Group North York. We're still calling it North York, even though we've become amalgamated and that's not allowed any more. We are consistently working with the North York community.

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We started early in 1996. We started this collective to plan for the early years of childhood based on the premise that we already know a great deal about what the common needs of children are. We also all know a great deal about what conditions and environments children need in order to have their needs met.

In recent years, the neuroscientific research has just compelled us to move even faster because we cannot ignore what we are learning. This is really validating what we already knew, but now we understand it better.

In spite of knowing all of this for such a long period of time—this means educators, professionals, parents, all of us—our social planning for children and families has always been piecemeal because we do not have in this province or in this country a unified vision of how we value our children, if we value our children, and what rights these children have in spite of the fact that we signed the Canadian Convention on the Rights of Children.

In this country, we don't yet have a mindset, a belief system, so we've been planning in piecemeal, going on tangents, going at this risk group, and going at that special need. Nothing ever comes together because it's not being planned within a common vision that makes it all go toward the common goal.

It makes me think of when I lived in Denmark, where it seemed that people were simply born with that belief system such that of course they care for their children and provide whatever is needed to make sure that the children have the opportunity for healthy growth. It seemed as if they didn't have to be taught that, except that when children are born, they would learn that as they developed through modelling and through teaching. You didn't have to debate or talk about it, because children were important.

In North York, we decided that we would proceed and mobilize the existing resources according to our own unified vision of what we believe about children. This was done so that we could develop the opportunities in this community—North York is a large city—and the conditions that all children need to have the best chance for healthy development and achieving their potential.

I emphasize “all children” because in our program we are not targeting only children at risk or children with special needs. We're concerned that all children and families, including those children at risk and those with special needs, have the opportunities for becoming the best they can be.

With this approach, we prevent the kids who are okay today from becoming the kids who are at risk tomorrow. We all can be at risk at any time in our lives. So the goal of this group is that every child will be ready to learn at the entrance to formal school education. That means that the common needs of all children and the special needs of some children are met from conception to that period of time.

In order to do this, we need to know how the kids are actually doing. So we planned that at the two universal access points.... The only place where you can really get a universal idea of how the kids are doing is at birth and at entrance to formal school education. They have to be born and they have to go to school.

We decided that we would include in our plan the research capacity, the evaluation capacity to be able to measure that and keep track of that. We put in a proposal for a researcher for three years in the initial phase. We intended to link our data with a longitudinal study on children and youth in Statistics Canada so that we could become part of a larger system that is looking at children and youth.

We didn't get the funding immediately for the research component, but of course we carried on planning, because there's so much that we already know about what needs to happen. Fraser Mustard, fortunately for us, offered seed funding for this research so that Dr. Dan Offer was able to start developing the readiness-to-learn measures, as Magdalena talked about. It's going to go into effect in September in North York. It's not ready yet, but that's the plan.

Then Healthy Babies/Healthy Children came along in Ontario. They are looking at children at birth, so we are now connecting in partnership with them. They are part of our Early Years Action Group planning system.

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Then, very recently, and very fortunately, Human Resources Development Canada funded our proposal for research in total for three years. This is really the most exciting thing, because they are funding an initiative on the ground that's actually going from the community up and making it possible for us to do the evaluation and analyse the data we collect.

So we intend to link the birth and screening data with the readiness to learn. We also intend to look at secondary access points, for example, children in child care, children visiting physicians, and so on. This would include child welfare as well, because there are important access points between birth and the readiness-to-learn stage.

We have an amazingly committed and broad-based group of individuals. This is the most exciting thing I've been involved in in 34 years of working with children and families. All of it has been exciting, but this is really the most exciting because I've never seen such commitment from a group of people. They represent all the institutions, organizations, groups, associations and so on, and the three governments in health, education, and community and social services.

The main part of our whole thrust is to mobilize local neighbourhoods to plan for their own children, because the neighbourhoods know their children the best. They know what their children need. They're the ones who can plan for their own communities. In Toronto, as somebody mentioned, we have this amazing diversity, which we feel is a huge asset to developing healthy opportunities for children. So we're doing outreach and beginning to get local neighbourhoods mobilized to plan for their children.

The frustrating thing over the last few years is that you have local neighbourhoods planning, but they don't have the support of an infrastructure. So you get wonderful things happening in local neighbourhoods that are just amazing, but then, 5 or 10 years later, they're gone because people weren't there to keep them going, the economic policy didn't support them, or because the infrastructure wasn't there.

Our plan is to look at what the needs are of children at each developmental stage and plan what conditions and situations are needed in order for those kids to have the best chance. We'll also make sure there's an infrastructure supporting the local neighbourhoods and advocate for economic policies that support the infrastructure. It's really sort of a holistic or total kind of approach.

We believe that parents cannot do it alone. We believe that parents have the main responsibility for raising their children.

We've gone on this tangent so many times: it's the state's responsibility; it's the parent's responsibility. No, it isn't; yes, it is. Do we spend money? No, we don't.

We believe the parents or guardians have the main responsibility for raising their children, but they cannot do it alone. Today especially, they cannot do it alone, as many people are living very much in isolation and with all the stresses they have. All of you know about all those things.

So we need to have support networks. We need to have information. We need to have support networks that are there and available when they need them. I might not need them today, but I might need them tomorrow. Nobody knows what's going to happen to affect their lives, so they have to be there and available.

Families need information. They need, for example, to know what's being learned about the development of the brain and so on. They need education, respect, and validation so that they can become the competent parents they want to be. I don't think I've met a parent yet who didn't want the best for their children. In disadvantaged communities, when we've done focus groups and talked about people's aspirations for their kids, they're the same as ours, they're the same as everybody's.

Child care has a big responsibility for raising children or caring for children, as do the schools, but neither one can do it alone. It takes a collective responsibility to raise healthy children. Unless we start doing that, we're not going to get anywhere. I'm not telling you anything you don't know, but these are the kids who are going to envision, manage, and be the future.

One thing I wanted to mention is that we felt in our initiative that it was important to have local government support. So we went to Mel Lastman when he was mayor of North York and we got very strong support from him, which is really important, I think. You've got to have your local politicians supporting what you're doing and believing in the need to support kids.

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The support of Dr. Fraser Mustard has been wonderfully encouraging for us. He has given us all kinds of connections to information that we otherwise wouldn't have had, web page connections and all kinds of wonderful things, and we've been able to get publications that we otherwise wouldn't have known about. So this networking is really important—networking information. Now with Human Resources Development it's really exciting.

Mayor Mel Lastman and Dr. Fraser Mustard are honorary co-chairs of our group, so we hold them accountable; they can't ignore us.

In spite of more than 30 years in this field and frustration over the years that we don't all get our act together around the basic values regarding children—and most of these are basic common sense—I do feel a sense of optimism looking around here and seeing what's happening. I really believe maybe we will develop a national vision, as Martha was alluding to, and then maybe we will begin to plan in an integrated way according to that vision so we're all going down towards the same goal, the same path, in different ways, in different places, according to different conditions and according to different needs—there's no magic cure or magic way for all of these things to happen—so that things will fit and they will make a difference, and not just today, but they will continue to make a difference, regardless of the changes that go on, because I think we have to keep in mind that the common needs of children do not change as the world changes. It does not matter what is happening, children still have all of those basic common needs that all of you have been talking about.

We have to keep that in mind and not jump over here and say, oh my God, now we have to do this with children and now we have to do that. Of course you have to respond to what's happening, but in regard to the basic needs of children, one of the things to continue to emphasize is that children learn through play, and let's not just go down in a tangent where we're teaching them to measure with the ruler and that kind of stuff.

That's all I have to say.

The Chairman: Thank you.

If I may intervene long enough to set a few rules now, we are halfway through, and Clara so caringly commented on the fact that we've been sitting for a long time.

Around here the reality is the members of Parliament, after they've been here a little while, develop the calluses that allow them to sit for a while. Someone observed that they also develop the hemorrhoids that cause them to look alert.

But what I'm going to do is try to contain the following presenters to about five minutes. I will start to gesticulate gently at about four minutes and more violently at five minutes to attempt to move the discussion along.

One other logistical point is that at 11.30 a.m., through the magical powers of our esteemed clerk, some food is going to arrive. We have asked that she select finger food so that people can simply take a piece of it and keep going. We're not going to break.

I'm going to ask everybody to be very conscious of the fact that somebody will be speaking. So I don't want everybody to all of a sudden get up and go get food; we will try to spread it around so everybody can get some. But I want to continue this discussion.

Mr. John Godfrey: One thing, too, is that people who are getting up be aware of where the cameras are focusing so they don't get in front of them.

The Chairman: Yes, we are on CPAC, so could you please be aware of that.

Those were some voices from various parts of the country. Now we're going to move into some groups that also have a perspective on this.

Mr. Bullivant, you could start us off.

Again, when you begin, presenters, introduce what area of the country you're from and what group you are currently working with.

Mr. Gordon Bullivant (President, Learning Disabilities Association of Canada): I'm the voluntary president of the Learning Disabilities Association of Canada. I'm from Calgary, Alberta, and I'm executive director and founder of the Foothills Academy Society for severely learning disabled children in Calgary. We represent thousands and thousands of children and adults afflicted with disability we know as learning disabilities.

My comments to the panel are, I suppose, good and bad. As a society, we certainly assess our children to death—it's certainly true in the east—but we rarely do much about it. So we have lots of test data on these children, with very little intervention strategy.

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Our other concern is that we know we can identify these children as learning disabled or language disabled or whatever as very young children, as young as two to three years of age, but we use a discrepancy model across this country, too. In this field of learning disabilities, these children have to fail and fail and fail before they get some appropriate intervention.

However, all is not alarmingly negative. On the positive side, we do now know, through very good research and through good longitudinal studies, that if we intervene appropriately with the right language and reading intervention, these young people can go on to become very successful adults. Many get their Ph.D.s, and many even in fact become politicians!

We do know, as well, that if children enter what we call formalized school at five and a half in Alberta, and they do not have the readiness skills to read, they are still not reading at grade 3 and they are still not reading at grade 9. We know the social implications of this are absolutely incredible in terms of dollars, in terms of emotional problems with children, and in terms of our young offenders centre.

What we have discovered over the years is that everyone passes the buck. Certainly in Alberta we get mega dollars for young children before they reach formalized public education, and then those dollars drop dramatically once it becomes provincial jurisdiction. Then the school systems tend to blame the other agencies surrounding them for the dollar allocations for these kids. So many of these children become very, very expensive to us as a society, and they needn't be.

We do know generally that learning disabled children are passive learners. Despite lots of nurturing and loving and caring and good parenting and good teaching, and whether you're a single mother or an aboriginal mother or whatever, we do know these children fail to thrive in the environment of an educational surrounding.

We also know that we can in fact intervene very efficiently and very effectively in educating these children and getting them up to snuff so that they can access the curriculum that is offered to them in formalized schools. We have the tools; it's time for us to move on and do something about it.

