HRPD Committee Report

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INTRODUCTION

In 1989 parliamentarians made a unanimous commitment to end child poverty in Canada by the year 2000. As this deadline approaches we, as their successors, are fully cognizant that attaining that goal continues to elude us. We also recognize that Canadians see securing the future of our children as an important public policy goal. Much, if not all, of the credit for the high level of public awareness and concern for children, should go to the non-governmental community. It has formed effective partnerships - regional, provincial and federal - that have been unflagging in their diligence and unequalled in their energy to improve the lives of children. Governments have made some incremental progress, but for many reasons, have not acted as quickly or as comprehensively as the community would like.

There are many reports, articles, analyses and criticisms of government action and inaction with respect to children. Our acknowledgement of these, prompted us to come together - as an all-party Sub-Committee of the House of Commons Standing Committee on Human Resources Development - to foster a renewed political commitment to children and this report is the renewal of a process, rather than the end. Our Sub-Committee has really only scratched the surface but we started by asking some important questions:

• What do we know about the current situation of children in Canada?
• Where are we in terms of designing a national children's agenda?
• What should be the key components of a children's agenda?
• What principles should guide the development of child and family policy?
• How can children's issues be addressed in a way that respects jurisdictional realities?
• What can we learn from others - countries, provinces, communities?
• What is the most important thing we can do as a parliamentary Sub-Committee to contribute to good child and family policy?

While these questions helped to guide our initial inquiry, we are not in a position to provide definitive answers at this point. We begin this report by identifying contemporary signposts that reflect a shared social interest in pursuing a better life for Canada's children. Following that, we mirror the key messages we heard during our short tenure and highlight some of the concerns that will occupy us in our future work.

LOOKING FORWARD - SOME SIGNPOSTS

Finally, science and scientific research, has confirmed what most Canadians - particularly parents - know instinctively: providing a stimulating, loving, supportive and safe environment for children in their early years makes an enormous difference in their life outcomes. As the recently-released report prepared for the province of Ontario so effectively argues:

The evidence is clear that good early child development programs that involve parents or other primary caregivers of young children can influence how they relate to and care for children in the home, and can vastly improve outcomes for children's behavior, learning and health in later life. The earlier in a child's life these programs begin, the better, These programs can benefit children and families from all socioeconomic groups in society.1

Although scientific research lends weight to arguments about making substantial investments in the early years of children's lives, we note that the message is not new. The importance of early intervention, positive parenting, high quality child care and education are all messages that Canadians have heard for many years from many sectors of the community. Nevertheless, we are convinced that these "new" scientifically-supported messages provide hope for a renewed social and fiscal commitment to children's early lives.

As far back as December 1997, provincial and federal governments came together and agreed to establish a National Children's Agenda (NCA)2. Although governments have implemented initiatives for children since that time, in May of 1999 the federal and provincial governments released the framework documents Developing a Shared Vision and Measuring Child Well-being and Monitoring Progress, both of which represent important collaborative efforts on the part of governments. The inclusion of a section entitled "An Aboriginal Perspective on the National Children's Agenda" marks a significant and fundamental recognition that aboriginal peoples of Canada have their own perspective on the future of children. These documents could serve as important starting points in a pan-Canadian "conversation" on children and what we want for their future.

On 4 February 1999, governments signed the Social Union Framework Agreement3 and from our perspective, it sets out important principles and makes significant commitments that are central to realizing good outcomes for children and their families:

• ensuring access to essential programs and services of reasonably comparable quality;
• assistance to those in need;
• working in partnership with various players and ensuring that Canadians have meaningful input into social policies and programs;
• providing sustainable funding for social programs;
• creating public accountability and transparency.

At another level, the Social Union Framework also identifies commitments between levels of government that have implications for the nature of policy development in Canada in general, and with respect to children in particular. The message of the

Social Union is essentially a message of inter-governmental collaboration with respect to social programs; one founded on a commitment to joint planning, sharing of best practices, notice and consultation, a recognition of respective roles and contributions as well as processes for avoiding and resolving intergovernmental disputes. But we all must remember that the Social Union Framework is a political accord that places obligations - both moral and political - on governments. At the same time however, governments are not bound solely by the letter of the agreement. In fact many would argue that the successful implementation of the agreement will see governments respecting both its letter and its broader collaborative spirit.

