Rethinking the Welfare State: The prospects for ... - e-Library

Notes 246
46 Cleveland and Colley, supra note 2, pp. 65, 71.
47 Alanna Mitchell, “Vouchers raise doubts about universal care,” Globe and Mail (November
21, 1995), p. A8. See also ibid., p. 45. In Ontario, for example, student parents must declare
their loans as income, Registered Retirement Savings Plans are treated as liquid assets, assets
over $5,000 precludes eligibility, and in any case subsidy assistance is typically contingent
on exhausting all assets. Despite these criteria, long waiting lists of fully eligible parents
persist.
48 Moreover, caps placed on the maximum expenditures that are deductible from taxes are
problematic in that better quality child care—the kind we should seek to encourage—often
exceeds these caps, thereby providing an added incentive to parents to select child care
options that are of lower quality but are fully within the tax-deductible range.
49 Cleveland and Colley, supra note 2, pp. 45, 66, 115.
50 Ibid., p. 66.
51 Ibid., p. 67. As in Quebec, for example. In order to finance extensive public child care
services, Quebec revoked provincial tax deductions related to child care expenses. Quebec is
trying to correct the problem of “atypical” parental needs, but as yet no action has been
taken.
52 Ibid., p. 76.
53 Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport, and Ministry of Education, Art and Science, “Early
childhood education and care policy in the Netherlands,” Background Report to the OECD
Project (2000), p. 58. See also ibid., pp. 75–6. Child care in the Netherlands is typically
private for children aged 0 to 3 years, but publicly co-funded by vouchers. Parental fees are
set at about 44 percent of the costs while government and employers account for the
remainder. Fees are also determined on a sliding scale, with higher-income families paying a
significantly greater proportion of the costs than low-income families; 50 percent of families
use employer-funded day care centres while an additional 20 percent use child care centres.
54 Cleveland and Colley, supra note 2, p. 80.
55 For a discussion of this connection see Gillian Doherty et al., Child Care: Canada Can’t
Work Without It (Toronto: Child-Care Resource and Research Unit, University of Toronto,
1995), p. 8.
56 Cleveland and Colley, supra note 2, p. 14.
57 Ibid., pp. 34, 42.
58 Cleveland and Colley, supra note 2, pp. 42–3, 65–6. It is important to note that these
measures may not accurately reflect the quality of care in Quebec, as the study was
completed before the institution of reforms. Quebec now requires that two-thirds of staff at
child care centres have early childhood education training from a college or university; all
family care providers, service units often attached to the centres, must now have a minimum
of 45 hours of training.
59 Ibid., pp. 42–3, 48. These findings have been disputed by some provinces. Ontario, for
example, dismisses the data entirely but has not been able to offer an alternative analysis. A
government agency established in 1998 to assess child care services has not completed its
work, leaving parents and caregivers with few means to accurately assess quality and no
means to ensure accountability.
60 Ibid., p. 80.
61 OECD, supra note 13, p. 164.
62 Ibid., p. 163.
63 Connolly, supra note 45. See also Alison P.Hagy, “The demand for child care quality: an
hedonic price theory approach,” Journal of Human Resources, 33(3) (1998), p. 684.
64 Cleveland and Colley, supra note 2, pp. 73–4, 77, 78.
65 Ibid., p. 58.
66 Ibid.
67 Ibid., p. 86.