We have been recognizing in this country for years, in assessing these children, that some have certain types of special needs, but we need to move on that, and we haven't done that yet. I congratulate this committee for addressing that issue. We do need a nation-wide push to make sure that transition from what we call early childhood to school-age children is kept to.

Thank you.

The Chairman: Thank you, Mr. Bullivant.

Mr. Richard.

Mr. Kenn Richard (Executive Director, Native Child and Family Services): I'm Kenn Richard from Native Child and Family Services in Toronto, but I'm here more in the context of an aboriginal Head Start program.

Before I start, just to show you how things come full circle, I just want to acknowledge Dr. Carolyn Bennett, who may not remember me, but she delivered both of my kids. Talk about hands-on experience in this area—I think you have someone who has it!

Maybe I should tell you a little bit about Head Start. It's an early intervention program. It is not so old now that it could be evaluated with any depth, but my staff indicate to me that on the line they're making some tremendous progress with kids who have almost, at such an early age, been written off by the conventional school authorities. This is one program that we feel, in Toronto, is going to make a real difference.

The kids we're working with in that context are kids of the most at-risk of an already at-risk population. The aboriginal child will score, in any measure of quality of life, lower than anybody else. That has been a reality and it continues to be a reality.

I also want to just make another comment—and this comes from my own personal experience of raising my children—and that is the importance of early screening to ensure that we have kids who are really ready to learn, from the physiological perspective.

One of the speakers, I think Mr. Murphy, identified the need to do that. I have a child—one of those children Dr. Bennett delivered—who has a severe sight problem that was not assessed until the child was close to five years of age and got his glasses. His whole world changed, I have to tell you. While he is still struggling, as he's got a lot to catch up on, I think if we had screened him in the early days as an infant—because I'm seeing infants with glasses these days—it would have been a much easier time for him and, at the end of the day, for me.

I want to just reinforce what Martha Friendly talked about in terms of the broader context of the life of a child. All of the kids we work with in the aboriginal Head Start program are kids in poverty. All poverty does to families is create an incredibly stressful environment for these kids.

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Our kids are constantly on guard. Their adrenalin is there. They're looking to see what's safe and what's not. Most of them are into a basic survival mode. And I doubt that any kid in that frame of mind is going to be open to what I consider to be learning, on any level, academic or otherwise. They are looking for the safe places to be. They are looking not to take risks, because risks sometimes mean dangerous consequences.

The parents, obviously, in the manifestations that show they're stressed, despite the considerable love they may have for their children, are probably not performing as we would want parents to perform with respect to the early education of their children.

These are points that I just want to reinforce because they're quite real in the context of the aboriginal Head Start program and, to some extent, in the context of my own life.

I asked the staff, the people on the line delivering services to these kids, what was important, because I knew there would be an esteemed collection of academics and big brains here, and I thought maybe I'd just bring something here from the line, from the people who are working in this context. I asked, “What's most important in terms of getting our kids ready to learn?” They identified just a few things, and I'll only take a second to list them.

They said that children need a safe, loving, and consistent environment. This is especially true for these kids, our kids, given that their world is not always safe. It is very rarely consistent, and while parents may indeed love their children, there are issues as to how this is conveyed. Only when a child feels relaxed will he or she be in a position to start learning.

All kids, but our kids especially, need to have to have some work done on self-esteem, and that is a very elusive concept. In our case we're addressing it through aboriginal culture and the infusion of native pride. I think there would be different approaches and different contexts with different groups.

Our program workers find that the kids with the highest self-esteem are those kids that are more persevering in the completion of a given task: they think they can. I'm reflecting on that little story, The Little Engine That Could, which is really a self-esteem story, and what you want to do, obviously, is address that in the quality of your programs.

They also tell me that the children need a lot of one-to-one, and again I'm talking about deprived children in poverty, aboriginal children. They need a lot of one-to-one: despite similar backgrounds, each child has his or her own needs and manifests his or her problems in different ways. These are best addressed, at least part of the time, through a single, focused relationship, often with just one or two adults. Some kids are so disorganized and unfocused that they will learn only with individual attention.

Obviously, the implication is that investments that are going to make a real difference to those most in need are going to be fairly expensive, and government will obviously have to find some dollars beyond the allocations that are currently going to early childhood intervention and aboriginal Head Start. We are finding that we are limited. While it appeared generous initially, we're finding that the problems are requiring a lot more resources than we can in fact muster.

Children need structure. So many are from disorganized and chaotic backgrounds by nature of the stresses they're under that structure is one way of promoting their safety and security. We have found, at least so far, that without structure our program would rapidly disintegrate, as the children are not self-regulated to the point where they are able to handle even ten minutes of free time.

Children must be understood as the whole child. Martha talked about that, so I won't pursue that point.

Parents need to be involved. One of the cornerstones of the aboriginal Head Start program is parental involvement. Many of the institutions that these families have been interacting with have dismissed the parents as a liability. And frankly, the parents can be a liability at times, but they are complex beings, just as their children are, and there are strengths that can be built upon in the context of a nurturing program that accepts them and works with them. We have one staff dedicated to liaise with them. In fact, we provide workshops around parenting for the parents themselves. We work together. We've drawn them into a partnership.

Finally, we need these programs for the long term. Our program starts when the child is two and half years old and doesn't end until he or she enters kindergarten. There are no quick fixes for kids that are deemed to be at risk. Our work really involves joining with the family and co-parenting and raising the child together. This is the strength in native culture anyway and we're glad we could formalize it through the aboriginal Head Start program.

Merci.

The Chairman: Thank you very much, Kenn.

Sharon Hope.

Dr. Sharon Hope Irwin (Executive Director, SpeciaLink: The National Childcare Mainstream Network): It's Sharon Hope Irwin.

The Chairman: Oh, yes. That's not Irwin SpeciaLink, that's Sharon Hope Irwin, SpeciaLink.

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Dr. Sharon Hope Irwin: Good morning. I'm from SpeciaLink, the national childcare inclusion network. I'm from Wreck Cove, Cape Breton Island. Prior to being involved with SpeciaLink, I ran a day care centre in Glace Bay, which, since it began in about 1975, included kids with disabilities.

The national SpeciaLink sort of took the lessons we had learned, along with the lessons of many other child care centres across the country that included kids with disabilities, and put them into a national program to encourage all child care programs to include everybody, to include kids with disabilities and kids from special circumstances and to not segregate anybody. To us, inclusion means that children with special needs or disabilities attend and fully participate in the programs they would attend if they did not have a special need or disability. Supports are provided to facilitate their optimal development in these settings.

I wouldn't be here today, despite the august company and the free ride to Ottawa had it not been for the pit or the knot that started to grow in my stomach when I heard the word “readiness” again. As a society, we've done readiness several times in the last 30 years. Each time we had a readiness instrument—and granted, they weren't as scientific as the new ones—it served to keep people out.

Some people in this room may remember the Gesell instrument. As a screening tool at school entry age, the main thing it did was tell certain parents that their kids were too immature and that they ought to stay at home and come back next year.

For kids who were well supported at home and who maybe had a mom who could stay home because the family income was sufficient, that was often all right. And for people who could afford nursery school, perhaps that was all right. But in the current economic context, a holding pattern of “keep him out another year” often not only doesn't bring a child to a point where he's more ready, but takes him backwards a little bit.

So the knot grows.

There are two other treatments that schools often used with not-ready kids. The one I mentioned was delayed entry. Another was developmental preschools or developmental kindergartens. You stream the kids at age five so that kids who aren't ready for formal learning are in a special class. And it sounds pretty good. You're talking about greater resources, higher staff-child ratios, better equipment, nicer walls, and all kinds of things. The research tells us that's not a successful strategy.

The third thing people did at school entry when kids weren't ready was to keep them back a year, keep them in kindergarten for a second year. The research on the results of that tells us that when you look at control groups of similar kids who weren't ready after kindergarten, this didn't help at all.

Therefore, although it is very important that we have a more scientific marker of readiness, especially so that we have a social report card of how our kids are faring across social gradients, across the country, and across issues of culture and disability and everything else, we obviously need to intervene earlier, before school entry.

Across this country we have a non-system, but a pretty good non-system, of early childhood programs, which, with a better social policy directive and with funding, could provide the base of a system of supports for children, a healthy place for them to grow and thrive while their parents are doing all the things that parents do alongside that system and which would decrease the likelihood that many of the kids in our population aren't ready for what schools offer.

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The last point I want to make is that the shift in readiness tools across the years has also been part of a pattern that looked from readiness of kids to readiness of schools, and the concept of schools that are ready to welcome all kids who are of school age is one that requires a lot of thought, preparation, design, and consideration.

Thank you very much.

The Chairman: Thank you very much, Dr. Hope Irwin.

For our next grouping, I will give you the list of names.

We have among us someone whose work many of us have read over the last few years as he's become more involved in this: Dr. Thomas Gove.

A voice: Judge Gove.

The Chairman: Judge Gove. Sorry, I have so damn many doctors here. I have a judge now.

Judge Gove, I'll ask you to start off, and we'll follow that with Dr. Colin Maloney from the Children's Aid Society. Then we'll go to Sandy Berg, Carole Presseault and Diane Bascombe.

Your Honour.

Hon. Mr. Justice Thomas J. Gove (Court of British Columbia): Thank you. That's the second time in a week I've been introduced as a doctor, and I'm not.

The Chairman: Nor do you want to be.

Mr. Justice Thomas Gove: Nor do I want to be.

I'm a family court judge from British Columbia. In 1994-95, I spent 18 months conducting a commission of inquiry into child protection. The inquiry came about as the result of the death of a little boy who was killed by his mother and the concern about the adequacy of child protection services, specifically investigations into abuse and neglect.

During the course of the inquiry, in which I conducted many public hearings, received many briefs, and initiated 22 research projects, it became apparent that viewing child protection on its own was missing the point, that child protection was really part of a larger description of child welfare.

I concluded from the work I did that we should approach the issues of children's safety and children's health by using a broad definition: that child welfare should include everything from prenatal care to public health nursing right through to young offenders to alcohol and drug services for children and adolescents and their families, as well as child protection and other child and family services such as child care and day care.

I also concluded that the effective way to manage those services, effective both in terms of ensuring that the services got to who we wanted them to get to and in terms of making certain we're using the tax dollars most effectively, was to bring the management within one organization as opposed to having a disparate number of organizations duplicating services.

I also concluded that the constituency of children that we should include within this definition of child welfare is all children, that we should not hive off select groups that we then turn our only attention to. And after hearing some of the speakers earlier today, I think that's a view that is shared by others.

I think it's fair to say that all children and their families at some point benefit from—perhaps require—some child welfare services. I think all of us can at least relate to the visits by public health nurses when children are born. That's all that some children and their families require, but I dare say that most children and families require more. And again, I commend the approach discussed earlier, the healthy start approach, not perhaps under that name, but I think most you are aware of it. In my view, it is a way of ensuring that we don't lose children early on.