Considerable inspiration for the future possibilities of investing in children can be drawn from what we would like to refer to as the "Quebec Model". In 1997 Quebec chose to make some significant changes to both the content and the form of its child and family policy. The provincial government reorganized its ministries to form an integrated Ministry of Family and Children (Ministère de la famille et de l'enfance) and implemented a family/child policy with three central components:

1. an integrated child allowance;

2. early childhood education and development services;

3. a new parental insurance program with enhanced maternity and parental leave provisions.

Making children and support to families with children a central priority in the design of policy, and of its bureaucratic structure, demonstrates the extent to which Quebec has implemented its commitment to children and families. Quebec's approach places in a central position many of the principles that our sub-committee heard from witnesses. Key among these are:

• adoption of a universal rather than a targeted approach
• implementation of a community based partnership model and
• an integrated program of income support and services.

WHAT WE HEARD

Those who appeared before our Sub-Committee delivered a set of very clear and consistent messages about investing in the lives of children. During our short existence, we have heard from some of the most important policy researchers and government officials and ministers who have worked to identify issues and to suggest solutions. Their level of unanimity provided us with a place to resume our work. The key messages that we will apply to our future studies provide a good starting place for anyone who is interested in pursuing policies and programs for children.

1. Canadians share social and economic responsibility for the well-being of all children. Children have a fundamental right to share in the benefits of our society.

Although many Canadians are not involved in the day-to-day rearing of individual children there is an implicit sharing of responsibility for the future of our children in Canada. All Canadians contribute - either directly or indirectly - to the economic and social conditions that children confront. Ensuring the best outcomes - physical, emotional, social and economic - for children is a shared social project; public policy must reflect that commitment and respect the fact that provincial governments have jurisdiction over services for children and families.

2. Canadian society will benefit significantly by ensuring that children have the best possible early years - age 0 to 6.

Important markers of later success in life are established in a child's first years. Health, social and emotional adjustment, and not just success in school and work are all strongly influenced by the kinds of interactions and the quality of life to which children are exposed from 0-6 years. Investing money in preventative and supportive programs and services for children and their parents will be less costly than attempting to "fix" or address problems later on in life - either in teen years, early adulthood or mid-life.

3. Investing wisely in the future of Canada's children requires an integrated public policy framework that acknowledges the horizontal nature of children's issues and includes the impact on families.

Issues that affect the lives of children are not easily compartmentalized within one government department. The lives of children are influenced by policies and programs that are cross-jurisdictional as well as cross-departmental. A successful public policy framework must recognize and respond to the life-course of children. The multi-dimensional nature of children's lives needs to drive this policy framework; bureaucratic exigencies can no longer take pride of place over children's needs.

4. Children and families require an integrated continuum of income, income support and services, developed within a horizontal, child and family centered public policy framework.

Assuring and improving the income of families with children - particularly those with low incomes - constitutes an important first step in improving the quality of life for those children. Unquestionably, income and income support is central to families and children, but large numbers also require access to high quality services. The two elements - income and integrated child and family services - must be pursued simultaneously. Canada has taken some significant steps in terms of income support. The federal-provincial Canada Child Tax Benefit, while imperfect in some ways, has improved the income levels of families living in difficult circumstances. Some experts claim that improvements to this level of benefit will go an additional distance in helping families in immediate need. There are still many unanswered questions about the nature of the provincial reinvestment projects and the clawback.

We also know that children - all children - benefit from access to high quality child development centres/programs. The latter - an example of the kind of services we are speaking about - could include many different programs under one integrated community-focused roof: full time early child development and care; drop-in parenting programs; play-groups; child-parent reading or literacy programs; well-baby clinics; respite care for parents with children of special needs etc.. Local communities, and neighbourhoods should determine their own requirements but funding for such centres remains central to our view of an integrated continuum of income and services for children and families.

5. An integrated public policy framework for families and children needs to identify key outcomes (particularly their impact on families) that Canadians want for their children and design ways- both qualitative and quantitative - of measuring success in achieving those outcomes.

Both governments and citizens have begun to recognize the importance of outcomes. If we are to improve outcomes, whether we are talking about poverty rates or school readiness, we must be prepared to set real targets so that we can see if what is intended from a particular policy or program is actually being achieved. Citizens recognize the significance of this information too; they want to be part of the process of identifying what is important - targets and outcomes - and they want to know what is being accomplished through government spending; particularly where children and their families are concerned. Building this approach into a renewed commitment to children at the outset will help to keep governments and partners "on track" as policy and programs are altered, developed and implemented.