The final point I wanted to make with respect to the conclusions that I came to is the need for ongoing monitoring, evaluation, and research. During the research phase of the inquiry, I was very surprised by the difficulty of finding out what is going on across Canada. We actually had an easier time finding out what was going on in some American states than we did finding out what was going on in Ontario, Nova Scotia, and elsewhere. We really don't have a national institution; we don't have a national vehicle. That's something you ought to seriously consider.

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In conclusion, then, I made the following recommendations. I recommended that there be a ministry for children and families, bringing into one organization those from six. I recommended that there be an independent children's commissioner who would monitor the services and speak out to the public where services were not going as they ought to be. And finally, I recommended a multi-disciplinary, integrated delivery system, which I refer to as children's centres, at the community level, managed at the community level, reflecting the needs of each individual and particular community.

Those changes are now taking place in British Columbia. As with any changes in an area of social concern, it's always somewhat of a rocky road, but the change is in progress. I would commend the approaches I've described and set out in my report for your consideration. Thank you.

The Chairman: Thank you, Judge Gove. As a former director of child welfare, I read your report with some interest.

Dr. Colin Maloney.

Dr. Colin Maloney (Executive Director, Catholic Children's Aid Society): I'm from Toronto.

I would like to, Mr. Chairman, with all due respect, invite the committee to broaden its mandate. It's fine to talk about readiness to learn, but there are much more serious issues of school readiness for the children, as Sharon was just mentioning. I'd like to invite Dan Keating to give us indices of what that would be. I'm sure OAC would be glad to have indices of school readiness and what flexibility needs to be there.

The committee should make it a goal that in the educational systems across our provinces, they take as a primary mandate that they're responsible for school readiness. And they should do that, because if the children are not school-ready, the school is at high risk of failure.

Not that they'd do it themselves—they don't have the money and they're not going to get it—but they do have a sense of realizing that their first teachers are the parents of that school district. I remember reading that in the States there was a head of a school system who would always send a letter to the newborn child's mother, saying, “Welcome; we have a desk for Johnny”, or whatever the name of the child was, because he realized their concern began then.

What I've found most in all these discussions of learning is how there is a lack of leadership at the community level. You do get it every here and there—you get a Clara Will or someone like that—but where are we going to get it consistently, systematically, responsibly, and accountably for all children? We don't have it.

The only system we have is education. They can't do it alone. They have public health, the pediatricians, the libraries, recreation, the churches, and immigration. But if they don't feel responsible when the kids walk in that they have the indices of being flexible to whatever level that child is at and that that child is ready is their responsibility, because if they're not, they fail as a system....

I strongly urge the committee to do that. It's not how we'll spend our non-existent surplus, but it's something that could be managed just to change the attitude, the sense of their framework of that. If the leadership at the local community level were to create the alliance, the partnership, so that every school felt parents were their first teachers, it would be very successful.

The Chairman: Thank you very much, Dr. Maloney.

Now we have Sandy Berg and Carole Presseault.

Ms. Sandy Berg (Director, Fetal Alcohol Syndrome and Effect Support Network of British Columbia): I'm Sandy Berg. I'm from the FAS Support Network of British Columbia. We're located in Surrey, which is in the lower mainland of B.C. FASE is fetal alcohol syndrome and fetal alcohol effect.

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We're very concerned about the education part for our children. Our children wouldn't fit into any of these standard readiness-to-learn documents that have been developed over the years. There has been a lot of research in this area. We know what works and we know how to do it.

I personally would like to see this committee start working towards putting these things back into the community and getting some resources in there. A study was done at the University of Washington that came out in August 1996, and it showed that of children with FASE, by the time they're in their late teens, 94% have mental health issues, 60% have disruptive school experience, 60% have been involved with the law, 50% have been confined, 50% have inappropriate sexual behaviour, and 30% are already having difficulties with alcohol and drugs.

Early intervention is absolutely essential. I would agree that zero to six is where we start. However, it has to continue.

Our kids can succeed. The youth detention centre in Vancouver, British Columbia completed a study, and it showed that of the kids who went through the psych assessment unit there, 23.3% were diagnosed with fetal alcohol syndrome. This is a huge problem, and we're not dealing with it. Any readiness to learn, anything we're going to develop, has to include these special needs people.

Canadians have to start recognizing that this is a problem across Canada. It is a huge problem, and we are not dealing with it. It's one of the only disabilities or birth defects that is not reportable. We still don't have to report this. How do we plan for it financially? How do we get these kids ready for school? How do we help them reach their potential in life if we do not even report the birth defect? How do we plan for them financially?

In the United States they did a study that showed that it cost $ 1.4 million to raise a child with FAS. This has to go into our planning. We have to go back to grassroots communities that know how to work with these children, that know how to educate, that know how to train, and start bringing these kids forward with all the rest of them.

I'm really happy that we have had the ability and the funding to do the research. However, I really feel we're missing the boat when we're not funding communities to take care of these kids.

Thank you.

The Chairman: Thank you very much, Sandy. I should say that with Madame Bradshaw here, barely a meeting goes by that we aren't reminded in some way of FAS-FAE.

Carole Presseault from the Canadian Nurses Association, and Diane Bascombe is next, please.

[Translation]

Ms. Carole Presseault (Senior Advisor, Government Relations, Canadian Nurses Association): Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

First, fetal alcohol syndrome is a tragedy and it's a completely avoidable disease.

I'm happy we were invited here today. I wish to convey the apologies of my president, who is from Moncton and who, though she's here in Ottawa, cannot join us since she is chairing a meeting of the board of directors this week.

Obviously, nurses are an important part of this discourse since, in the end, every Canadian will have contact with a nurse from the time he or she is born, and for a large part of their childhood.

We recently interviewed more than 150 nurses from across Canada who were taking part in community development projects. They told use things that we found particularly touching. They work at ground level, within the communities, and deal with very important issues with regard to prevention and education. But we learned that, on account of some very elementary things, including poor nutrition, it's hard for them to do their job.

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A nurse told us about the difficulty she had when she worked with a particular family. She said she knew that the children were basically very hungry, but the system didn't allow these children to eat. She told me:

[English]

“They were hungry. I stretched the rules as far as I could, and finally the authorities relented. They were not supposed to eat that day, I guess, but the children finally got lunch and could go to school that afternoon.”

[Translation]

It was a basic need. Some nurses also said that services such as transportation were essential so that families could have access to health and prevention services.

As I said to you, the Canadian Nurses Association is very concerned about the recent changes. The National Forum on Health recently made some very specific recommendations on the question of home visits, among others. One of the witnesses talked about postnatal visits this morning. In Alberta, we have a very large postnatal visit program, but I have to say that the moms who get a home visit from a nurse 48 hours after they leave hospital are now very rare.

I'll tell you about my own experience. Twelve years ago, I had a daughter and I was not only visited by a nurse, but I also benefited from community system referrals and community access services. Four years ago, when I had another daughter, I didn't receive one postnatal visit. Although I'm not necessarily a parent at risk, I'm a parent like so many others and I need resources, including community resources.

A year ago, our association decided to challenge our elected representatives. We realize that in recent years, the decisions made more or less everywhere were made in the light of budgets. We want to issue a leadership challenge. Decisions are now a matter of political will. You've heard people who are very knowledgeable in their fields tell you that now there are no reasons for not investing resources for young people.

Finally, we want to tell the Minister of Finance that, when he prepares his next budget, he should be aware of the fact that we're placing a whole generation at risk and that we will have to pay costs later. Thank you.

[English]

The Chairman: Thank you, Ms. Presseault.

Diane Bascombe, and then Betty Green. Thank you.

Ms. Diane Bascombe (Executive Director, Canadian Child Care Federation): Good morning. Thanks for the opportunity and for inviting me here this morning. I'm Diane Bascombe; I'm with the Canadian Child Care Federation. In my job I have the privilege of working with 10,000 individuals and organizations who have the privilege of working with Canada's children and their families from coast to coast to coast.

It's really exciting that we're focusing on early childhood at a lot of different levels—nationally, provincially, and locally—and that there's a recognition of the importance of this time in the growth and development of children. It's also quite exciting for the people who have been working in the field of early childhood care and education for many years.

In 1995 Dr. Mustard came and spoke to our national conference in Calgary, and everyone in the room was extremely excited, because finally, they said, they could prove what they've known for decades about the importance of early childhood, now that we were starting to look at the emerging brain research.

Most of what we're talking about today isn't new. Most of it we've known for a long time. Over the past few years it's been really interesting to see the number and variety of places where the importance of early childhood is emerging, in everything from the National Forum on Health to the National Crime Prevention Council. Yet we still are on the precipice of taking action, I hope, in this area.

I'm here today to offer a solution, not just a problem. The majority of children in Canada of preschool age are already in some form of child care in this country. Be it a child care centre, a nursery school, some links with a family resource program, or being cared for in their neighbourhood in a family child care setting, most children in this country are using early childhood services.

So we don't need to start fresh; we don't need to start new; we don't have to build a whole new infrastructure. There are lot of high-quality, community-based programs in this country and a lot of people out there who know what the answers are. They know what to do and they're already doing it. What they need now are some tools, some support, and some stability to continue to do their work.

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We have a situation where there are a lot of good programs that are targeted to children at risk and families who are vulnerable, but they're hard to find. How can we identify them in our communities? We identify them through providing them with universal services, places in their community, in their neighbourhood, in their local area, where all children have access to a program, an early childhood program.

The situation we're starting from today is one in which, as you've heard this morning, there are a lot of exciting multi-disciplinary programs happening at the local level. There are a lot of local leaders doing exciting, innovative things that are building on all of the work that has happened in their communities in the past couple of decades. We also know that not only are we at a situation in Canada where there are children and families at risk and in a vulnerable situation, but our services and our community supports are also at risk and are also vulnerable today in Canada.

We need to take the opportunity we have here before us to find a way to stabilize the sectors, the people, and the infrastructure that support children and families at the community level. We can't expect people to work in isolation without that support and stability.

I'd like to leave you with the thought that we are talking today about a national children's agenda. You do have an opportunity, but we have to make sure that it's comprehensive, that it's integrated, that it builds on what we already have, and that you work with those of us out here who know what we're doing, know how to do it and have all the links in the infrastructure to help you do the job in putting together a national children's agenda that will really make a difference.

Thanks.

The Chairman: Thank you, Diane.

Next is Betty Green, from the Canadian School Boards Association, and then Cynthia D'Anjou-Brown, and after Cynthia, Lil Krstic.

Ms. Betty Green (President, Canadian School Boards Association): Thank you, Mr. Chair. As has been indicated, I'm Betty Green from the Canadian School Boards Association.

As Doctor Colin Maloney has suggested, we have a challenge before us to see our role in the preschool education of our children. I think our own school division, the one I belong to, has taken that on as an initiative. We don't send a letter to every mom; we send a nursery rhyme book—it's inscribed—to let them know we believe they are their child's first teacher and that we want to be part of the education of that child.

School boards across Canada have an obvious interest in seeing children come to school ready to learn. We also know school boards across Canada are assessing children as they enter the school system, but that's too late. We can address the needs that we identify; what we need to do is address the needs before they become needs that are going to be costly, because the longer we wait to address the deficiencies within a child, the more costly the treatment or the intervention will be.

There is no question that preschool education, which covers the learning from zero to age six, both within and outside of organized settings, is critical, and that the transition into school and the eventual success is determined by that early training and opportunity to learn.

Child development experts and brain researchers continually advance our understanding on the magnitude and the critical nature of learning during that time period and the importance of age-appropriate development to ensure that the child is ready to enter the formal school system and benefit from the learning experience they'll experience in that setting.

Preschool education for children at risk is even more critical. We know we are increasingly seeing students enter the school with physical challenges, students who are new to Canada, aboriginal students, and students who are living in poverty, and their needs are quite critical.

There's a need for a variety of preschool education supports and a recognition that there are various partners with differing but complementary roles to play. These programs are often delivered in schools, in child care agencies, through cooperation, perhaps with parents or within community groups, and all of those are very critical.

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What we need is a multifaceted, multi-partner approach. We know that families and communities have a major role to play in the development of young children before they enter and while they're in the formal learning programs. The formal education system has a role to play to see that families and communities are supported in providing for the growth and learning during that preschool system and period.

We also know that the ministers of education must take a leadership role directly through their own offices and through coordination or influencing others from their office to ensure that the students' and young children's needs, and their families' needs, are met. Recently the CMEC, the Council of Ministers of Education Canada, held a national forum in Newfoundland. We challenged them to make a strong statement in support of universally available preschool programs. We also asked them to become full partners in the national children's agenda.

I think what we've seen today here in the room is not only the knowledge and the will but the passion to become involved in preschool education. The Canadian School Boards Association would like to be an active partner. We're more than willing to participate and, as Dr. Maloney has said, throw our influence into that period of the learning of young children. Thank you.

The Chairman: Thank you, Betty.

I would like to thank everybody for being so disciplined in getting your points out in a timely fashion. We are almost on time.

Ms. Cynthia D'Anjou-Brown (Vice-President, New Markets and Special Projects, United Way of Greater Toronto): I am Cynthia D'Anjou-Brown from the United Way of Greater Toronto, not the United Way of Canada.

Our local United Way has taken the position that we can best make a contribution by significantly increasing our investment in social and community services in the context of Martha Friendly's presentation. To do so we've taken a two-pronged approach. First of all, we engaged the various publics last year in a broad consultation process, and we heard clearly in Toronto that our United Way must make children zero to six a priority and moreover must shift those resources to that area, and we have begun to do so.

Second, we took another tack in which we initiated a project called Success by Six, and we did that to engage corporate partners in problem solving around our at-risk children's needs. We took a little bit of a narrower focus in terms of investment and we determined from research that there were three program themes that were important: first, pre and post-natal care, home visiting, and child-parent supports. In talking to many corporate leaders—you can probably tell how good a fund-raiser I am, I had to do so many of them—I found that corporate leaders are interested in our children. I hear a lot of us talking about other partners, but no one has mentioned corporations. I want to put it on the table that corporate leaders are interested in the plight of our children and are willing to step up.

We have raised significant new dollars for these three program areas, and subsequently we initiated a request for proposals for this funding. To our surprise—we knew we'd get a few—we got 71 requests, not from individual agencies but from networks in Toronto, and they requested $ 6 million. I assure you I did not raise $ 6 million. I had to go through a priority-setting process. But what we learned at the United Way from this application process, which just ended a few weeks ago, is that there are a few themes emerging.

First of all, there are a lot of great collaborative networks out there. People are working together on the ground, and a lot of that has to do with the CAPC funding. But the work is spotty. You'll go from neighbourhood to neighbourhood and it's like feast or famine. We have to infill in terms of the social infrastructure in our community.

Second, we learned that while we are making investments along with other people, other constituents are doing different things. They're increasing recreation fees; they're charging rent for programs. We're shaking our heads. We can't win. We can't seem to get ahead here.

I think I'll comment on what we have to do to make this all work together.

We also learned that poverty was the overriding issue. There is 36% poverty in Toronto and that's causing a lot of stress on families. The other thing we learned was that there is a lot of stress on newcomers. It's not only the income issues, but you've got the settlement issues compounded on top of it.

What I would like to conclude is that we do need policy, especially national policy, in this area, and we need to increase public and private investment. I think there's a willingness to do it. We need to do so from our theme of partnership. We can't expect great results on school readiness if we don't invest; it just won't happen for us.

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The Chairman: Thank you very much, Cynthia. Now, I would like to ask Connie Laurin Bowie to come to microphone 19, and Lil Krstic.

Ms. Lil Krstic (Vice-President, Telephone Pioneers): Thank you very much for allowing me to come and speak to you today. I'm the vice-president of a very large community organization called the Telephone Pioneers. We're an organization of about 800,000 volunteers throughout Canada, the United States, and Mexico, with about 85,000 volunteers here in Canada. Our focus is education, and until recently our focus has been more on mid-level to senior-level education, working on preparing students and, in conjunction with teachers and schools, giving students the skills they're going to need to be successful in our ever-changing economy and society.

We've talked a lot here about background research, partnerships, community involvement, and family involvement, which is a lot of what I was going to talk about. Instead of talking about all those things, I'd like to give you a concrete example of one of the initiatives we're involved in that brings a lot of these elements together and I think addresses how children can be made more ready to learn and more successful as they go through the school system.

I'd like to focus on three specific areas—emotional well-being, a positive approach to learning and new experiences, and social knowledge and confidence—which we heard some of our experts talk about earlier as being goals on which to focus readiness to learn.

I'd like to talk about a program called I Like Me. It's an initiative we partnered with another organization called Kindergarteners Count, which has the support of experts such as Dr. Don DeMoulin from the University of Tennessee, who is a specialist in education and self-concept in children, and Geoff Deane who is the president of the Canadian Principals Association. This program is really aimed at encouraging self-concept in kindergarteners, self-concept being taken from two specific approaches: self-esteem, how students feel about themselves; and self-efficacy, how students feel about what they do and the impact that has on how they approach tasks such as learning and new experiences.

The fundamental element of this program is a personalized reader. A personalized reader is a book that is developed individually for each specific child. There are over twenty references in that book, which include the child's own name, the child's school, teachers, principals, family, and friends. Again, it's personalized for each child and that's the key component for this particular initiative. The goal of the program is to improve the child's self-concept and help them become open to new learning experiences and to foster an early love of reading.

In addition to that, it does a number of other things that I heard a lot of folks around the room talk about: it improves overall comprehension and recall; it communicates tolerance and gender-sensitivity messages; it illustrates cultural diversity and the inclusion of people with disabilities; it fosters child-teacher-parent interaction; it encourages community, business, and school partnerships. It's a very inclusive program that tries to bring together a number of different aspects of society.

We felt that in working with some of the older grades that we weren't getting to a lot of the students at an early enough age. Again, some of our experts pointed this out to us. We really wanted to focus on something that started much earlier in the child's learning experience. To illustrate the point, Dr. DeMoulin indicated to us, through the research he had done, that if self-concept is left unchecked, it starts to decline as early as grade two. We only started this program a year ago, just in a trial phase, but the preliminary results we've had—we did a specific research study with 1,000 of the students who went through the program in both rural and urban communities—indicated that the kindergartener's self-concept increased by over 70% in most students.

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Teachers also reported an improvement in parental involvement and in home-school relationships and a 40% reduction in behaviour management programs. It's a very simple, very inexpensive program that really works. So there are a lot of initiatives we can undertake in this manner to move this forward.

I'd like to leave you with one last thought that a very wise man once said to me: It's easier to build a child than it is to repair an adult.

I commend this committee on the work they're doing. Thank you.

The Chairman: Thank you very much, Lil.

Next is Connie Laurin Bowie from the Canadian Association for Community Living, and could I have Dawn Walker from the Canadian Institute of Child Health on deck, followed by Armand Brun and Cathy Brophy and Bruce Ryan, in that order.

Ms. Connie Laurin Bowie (Coordinator Government Liaison, Canadian Association for Community Living): Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I'm Connie Laurin Bowie, with the Canadian Association for Community Living. Our association has 12 provincial and territorial associations across the country, and we work with and on behalf of people who have been labelled with an intellectual disability.

I have been oscillating this morning between being very encouraged and being very skeptical, and possibly slightly concerned. I didn't know really what the agenda was going to be about today. I think I only figured it out a little while ago when someone made a comment about a national children's agenda. The light went on and I thought we're actually talking about a national piece of work here. That sort of depresses some more detailed comments.

I was glad—and I appreciate Dr. Hope Irwin's comments and Martha Friendly's comments, and also Sandy Berg's comments about the issues of disability.

We know from years and years of experience, as does this committee and those of you around it who participated in other forums, that how you define the issue determines who gets in and what you do. We know, on the issue of disability, that if you set it aside and add it on at the end of the day, the system you build will not be inclusive, no matter what your intentions are. I'd like to reflect on that in terms of the way disability has been defined at the federal level and then speak specifically about children.

We know, because the agenda at the national level has been focused on employment, the operationalization of that, at the policy level that makes good sense, and we can talk about including people and we can say that means employment for everyone. When it comes down to operationalizing it and putting it in place in the form of policy, what it actually means is many people get defined out before the program is even developed, particularly people who have a disability, and even more so people who have an intellectual disability.

I think there is a direct analogy when you think about children, particularly children who have a disability. It's not enough to create a process; you need to build in the supports to enable their participation in a process.

This committee provides an example of how we've built that into our democratic system. We know for people to come and appear before this committee and have effective input, they need (a) to have their travel paid for, which you very graciously have done; and (b) they need to have the supports in terms of their organizations in civil society and their communities that allow them to have a knowledge base.

So an individual who has a disability comes to the table and has an individual perspective. Children and families and parents can come to this particular table and have an individual perspective. I could tell you my own experiences with my new baby, but that's not the same as being able to say.... That's valuable; I should say very clearly that's valuable. I know it's valuable, but I think there's a capacity in the community to create an analysis and to input into policy that we have decided as a society we will support.

As with disability, there are two things I think we need to point to. One is that at an individual level, at a family and a community level, people need the support to participate in schools. So readiness to learn is not about the individual child's “developmentness” only; it is about how you support that child to participate in a school. Building a school and saying you're ready to go into it isn't enough; what we need is to build the supports around the child and the family and the community to allow them to participate in that school.

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I think I'm really saying the same thing that many others have said, but I want to give it the spin from our perspective.