In addition, the identification of outcomes involves looking horizontally across government in order to identify gaps in programs that allow some children to fall through the cracks. Designing adequate measures to assess the impact of programs, existing or planned, is critical in ensuring that these gaps are filled and that money is spent appropriately. For us to avoid unintended negative consequences, we need to have a thorough analysis of anticipated impacts before programs are implemented.

6. Families face significant pressures in balancing their obligations to their paid work and their obligations to raising and nurturing their families and taking an active role in family life. Government and employers alike must recognize the stress of this balancing act and solutions must be sought across all sectors of the economy and society.

Almost all children live in families and like all social systems, families continually evolve and respond to changing social, economic and political conditions. Families have undergone significant transformations in recent years and policies and programs need to adapt to the changing needs and realities of families. For families, the pressure has intensified, whether parents are paid or unpaid. Outcomes from a two-year study undertaken by Canadian Policy Research Networks (CPRN) underscored the extent to which families are struggling with the work/family balancing act:

...there is a strong message in our work that people are really struggling with the work/family balance and that is where they really want help across the whole income spectrum. That is a preoccupation. People are stretched to their limit. And the stretching is a time problem, it's the access to child care that they can really count on and there is the balancing of the economic and social (tradeoffs)...4

7. Families with children make important contributions to society and in so doing they all make sizeable sacrifices. How a country acknowledges the extra costs of raising children is linked to the structure of their tax system.

Over the past number of years changes to the tax system have had a significant impact on families with children. Canada is alone among industrialized countries in not explicitly recognizing the costs of raising children in the tax system. Given that the latest estimate of the costs of raising a child from birth to age 18 is $160,000.families make sacrifices at many points along the way. We were told that focusing an inquiry into tax fairness for families with children on the differential circumstances of one and two-earner families is inappropriate.5 The focus must be on ways of distinguishing between the tax treatment of families with and without children. The Sub-Committee on Tax Equity for Canadian Families with Dependent Children of the House of Commons Standing Committee on Finance is currently investigating a number of issues dealing with families and the tax system. We anticipate their findings and will monitor them in terms of our work on children and families.

8. Canada has moved significantly away from a universal system of income support and services. The highly targeted system in Canada needs to be re-examined.

Canadians have a proud legacy of success in addressing the high level of poverty among seniors that once marked this country. Accomplishing a significant reduction in current child poverty levels requires a substantial increase in the base of the current child benefit. At the same time, we know that all children benefit from good services rooted in healthy and safe communities. The provision of universal services was strongly supported by witnesses.

9. Supporting families with children requires a re-examination and re-evaluation of our system of maternity and parental leave.

Society as a whole benefits from ensuring that adequate maternity and parental benefits are available. In Canada the Employment Insurance system provides a basic maternity benefit for women of 15 weeks of leave at a salary replacement rate of 55 per cent, although there is a ceiling on the level of benefit payment available. In 1990 an additional 10 weeks of benefits - known as parental benefits - was introduced. These weeks can be divided between parents in any configuration they so choose. Self-employed workers have no benefits. Quebec's proposed new parental insurance program is significantly more generous. The proposed plan would entitle mothers to 18 weeks of maternity leave at 70 per cent of their gross earnings. Fathers would be eligible for three weeks of leave and either parent would be able to take seven weeks of parental leave - for a total possible leave of 28 weeks at 70 per cent replacement. Adoptive parents, under the Quebec scheme, would be eligible for 12 weeks at the same replacement rate. Giving all parents access to an expanded maternity/parental leave could ease the transition into parenthood and would be an additional and important source of support to parents. During our hearings, our witnesses urged us to support a more generous system.

10. The implementation of any new programs or alterations to existing programs that serve families and children will need to proceed on a community-based collaborative partnership model that values diversity and is inclusive.

There are some tremendous success stories of services and programs currently in place across Canada. In large part, a measure of their success is linked to the extent to which the services and programs both draw on the strengths of local communities and respond to their needs. The models clearly demonstrate that integrative approaches that link governments, non-governmental agencies and communities toward the common goal of the best early start for children and families can have a profound impact. Central also is the recognition that we can not afford to exclude children with specific needs based on their level of ability, language or culture. A truly successful community-based approach to ensuring the best outcomes for children needs to be accessible to all children and responsive to their needs.