I think the second thing we need to recognize, and a role that the federal government has talked about in terms of disability and it needs to consider in this forum, as well, is the issue of civil society and supports to civil society. For us to bring groups like this together and give the individuals who have presented before you today the opportunity to be effective in their participation, we need to provide the supports at the community level and in civil society to engage all Canadians, including those with a disability, in these kinds of debates.

So I congratulate the committee. If this is actually about a national children's agenda, I'm very pleased.

The Chairman: Thank you very much, Connie.

Now we have Dawn Walker from the Canadian Institute of Child Health, and next is Armand Brun or Joanne Roulston.

Ms. Dawn Walker (Executive Director, Canadian Institute of Child Health): Hello, I'm Dawn Walker. I'm the executive director of the Canadian Institute of Child Health, which is the national organization solely dedicated to the promotion of health for all children and the prevention of disease, injury, disability, and illness.

I'm not going to spend much more time on supporting my colleagues and friends in the neuro-development evidence. I think it has been talked about over and over and supported. It's a given with us.

Linked with that, we understand the need to build a strong, comprehensive infrastructure at the community neighbourhood level to support families caring for their young children, and that includes quality comprehensive child care and other parent-support type programs.

But I would prefer to emphasize three points that I've heard a little bit but I think need to be more on the record.

One is that the developing fetal and young child's brain is also very susceptible to environmental contaminants. The air that moms and babies breathe, the water they drink, and other substances such as alcohol all have an effect on the early developing brain, which at times is irreversible. If we're going to look at a comprehensive program on ready to learn, we have to include the environmental contaminant impacts. We're very far behind our American and European colleagues linking environmental factors with the ready to learn. I haven't heard very much about that today, so I want to put that on the table and emphasize it.

The second thing is, we also need to take seriously the need for early screening on the cognitive development areas, speech, hearing, and eyesight, because that too is irreversible. It's incomprehensible to me that children are on waiting lists for months and years to get treatment when we know the damage is going to be irreversible. So this really needs to be looked at in terms of how a child is ever going to be ready to learn when their physiology is not being taken care of, in light of the knowledge that if it isn't going to be taken care of, they're going to lose it. So, please, consider this.

The third one is that any readiness-to-learn strategy has to include children with special needs so that they can reach their best potential and not be left out.

So those are the three points. I certainly concur with the early child development, the neuron development, and the need for child care, but as well, remember those three points: the environmental impacts; the kids with special needs; and early screening, please, in the area of care and treatment.

We applaud the increased interest in early child development by a variety of departments and certainly a wide spectrum of parliamentarians, and we look forward to and hope for the action.

The Chairman: Thank you very much, Dawn.

Armand Brun is next, and following Armand, Dr. Cathy Brophy and Dr. Bruce Ryan, please.

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[Translation]

Mr. Armand Brun (Vice-Chair, National Council of Welfare): Thank you. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Armand Brun and I'm from Shediac, in New Brunswick. I'm the Vice-Chair of the National Council of Welfare and I'm accompanied this morning by Joanne Roulston, a Council researcher.

I wish to thank the committee for inviting me to talk about preschool children and learning readiness. These are two topics of interest to the Council and that I'm particularly interested in since, for years, I took care of children and young people as a teacher and school principal. Not all injuries and scars are just on the outside. They're also on the inside. I'm going to give you an example.

Forty-five years ago, I began my career in teaching. I taught 21 children aged 14 to 19 in grade eight. Last Sunday, when going through a box of photographs, I found a picture of that class. What I saw first was not those who have succeeded in life, the one who's a doctor in western Canada now, the one who's a judge or those who have had distinguished careers. What drew my attention in particular was a shy boy at the back of the class who committed suicide during my first year of teaching. I've always blamed myself, as a teacher, for not knowing how to recognize the suicidal symptoms of this young man.

The National Council of Welfare is an organization of citizens whose mandate is to advise the Minister of Human Resources Development on issues concerning poverty. It generally submits its advice in the form of reports to the Minister, which are then distributed free of charge to the general public.

If my memory serves me well, it's Napoleon who said that a child's education begins nine months before his birth. In this context, the Council has made families with children one of its priority issues for the coming years. Last year, it published a report entitled Healthy Parents/Healthy Babies, in which it made several recommendations with a view to improving children's programs. We made a few copies of this report available to the members of the committee. We are now working on a second report in this series on preschool children, which we plan to publish in the fall.

For discussion purposes, I'd like to suggest three recommendations to you this morning concerning programs for young children.

First and foremost, all initiatives taken on behalf of children and families must be part of an overall, harmonized approach.

In recent years, the federal government and the provincial and territorial governments have put numerous programs in place for children and families. At the federal level, we should mention the Community Action Program for Children, the Canada Prenatal Nutrition Program, Aboriginal Head Start, the child tax benefit and its reinvestment measures, and the Crime Prevention Centre, whose funding has just been announced.

We've come together today to discuss a new approach aimed to early childhood: development of learning readiness. On the whole, these approaches are very sensible, and we're delighted that the federal, provincial and territorial governments, and your committee in particular, are concerned about the welfare of children. Still, as long we don't have a national family policy to harmonize all these programs, we'll waste a lot of time and opportunities.

In the absence of such a policy, the application of programs such as the child tax benefit is always going to come up against obstacles. This benefit is supposed to encourage parents who receive welfare benefits to look for work. As long as it's not backed up by solid employment policies, however, which ensure a decent income for workers and their families, and policies guaranteeing affordable, quality day care services, the child tax benefit will have a hard time meeting its objectives.

The Council feels that the federal government, the provinces and the territories should move in this direction, following Quebec's example. In that province, children's benefits, tax measures, welfare reform and child-care services have been harmonized under one overall family policy. In Quebec, in a few years, all pre-school children will be able to attend day care for $ 5 a day.

[English]

The Chairman: Excuse me, but you have 30 seconds remaining.

Mr. Armand Brun: Okay. I'll just make the two other points,

[Translation]

and I won't develop them.

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The second point that we'd like to raise has to do with social programs, which, as good as they are, cannot replace income security.

The final point that we wished to raise has to do with national social program standards.

Thank you.

[English]

The Chairman: Thank you, Mr. Brun.

Now, unless I am about to make a horrible faux pas, I suspect you're not Dr. Cathy Brophy. Dr. Cathy Brophy, and then Dr. Bruce Ryan, unless you have decided to switch the order.

Dr. Bruce Ryan (Professor, Department of Family Relations and Applied Nutrition, University of Guelph): Yes, we did.

The Chairman: Okay. Go ahead.

Dr. Bruce Ryan: My name is Bruce Ryan, and I'm from the University of Guelph.

As a researcher in the general area of school readiness and school development, I think the issue this committee has taken on is absolutely critical. I really want to endorse what I think is a remarkably consistent and coherent set of statements from the initial presenters. The work in this field is very clear; the science is no longer doubtful, and I think they've articulated that perfectly well.

One point I'd like to put, which I think is implicit in what we've heard today—and I want to put this point because I see this committee moving towards some kinds of policy recommendations—is that a mistake I often see in policy is that strong boundaries are drawn around an issue where they ought not to be, if we pay attention to the science.

We've been quite rightly focusing on the preschool years here today, but children are not like clocks. A well-made clock will tick for a hundred years and keep good time. Children are not like that. They are living biological and social systems. They can start off right, but go wrong when things go wrong later in their lives. It's important, yes, to get the early years right, but we cannot draw the boundary at age six. I think we have to, when we formulate a policy, look ahead and connect those early years to something that happens later.

A little over a week ago I was at a conference in Halifax, a conference on child and youth care, and one of your committee members was a keynote speaker at that conference—Madame Bradshaw. She gave an outstanding address, and she made a couple of points, among many. One of them was, “Come to Ottawa and talk to us. We want to hear from you, and we're here.” The other was, “Don't bring us problems. We already know pretty much about the problems. Bring us solutions.”

We've heard, I think, from the cheap seats back here a goodly number of solutions, and I hope the committee is taking note of these solutions. It's in furthering one of these solutions that I turn the microphone over to my colleague, Dr. Cathleen Brophy.

Dr. Cathleen Brophy (Professor, Department of Family Relations and Applied Nutrition, University of Guelph): Hello, I'm Cathleen Brophy. I am also a professor in the Department of Family Relations and Applied Nutrition at the University of Guelph, but I'm also a member of the research coordination unit for the Better Beginnings Better Futures project, which is a primary prevention initiative funded by the Ontario government through the ministries of health, education, and community and social services.

This project has been developed for a while in eight communities in Ontario, and the communities are Ottawa, Kingston, Cornwall, Sudbury, Guelph, Toronto, Etobicoke, and Walpole Island. The communities have been ones that have been known to be at risk. They have all the indicators as such.

The focus of the project is on families with children from birth to eight years of age. We have some communities that focus on families with children from birth to four years of age, and some communities with families with children from four years of age to eight.

That sounds really good from a research point of view, but I've learned—and I was educated by communities and families—that communities and families don't function that way. We can't very nicely divide them by ages. The communities, in their wisdom, as they always are, have also implemented strategies to focus on the total family and the total community. So in our intervention strategies we also have programs for teenagers, we have programs for school-age children, and, yes, we do have programs for the focus group of the original study.

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The goals of the project are threefold, and very much echo what my colleague Martha Friendly said earlier in her discussions; that is, we need to focus on the development of the whole child. Secondly, we need to develop supports for families to help families parent their children. Finally, we also need to develop supports for the community, so that the community can support families. Those are the three goals of our projects.

There are many reports being written by the Better Beginnings Better Futures project, and if you would like them, they can be made available. We are writing our final report, or one of them, for September 1999.

While there are many findings from the projects, there are three I would really like to highlight, and I think they echo much of what has been talked about today. Some of the examples I will give you are from the Onword Willow community, which is the Guelph project, and I've been involved with that since its beginning. In fact, I feel very funny standing here by myself without a community member with me, because that is what we are typically doing. We should have community people here presenting with us, so please accept that I am here speaking on behalf of my community.

First of all, one of our findings is that families and communities need to be active in developing strategies and approaches to be developed in their own community. They do have the wisdom and the knowledge to know what works for them and what they need. You have to trust that wisdom and knowledge, and we've learned that. The only mandated program from the funding agencies for the younger cohort was a home visiting program, but out of that have sprung a lot of programs.

For instance, one of the local home day care providers wanted to set up a Mother Goose storytelling time, because she realized many of the children in the community didn't know the Mother Goose songs and stories.

We have a friends circle of families who speak Cantonese. They did not feel their needs were being met by the current ESL program in the community, and they meet on Saturdays, again with community people in charge. So we really feel the communities have the knowledge, but they need support from a number of areas to develop that.

Finally, families need options to tap into. Again, as Martha mentioned earlier, families, at different points in their development, need different approaches to meet the varying needs. So we need child care for those families that need it. We also need take-a-break groups for moms; we have a toy-lending library; and we have a drop-in program, because parents and families need to tap into these at different points in their development.