11. Better information sharing at the political level will help to avoid duplication of effort and overlapping of activities on child and family issues.

Members of the community are often asked to come and share their perspective and provide input at the parliamentary level. They told us that regularly, they are asked to appear before different committees that are addressing issues that are closely inter-connected, yet they are being studied by different House of Commons and/or Senate Committees. From their perspective this reflects a misunderstanding of the extent to which issues that affect children and families are truly multi-dimensional and horizontal in nature. We share their frustration and agree that we all must pay more attention to designing creative and innovative ways to share information. We would like to see more instances of joint committee meetings, Parliamentary fora that bring together various levels of government, joint House and Senate inquiries etc. Afterall, if parliamentarians are asking the bureaucracy to treat issues related to children in a horizontal manner, we have an obligation to do the same.

WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE....NEXT STEPS FOR OUR SUB-COMMITTEE

In many ways, the work of our Sub-Committee has raised more questions than it has had the time or the opportunity to answer. We have had many sectors - community groups, individuals, non-governmental organizations and academics - make requests to meet with us and share their views on important issues with respect to children. Given our time constraints, we have been unable to accommodate these requests.

As many of our witnesses pointed out, without our Sub-Committee there is no "home", no specific public forum, no focal point, within parliament, for children and for children's issues. Other parliamentary committees may touch on children's issues during the course of their work - but these issues, by and large, are peripheral to their mandates or considered within a very narrow focus. We believe that we can make a distinct and valuable contribution as a group representing all political parties in the House of Commons. By our deliberate and ongoing study of public policies relating to children - in the broadest as well as the narrowest sense - this Sub-committee can help to find practical solutions to some of these public issues as well as intensify the political will to put those solutions in place. We intend to provide a home for children's issues and thereby, ensure that children do not slip from Canada's public and political agenda. We believe that children should remain an important priority for governments. As parliamentarians, we see a role for ourselves as facilitators of the cross-country conversation, and believe the continuation of our Sub-Committee is central to this process.

As Canadians respond to new research findings on children, as they grapple with the discussion papers released as part of the National Children's Agenda (NCA) and as we all take an increasing interest in the outcomes and results of government programs, parliament has an important role to play. On May 11 1999 the Minister of Human Resources Development - Honourable Pierre Pettigrew and the Minister of Health - Honourable Alan Rock - appeared before our Sub-Committee. Minister Pettigrew sought our views on the following questions:

1. How can we best support and care for children in their early years?

2. How can we build on the National Child Benefit to improve the lives, and life prospects, of children in low-income families?

3. How can the tax system recognize the important role that all families play in raising the next generation?

4. How can we galvanize the efforts of all sectors of society and work effectively across governments in improve the well-being of Canadian children?

While these are important questions, we also will provide input on other issues that have come to our attention as a result of our preliminary work. In addition to the thorny issues of income security and supports and services for children and families, our work has opened up substantive issues that warrant further attention. These include:

• the relationship between child health and the environment,
• the lack of current information on the lives and needs of children with disabilities,
• the gap in our knowledge of children and youth who are currently "in care" and
• our limited understanding of children with fetal alcohol syndrome and fetal alcohol effect.

Our Sub-Committee intends to consult with Canadians who are working directly with children and families in community-based facilities, with additional experts on early childhood care and education, with those who have comparative knowledge on child and family-centred supports and services in other countries and with a variety of non-governmental organizations involved in programs that support children and families from all regions of Canada. Canadians - non-governmental organizations, community groups, policy experts, parents and children, have some of the answers to the questions that we are going to ask. We intend to listen to them before presenting our next reports and making concrete recommendations. As Canada moves toward the next millennium, we are confident that this process will place us in a position to make a positive and important contribution to decisions on how we intend to ensure the best future for all children.

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1 Honourable Margaret Norrie McCain and J. Fraser Mustard, Reversing The Real Brain Drain, Early Years Study, Final Report, Government of Ontario, Children's Secretariat, April 1999, pg. 7.

2 We acknowledge the fact that although Quebec agrees with the objectives of the NCA, it has decided not to participate in its development. This fact rests with their desire to assume full control over programs aimed at families and children in the province.

3 Quebec has not signed the Social Union Framework Agreement, therefore any reference to governments or joint federal-provincial-territorial agreements or activities excludes Quebec.

4 Judith Maxwell, Evidence, April 27, 1999.

5 Richard Shillington, Evidence April 13, 1999.