Finally, and one that I really would like to underscore, is that we have to have linkages between agencies and service providers. Too often we talk about the school and we talk about day care and we talk about family and children services. In our community there was one single father who had seven agencies knocking on his door at different times—to support him, that's true, but it was very confusing for him, and he didn't know what was happening at what time.

We really need to make linkages and support integration of services. In the community we have a management board that has both agency people and community people sitting on it. We have initiatives linking our local child care program with the school program in a literacy project. The local Family and Children's Services has set up a home base now within the community, moving some of its offices from a more central location, as far as the city is concerned, to a more appropriate location within our community. We are linking services for families so that families can access and understand and be active in finding the supports they need to support themselves and their children.

Thank you.

The Chairman: Thank you very much, Dr. Brophy.

We have heard from all of the presenters we have invited here, with the exception of one, whom I am going to deliberately save for a few moments. I want to commend all of you, as I said earlier, for being so disciplined in your presentations.

The committee undertook to do this really as a way of serving this issue broadly, to give us a chance to think a little bit about it over the summer. When we come back in the fall, we'll be establishing the research mandate for this committee and others. I note the chair of our health committee is here, and there are other committees that are interested in this topic. We are attempting to draw together our resources in the same way you are suggesting the community needs to.

• 1220

Because our members have also been very patient, though, I am going to allow each one of them some time to comment. For reasons of time, we will not be able to engage in the normal kind of question and answer session that we might normally have had in a committee if we had a smaller group of presenters.

I will start with Christiane Gagnon and then move down the parties. I will allow people to make about a four-minute comment, a brief one.

[Translation]

Ms. Christiane Gagnon: When the meeting began this morning, I mentioned that the steering committee hadn't been advised that it was to give this question priority.

[English]

The Chairman: Ms. Gagnon, if you have a process question, I would ask you to raise that at the conclusion of the meeting or at another venue so as to let us get through this subject matter.

[Translation]

Ms. Christiane Gagnon: I'd like the witnesses to know that you misled them. We didn't ask that priority be given to this issue. You said that one of our Bloc colleagues attended the meeting of the steering committee where the committee's work priorities were discussed. It was mentioned in a short line and a half that a worktable discussion on the learning readiness of children 0 to 6 would be held. It was mentioned like that, in a harmless conversation at the committee, and never was it said that we were going to make it a committee priority. It's important to clarify that. As a member of the committee, I feel I've been had. You, a government party colleague, probably with some of your colleagues on this committee, decided by yourself to set this priority, when we were supposed to be looking at employment insurance. Furthermore, I'm going to come back to this issue, because I have some questions about one of the aspects raised concerning the distribution of wealth.

As a member of the committee, I'd have liked to be notified and to be able to decide whether the committee should make it an immediate priority to hold a consultation table or a worktable on the learning readiness of children 0 to 6 years old. It's not that the question doesn't interest me, but I'd have liked to be advised and to know how other priorities got discarded.

I wished to point out these facts, because I found it embarrassing. It made our Bloc Québécois MP who took part in this committee look bad. I know what took place there, because I have the transcript of the deliberations here. Mr. Chairman, you're not setting a great democratic example for the members of your committee.

I've said what I had to say and I'm going to ask a question of Ms. Gillian Doherty. You talked about sources of insecurity related to parents' income and to the loss of work, and said that they had an impact on children. I wouldn't like you to tell this committee that we should create a program or a foundation similar to the Millennium Scholarship Foundation, which is not adapted to the realities of the provinces and Quebec. The members of the committee seem to want to implement programs and adopt national standards that do not suit some of the provinces.

What is up to us, to the Standing Committee on Human Resources Development, is employment insurance, the Canada Social Transfer and indexation of the tax tables. I think the Liberal government has everything it needs to correct certain inequities and ensure that the sharing of wealth is increasingly fair. The final cuts have been very hard for a certain layer of the population.

The impact of job losses on the least privileged, on children, families and the quality of a couple's relationship. You talked about insecurity, family income, distribution of wealth and job insecurity and said that these factors caused parental stress and that the children often suffered. Those were your words.

Could the government act in these three or four areas by reestablishing, for example, the social transfer or by granting larger amounts to health and education, which would also have an impact on children's daily lives? In your opinion, in view of all the budget cuts carried out by the government, should it give this money back to the provinces before thinking about creating other programs?

[English]

The Chairman: Thank you, Madam Gagnon.

• 1225

As I indicated, we won't have time for responses on this, but you can maybe have that discussion outside.

Next is Mr. Dubé, and then I'll come to you, Libby. I'll come back to the gentleman from Reform, and then I'll come over to this side.

[Translation]

Mr. Jean Dubé (Madawaska—Restigouche, PC): I'd first of all like to congratulate those who spoke this morning. The presentations I heard this morning are very interesting for me as a young MP and young father. I have two small children in the age group we're discussing today, one nine months old and the other four years old. So it's very interesting for me.

[English]

There are a few points that I retained from the discussions this morning. We talked about how the first three years are very critical in the development of a child. I certainly agree with that. In order for them to develop their life skills, we have to concentrate and put more effort toward this.

But we have to make sure that these parents.... From what I'm hearing—this is what I've been saying all along—there has to be a positive environment as well. You have areas in Canada that are not as positive as others in terms of employment. We talked about having a good revenue. I believe we have to concentrate in these areas and make sure these children have the proper tools and education to compete with other children throughout Canada.

Parents must play a large role in the development of their child. Parents must know how to play that role, but in many cases parents do not know this. That's certainly what I've been hearing this morning. Families need time together. Two parents are working and children are being bounced everywhere. I believe we all know that today.

Children need good caregivers. I believe I heard that this morning. Children need good parents. The bottom line is that children need good parents. Behaviour in school and in society depends on behaviour in the home. We have to really concentrate on this, and I believe that with what I'm hearing this morning, we seem to be on that track.

We're evolving very quickly. I heard a comment this morning that we go from pots and pans to snakes and ladders. We did that in 1962, when I arrived in this world. But today, we go from pots and pans to computers. Believe me, it's evolving very quickly. We have to make sure that the children of this world have the proper tools that some have, but some may not.

I certainly hope the Minister of Finance and the Minister of Human Resources Development read these proceedings and react to what I've heard this morning.

I'm certainly proud to be a member of the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada, which initiated and gave birth to the Head Start program in New Brunswick. I believe this was through great work from volunteers. I believe Brenda Robertson was the minister at the time. I'm certainly proud of that.

There are many good programs. I'm throwing this out here, because I heard something a while ago. I'm not sure who it was.

The Chairman: You've got 30 seconds.

Mr. Jean Dubé: I have 30 seconds. I'm used to that. I get cut off every time.

There are a lot of good programs. Sometimes we don't know exactly which one is the best one or where they are. So maybe we should concentrate on having a national perspective, one good program. So this is what I'm retaining from this.

[Translation]

We no doubt need national standards. That's my final comment. Thank you.

[English]

The Chairman: Well done, Jean Dubé. Thank you. The members don't have quite the same discipline as the presenters have, and they learn not to look at me, which makes it more difficult.

Libby.

Ms. Libby Davies (Vancouver East, NDP): Well, thanks very much, Reg.

My name is Libby Davies, and I'm the NDP member on this committee. I'm the critic for children, youth, post-secondary education, and social policy.

The first thing I'd like to say is that I really want to thank you for all of the information and the presentations you made today. It was just remarkable to hear the consistency that came from you in terms of what you understand the problem, issues, and solutions to be.

I can't help but begin by drawing a comparison in the riding I represent, Vancouver East. One of the very serious issues that I deal with is in a neighbourhood called the downtown east side. We have an epidemic of people who are facing HIV infection because they're injection drug users. I couldn't help but think about many of these people I've met who are addicts, who are the most marginalized people, as they are kind of outside of everything and literally on the street.

• 1230

Look at all the indicators we heard today and all the factors about what it is that creates healthy communities, families, and children. These people didn't get that. Here we are today dealing with an absolute crisis that's costing us millions of dollars and also causing deaths and just huge social costs and devastation.

So I can't help but draw that comparison, because I think the point is of course that if we did have that early childhood intervention in a significant national way that was coordinated, then maybe we wouldn't be dealing with those kinds of crises quite so much.

Somebody said that she didn't know whether to feel hopeful or skeptical. I feel the same way. You have a wealth of information. I feel we have this informed knowledge, yet there has been a failure to act by government. In fact, there has been more than a failure to act, as we've actually been going backwards. We all know the statistics about growing poverty and inequality.

So my question is not just a question but a challenge to us as a committee, particularly the majority members. We heard a little bit of talk about the national children's agenda. That's a great title, but what is it? Where is it? Where's the public debate? Is there a child care strategy that's part of that? Is housing a part of that? Is it community-driven? How does it involve the provinces? How does it involve the local communities?

So I really think that, as a committee, if we believe what you're saying and we understand that we have this informed knowledge, then we have to act and make that national children's agenda a reality. I hope this committee will take on that role and actually push it for the next federal budget to say that this will be a priority. It's something that has to actually involve open public debate.

Regrettably, we have not seen that to date. I've had many criticisms—I guess other people have had this too—that there has not been a public debate about the national children's agenda. Here we have Dr. Yelland from Vancouver, who has a model ready to go. Everybody's involved in all of the jurisdictions. We know what needs to be done, but where are the resources to do it? So it's frustrating. There is hope too, but it's very frustrating.

So I just want to say that I thank you for coming and I hope you will actually monitor what we do, because that's where the accountability is in terms of whether this will remain a nice, warm, fuzzy title of the national children's agenda or whether it's actually going to have the resources, political leadership, and public policy to go along with it that's actually going to improve the health and well-being of all the children we've talked about today. Thanks.

The Chairman: Thank you very much, Libby. Put in things for the budget? What a novel idea.

Is it Mr. Lowther?

Mr. Eric Lowther (Calgary Centre, Ref.): Yes, it is.

The Chairman: Thank you. Nice to have you here today. Now you see what we go through.

Mr. Eric Lowther: Thank you. I certainly appreciate being here. I thought that Dr. Mustard's research was very profound and will have profound impacts in the future, I would suggest. I'm also very encouraged to see the turnout here.

I think the common theme is that as passionate Canadians we're concerned about the future of our country. When you think about that for not too long, the future of the country is in our youth, children, and families.

I think it's important to note—it was touched on in a few places—that we need to recognize the pressure of the age we're in. This is the information age, the technological age, and it's changing all kinds of norms in our society in families and children. Even this institution is facing those pressures. We have to integrate that into all the discussions and not try to ignore it and hold on to old paradigms. We actually have to embrace some new things.

I think it's also important to evaluate how many of the families and children out there are actually having problems and make sure we've got some good numbers on this. I heard about 15% today. I don't know what the numbers are. Sometimes we think the sky is falling, but there are a lot of Canadians who are doing very good jobs with their families, both parents. We need to remember that there's a resource we can draw on.

But for those who are in trouble and struggling, I think I heard a lot of good things here today. Sometimes when I heard what some of you said, I instantly reacted from my own biases and didn't like what you said. But as you talked a little longer, I did like what you said. So I went back and forth.

What I come away with is that I think if we really listen to each other, we're not as far away on some of these issues as we think we are. There's actually some real common ground there.

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For those who are struggling, though, I would say we need to make sure the programs that families and children are going into are not a silo approach. That's almost a kind of family abuse in itself, in a sense, where you run into one institution and it's, well, we don't handle that; go over there. And you get one-tenth of it done, and then you go over here and over there. Actually, Judge Gove and I were talking about that a little bit.

Just to close, I like programs like the Head Start approach; they make a lot of sense. But any program has to be evaluated from some outside third party to make sure the service that's being delivered is actually going to the child and to the family and to the parents, because it's so easy for the finances and the money to get caught up in the administrative infrastructure if there isn't some evaluation from a third party to make sure we are actually hitting the goals here, and if we're not, let's change instead of building more infrastructure.

So those are some of my comments. I applaud you all for being here. This is a hopeful sign, I would suggest.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

The Chairman: Thank you, Mr. Lowther. It's nice to have you here today.

We do have some other members here, because we undertook to reach out to other committees of the House because of the cross-boundary nature of this issue. Beth Phinney, who is the chair of the House Standing Committee on Health, is here.

Beth, do you care to make a comment?

Ms. Beth Phinney (Hamilton Mountain, Lib.): Thank you very much, Mr. Chair. I want to apologize for not having been here at the beginning of the meeting to hear all the comments, but we had a health committee this morning and we're not going to be meeting for too many days longer so we had to have our meeting this morning, too.

I'd like to commend John Godfrey for his leadership in bringing this round table to fruition today. Just our being here today indicates that the government recognizes that there's need out there and that there's concern, and maybe this is the beginning of the action that somebody was calling for and suggesting there isn't any. Well, we're here today.

I thank all of you for coming. We need to hear from those on an intellectual level but also the grassroots people, the people out in the field who are actually working.

You'll find, although you didn't have much time to speak today, your comments will be studied, and you may even find that you're called upon for further reference because you were here today. Sometimes we have witnesses who say, well, I went all the way to Ottawa and I only got to speak two minutes. But you probably will be called on again.

If you have any new material or know anybody who is a new group that we should be hearing from, then please do let us know.

Again, thank you very much for coming.

The Chairman: Thank you, Beth.

From the Senate, I'm going to let Senator Pearson have a comment.

Senator Landon Pearson (Ontario, Lib.): Thank you very much, Mr. Chair, for allowing me the privilege of sitting at this table and hearing from many people who are old friends and acquaintances and some new voices that I have not heard before. It has been a very exciting and interesting morning.

I have one tiny comment to make, which I think was referred to by Martha Friendly and by Clara Will. Martha Friendly spoke about the child as a citizen—was it you?—and Clara spoke about the Convention on the Rights of the Child.

As many of you know, that is the thing that I feel should be the framework for so much of our work. The Convention on the Rights of the Child, which we have acceded to along with 190 other nations, talks about the child as a person, and this is what we're talking about, the responsibilities all of us have to those young persons in our midst.

The Chairman: Thank you, Senator Pearson.

Carolyn, would you care to make a comment?

Ms. Carolyn Bennett (St. Paul's, Lib.): I want to thank everybody. As someone who sits on both the health committee and the human resources development committee, I apologize for being a bit late—but also, I'm so optimistic that I've moved from the other side back over to the government side.

I think all of us feel that we have the data, that we have studied this enough, and that we actually do need to get together a coordinated approach to now get on with the action. I think as long as that action has good evaluative components in it, that we move forward evaluating as we go so that we know what works and what works better, we can't lose. We just have to get on with it.

But I don't want the evaluative component taken out of your budgets for delivering programs, and I think we need to see that we have to do the science and the program delivery and that both things are the responsibility of government.

The Chairman: Thank you, Carolyn.

• 1240

I'm going to go to Claudette Bradshaw, but before I do, I'd like to just put Suzanne Peters, from the Canadian Policy Research Networks, on notice, if she could get to the mike.

Claudette.

[Translation]

Ms. Claudette Bradshaw (Moncton, Lib.): I too would like to thank you for coming. I spoke to Ms. Gagnon a little while ago and I think it's important for you to be here today and that you appear before the Standing Committee on Human Resources Development. One of our mandates consists of assuring us that the money spent on EI benefits on our young people is used to train them and help them find work. As the statistics show, one of our big problems is the fact that many young people are at risk. What is being done to help them?

Every time a witness appears before the committee, I ask him whether, in his research or studies, he has looked at the type of training and employment that would suit our young people at risk. I have to say that, after one year, there is still no researcher or witness who has been able to answer us that he has studied young people at risk and analysed what they need to find a job. I therefore feel it's important that the committee go ahead today with such a study to get ready for our next year's work.

Last night, I watched Madam Justice Ruffo on television. She said services for children at risk were not being offered. Our community services have been considerably reduced. We could see Madam Justice Ruffo's frustration.

[English]

Therefore, for me, it's important that you be here today, because if we're going to look at youth at risk, then we have to be there with community services for children at risk.

If you look at FAE-FAS, how many of our youth...? And we know, the statistics tell us, that if a young person doesn't have grade 12 then we have a problem with employment. The more education they have, the more employment they're going to have.

I look at the FAE-FAS, and when we've had people come to a committee, I've questioned them on FAE-FAS and said, identify for us the kind of employment this child needs; identify for me the kind of employment the adult with FAE-FAS needs. As you can tell, I'm going to be an advocate of FAE-FAS while I'm in politics, and it might be long, depending on whether or not the people want me.

There is a lot of work that has been done. The Crime Prevention Council—not because I was on it—has done a lot of work. But how far is the $ 32 million going to go? Just how far is that going to go?

What we need—and it was interesting to hear you say that to me today—are community infrastructure programs. Is there funding for that? We've spent $ 46 billion on crime. I'm trying to figure out how much we've spent on poverty and I think it's $ 100 billion, if you look at the provincial and federal levels. Is there funding for prevention? Sure, there is. Where is it going?

What is the priority of the politicians? To answer Mr. Lowther, if you'd build community infrastructures, you're going to create employment within your own community. You're going to give autonomy to your own community. And let me assure you, as somebody who's been in a non-profit agency for 30 years, you have a board of directors. Who are they? They're your businessman and your bankers. They check your funding. And God help us all if you're audited.

What we don't have...and when I met with the Sparrow Lake Alliance, I said to them, I don't want to pick up any more books on child abuse. I don't want to pick up any more books on children at risk. I could fill every elevator on Parliament Hill. No one has been researched more than my kid. Now I want the bucks. So what I told the Sparrow Lake Alliance people is come and meet us, and that's what I think Libby is saying. Come with us. Come and research our community-based programs to make sure we're effective, to make sure we get good results. Come with us now—not only give us some of your money, but come and share with us and come and help us.

I think if we could do that, if we could put the two groups together by the year 2020, we could be the first country to start closing our prisons and our psychiatric wards. But we're going to have to work together, and your money will be well spent.

• 1245

Thank you.

The Chairman: Thank you, Claudette. I suspect that will strike a responsive chord.

Now, to my vice-chair, Bonnie Brown.

Ms. Bonnie Brown (Oakville, Lib.): I can't help but be tremendously impressed by the collective wisdom that is in this room today on this subject. The vibrations are full of goodwill, and that's a very positive thing for us as parliamentarians. We listen to a lot of people complain a lot of the time.

The question was asked, and wisely so, will anything happen or is this it? First of all, I'd like to point out that the existence of this event today is witness to the fact that this government has balanced its budget and we can now begin to examine our options as to what we do with any surplus. Prior to this, as you know—you've all lived through it—we had cutback year after cutback year. So this is a point when we can breathe a sigh of relief and say, what can we do? And I think we have to give credit to our own finance minister and Prime Minister for that situation, because it is one of luxury for us and I think for you.

Will anything happen? As has been pointed out, something will happen if we can secure the resources. The parliamentarians who have been here and others who were unable to come are the body on this hill who will be lobbying for those resources that will make some of your plans a reality. But resources only flow into political causes when the public will is behind them. So I'm going to try to recruit you to assist us. The more public speaking you do, the more press releases you get out there about your ideas and the needs, as you perceive them, to build this country into the best country of the 21st century, the more it is easy for us to keep pushing the agenda and to try to secure the funds, which we then flow down to you.

So I ask you to be public about what you're doing. Don't hang back. The needs of children in need have to be out there regularly. Most of you probably don't have enough resources from the point of view of public relations, but maybe you could get a volunteer to take care of it, or to at least put some time into it for you, because we need a big public media push if we're going to secure the resources that we want to get and that you need.

There was just one other little piece of wisdom, Mr. Chairman, that really touched my soul. I see all this goodwill and I hear about all these good plans, and actually programs that are already in existence, but I believe the doctor from Guelph pointed out that while we can try to make everything as perfect as possible, we would be foolish to think we can save everybody or make life perfect. Children from zero to eight, for example, can have everything just fine, but when they get to be teenagers they can absorb blows from marriage breakdown and a variety of other things, or exposure to drugs, as Libby pointed out, and we have to be realistic. That way we can keep marching forward with our agenda for the perfect situation for Canadian children without being knocked back by the realities that sometimes set in. I thank the doctor from Guelph for that injection of a note of reality into the comments.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

The Chairman: Thank you, Bonnie.

Now, Suzanne Peters, you have the, some would say enviable, some would say frightening, position of being the final presenter on this subject, and I'm saving a few minutes at the end for my esteemed colleague, John Godfrey.

Ms. Suzanne Peters (Family Network of the Canadian Policy Research Networks): Thank you.

Perhaps first I'd say that part of my tendency at this point is to say enough has been said. The summation of the hon. members themselves across all parties has shown the extent to which today's discussion has presented a compelling argument and a compelling sense of spirit and potential momentum on the issues. Nevertheless, having been asked to reflect on some of what I've heard, not because I'm someone who has all the answers but probably because I'm someone who tends to ask some tough questions at times, I will take the opportunity to try to reflect back on and think a little bit about some of the threads I've heard various witnesses share with us today.

• 1250

I would say that I come to the mike at this point with a sense of cautious optimism, and that cautious optimism, like that of others we've heard here today, is built not just on what I've heard in the room today, but also on work that we've been doing at Canadian Policy Research Networks to think about what it would mean to have a societal strategy for Canadian children. That work has included meeting with heads of corporations and heads of unions and meeting with people in community-based organizations.

The resonance of themes and concerns that we found here today from expert witnesses and community leaders is also out there, not just among citizens but among people who are leaders across various sectors in our society. I find that very encouraging.

With that optimism, however, there are remaining puzzles that I think we have to think much harder about. I think those puzzles are the ones that I would alert all of us to as we begin to think about a national children's agenda.

One of the real challenges in front of us is to understand the major transformation that families have undergone. One of the important issues that we come back to over and over again is that we've changed our economy and our society. We talk about an information society and new technologies, but we don't reflect to the degree that we should on the way those changes have had impacts on families. They've had impacts on the way families have the capacity to have jobs and on the way they structure jobs and organize their time. They've had impacts on the mobility of families and on the isolation of families.

We have more families in Canada with two parents working full-time in the labour market than any other modern, industrialized society does. That's a fact. We are going to need solutions that are of a different kind. We can no longer, I think, take the family for granted. I think that is what the collective body is saying. In a concern about children, we have come to understand that we have to understand families in a new way, that the family can't just be a residual when we think about what we're doing and how we're using our resources and government dollars. The family has to be the starting point.

Families have the difficulties that people have outlined today, and children are dealing with those difficulties. It seems to me that we're beginning to think in much more integrated ways about the range of issues you've heard about. The issues of adequacy and the issues of family self-reliance—because families do want to be independent and families do want to raise their children—are balancing points that we have to seek in this society.

Another important balancing point we have to think about is the issue about families wanting to do it themselves, and yet there is their need for information and their need for skills, along with their isolation and mobility experiences. The family's need for supports and services that go beyond independent silos is something we have to think about in this context of major change. The family is not what it was. It perhaps never was quite what we thought it was, but it's something very different today. It's an evolving and emerging social institution that is still one of the key institutions of our society. It is where children grow up and it is what we have to think about in the total context of addressing these issues.

The other thing I would reflect upon briefly is the information that was very compellingly presented this morning on wiring, that is, on the connections in the brain and the way the new learning we're doing is making us seek new solutions.

I think we really have to fundamentally think about what that means. We've had a new understanding of how we operate as a species in the context of our social institutions. The contributions of Dr. Mustard and Dr. Keating and others help us understand that we now know things we couldn't know in the past, and they offer us opportunities to seek solutions that weren't in our grasp in the past. That new understanding is something that we cannot take too seriously. We have to take it as a social responsibility, just as we took the social responsibility when we understood that there are ways to address the health problems of the population or when we understood that public education could make a difference to where we were going as a society.

We have to understand that new information about family transformation and about the potential to build the development of children in a new way. It's going to take a major set of reflections, but as I said, I think we're coming closer to a convergence on those answers.

Another point from today's discussion that we have to take very seriously, I would say, is the incredible championship of communities across this country. The models, ideas, and programs that we've heard about today offer us a vision. I do agree with Clara Will, though, that they don't yet offer us a national vision.

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These community champions you've heard from today are doing this work because they are leaders, because they have some natural abilities, and because they brought forward something that was possible for them in the context in which they lived. Not every community is doing this and not every community even knows it's possible.

The national opportunity to create shared experiences across communities, to get others to understand the issues and to begin to think about how communities need the resources and can build on one another's experiences seems to me to be compelling and seems to me to be something that we have to reflect on and move forward with.

We also need to think about what the provincial leadership issues are. I was very appreciative of the comments from P.E.I., but we also know that Saskatchewan and Quebec have provided leadership on the file for children. We need to think about what they've done and we need to think about how we can begin to take a lead from the leaders.

One of the problems that I think is going to face us nationally is the problem that hits at the local level, the problem that exists with regard to the continuity of programs. When we hear people say there's only so much time and then they're out of the business, or when we hear that a program that's doing good work is suddenly destabilized, we have to take that seriously, and we have to think of that seriously as a national leadership issue.

An issue of national leadership at this point is, I think, going to be the issue of continuing to create the feedback loops, the constant learning, and the driving towards the best knowledge possible. We have to begin to underline for communities what the four or five building blocks are that are going to make a difference. We've heard a range of models. Many of them contain similar programs or like programs. Those can be enhanced. Communities will have control, but we need to have a national vision of what makes a difference.

I think one of the things that's going to be key to that process is a national commitment to evaluation, to research, to report cards, and to continuing feedback loops, which will tell all of us and tell citizens that we've been accountable for achieving these results. It's through measuring those outcomes and knowing what outcomes we're achieving that we're going to be able to do a better job, that we're going to be able to respond to these fundamental changes we've heard about today.

The issue of public awareness that we heard about today, both for parents and for a wider group of stakeholders, this integration across libraries, police chiefs, mayors and town halls, is crucial to moving the issue forward. For my money, what is going to be key to providing leadership on this front is the partnerships we can create across the national organizations, across the levels of government, and across sectors and governments.

The leadership you've provided by inviting all of us here today is very much appreciated. I think it gives each and every one of us here an opportunity to think further about it, and I hope we will have continued opportunities for shared learning of this kind.

I thank you.

The Chairman: Thank you very much.

As we approach the end of the time available, I do want to turn the microphone over to the person who probably has done more to cause this meeting to happen than any other individual in the room recently, and that's John Godfrey.

Mr. John Godfrey: Thank you very much. I just want to thank you for inviting all of us who are not regular members to come to the committee, and I want to thank all the parliamentary staff who have managed this extraordinary feat of bringing you all together.

I want to thank all of you for coming here today and being so patient and disciplined. I think it's been an extraordinary, exciting meeting. I see a huge amount of potential.

Now, what do we do with it?

The first element we heard, and we heard it wonderfully from Suzanne at the end, is a call to us for national leadership: we heard statements about national policy, national programs, national standards, national perspectives, national challenges, and national visions. I think I heard a word there. It's the word “national”. And that doesn't mean federal; it means national. It means all of us working together to knit together some kind of a response to a challenge we agree on. We need—

[Translation]

what's called in French a social project,

[English]

a national project that binds all of us together to a common objective.

What would that objective be? I think we've heard compelling reasons to believe that if we as a country could make it a national mission statement for our national project that all children, by the time they hit school, are as ready to learn, from every point of view that we've heard, that would be an extraordinary achievement, because we would have done it right before they got there. The measure won't do it by itself, but the measure has huge potential to mobilize us.

Why do we need to do this? We've heard the reasons. They are compelling. They are irrefutable. They are agreed upon. They are elaborated and researched, and all the filings are in the elevator—and Claudette knows where the elevator is.

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That's not the problem. The problem is pulling it all together in a fashion and in our own lifetime—in the lifetime of politicians. It seems to me that whatever we do under the rubric....

By the way, that's for whom the bell tolls, but we have 15 minutes, and we have our running shoes on.

The first element of a strategy to take advantage of the national children's agenda is to use this mobilizing benchmark of the readiness measure. It has powerful rallying capacity. It is powerfully useful to communities, and we've heard that evidence.

We also know, though, from what we've been told, that the people who advocate the measure have to deal with all of us—with every situation. We have to know before we endorse this how this works for FAS-FAE. We have to know how this works for the various kinds of disability communities. Is this, in fact, empowering to them? Is this, in fact, inclusionary for them? Will this address their specifics? Otherwise, what do we do about it?

That's a real challenge to the research, as it is to...we think of aboriginal communities, or all other Canadians who live in this incredibly rich and complex society. That's a challenge to the measurement people, and I hope that's part of the research. I know it is.

The second thing, which is so obvious from everybody here, is there are huge resources out there. There are wonderful textbook cases, models, and all the rest of it, but how do we pull it all together? What is the role of the federal government in helping that process, while not treading on the grounds and on the rights of the provinces? How do we do that? What tools do we provide so that it's not all fractured, and so that we can exchange best practices? Will it be through the Internet? Will it be through expanded versions of CAPC? We don't know that, but we know that community mobilization is a crucial element and the weaving together of that as a national community.

Third, we know that whatever we do for this group of children from prenatal to six, it has to be for all children. This cannot be simply for children at risk, or simply poor kids. It has to be for everybody, and there's a good solid political reason. There are more people who have children who will be supportive of this if they understand it's for all children. We need a kind of understanding that it should be as universal as the public health nurse visiting, or the health care system, or the public school system. It has to have that quality. It may not take as many resources for each and every child, but it has to have that quality. Otherwise, we're going to lose it politically, and otherwise, there's not going to be the benefit of all of us.

Okay. How do we do it? I do believe the political challenge is, first of all, pulling all of this together so that we chunk out the tasks according to a kind of common work plan. That's why you need a national strategy, which pulls in provinces and communities and parents and NGOs and union leaders and corporations and social workers—the range of people that are represented here.

We have it in the room to do it. We could do it almost now. We could almost come up with a game plan and assign tasks and say, “Okay, what's our bit? What's your bit? What's their bit?” We need to go through that exercise, and what is all of that in relation to the knowledge base of what is needed from prenatal to six, so that that is the discipline of what needs to be done in a non-competitive, holistic, integrated fashion.

The political vehicle may be the national children's agenda. It should be. It is an empty vessel that needs to be filled with some meaning. Let's fill it. What's encouraging is we heard from Health Minister Allan Rock this morning at another group before this one—it's been a day for kids—that there's a meeting on June 18 of the ministers on the national children's =5427=] agenda. That will give us a huge opportunity, because they are about to set out a discussion paper that will be delivered in August or September, which will lead to a series of further meetings in October and November, with the target of next year's budgets, provincially and federally.

So we have a chance—as a group of politicians from all parties who think this thing is more important than any one of our parties, and from all levels of government—to have some impact on that policy, if we target those people who are responsible for the national children's agenda and say, “We want it in the budgets, and we want you guys to work together. We issue a challenge to you.” That's what the publicity ought to be about—as you force us to react. That's how politicians behave best, you'll discover.

Finally, Mr. Chair, as a visitor, it's not up to me to say what the future work of this committee is, and I understand full well the concerns of Madame Gagnon—they are huge—about unemployment and the use of the EI fund. But this is part of that story, too. This is part of the answer to that story.

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It may be that those who are permanent members of this committee may choose to make their work for the fall to allow the national children's agenda to achieve its objective. So that's a challenge to ourselves.

Thank you for allowing a visitor to say these things.

I would suggest to our guests that they should please take advantage of the ticket. Stay, schmooze, enjoy, and finish the sandwiches. Keep the pressure on us and think about how we can weave this together.

The Chairman: Now we have three or maybe four quick things. I've asked our esteemed researchers to undertake to summarize what we've heard today. We will have the clerk circulate that to everyone who participated today and to anyone else whom you think might be interested in reviewing what was discussed.

Finally, we will forward that information to this committee when it reconvenes in September. It will have to be reconstituted, and then it will have to look at its agenda for the fall. So we will see they have the product from these discussions in hand when that happens.

Finally, I am informed that the whips have asked that we attend the House, because while it is a 15-minute bell, they are going to attempt to have the vote in 10 minutes, so all members should leave.

Thank you.

The meeting is adjourned.