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Its all Greek to Quebec

  • Thread starter Thread starter Jed
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Child care at $7 per day cost to government is reasonably assured of being a revenue generator, since it is less than the nominal income tax ($12.67 from $9.90/hr min wage x 8 hr x 16%).  I suppose it might sound like an impressive claim to the innumerate.  Try reworking the benefit to the government if government pays the full shot.
 
Brad Sallows said:
Child care at $7 per day cost to government is reasonably assured of being a revenue generator, since it is less than the nominal income tax ($12.67 from $9.90/hr min wage x 8 hr x 16%).  I suppose it might sound like an impressive claim to the innumerate.  Try reworking the benefit to the government if government pays the full shot.

Brad, I am a little slow on the uptake tonight.  Can you dumb it down?
 
The real point is that of course the government benefits when people work - it doesn't have to pay for their food, shelter, clothing, diversions, child care, etc; and employed people pay income taxes.  The notion that it justifies public child care makes no more sense to me than public meal programs and public residences for everyone.
 
So, your point is that being employed is a virtue that does not need to be further dressed up?
 
I think that the problem is more one of perspective. Good governments provide the people with most of what they need, and some of what they want. Quebec has take the opposite approach: all of what they want, and less of what they need. They've done so by having an outrageous tax regime, and when the cupboard is bare, coming cap-in-hand to the ROC saying "you owe us, we want more" (the supposed fiscal imbalance).  The real fiscal imbalance for Quebec (and Ont) is one of spending priorities.
 
>So, your point is that being employed is a virtue that does not need to be further dressed up?

I don't think being employed needs to be dressed up; but that was not my point.  However, my point is void due to the fact I misunderstood who pays the "7$".  The fee is what the parents pay.  I presume the province picks up the rest of the tab.  That would mean a higher cost to the province, and less net benefit unless the effect was to persuade more high-income earners to enter the work force.  However, I doubt that the cost of childcare discourages people with the potential to earn high income and a desire to work.  What hinders employment is the availability of daycare spaces.

 
Brad Sallows said:
  I presume the province picks up the rest of the tab. 

Exactly. $7 is what the user pays. The cost of providing the service is considerably more than that.
 
Brad Sallows said:
The fee is what the parents pay.  I presume the province picks up the rest of the tab.

Yes.

Brad Sallows said:
That would mean a higher cost to the province, and less net benefit unless the effect was to persuade more high-income earners to enter the work force.

No, the effect is that instead of paying a single mom with two kids 20k+ a year in social assistance, you pay for her children's daycare (much less than 20k a year) which persuades her to go to work because now that she doesn't have to pay extremely high childcare fees, there is actually something to gain from going to work (why would she work 40 hrs a week for minimum wage if she also has to pay childcare? She would get more money for sitting at home and not working? Economic incentive...)

So the point is, instead of paying 20k a year for them to stay at home and look after their ids, you pay maybe 10k a year for someone else to look after their kids in a centre-based daycare, and then you even collect some small amount of tax revenue from them since they are now working full-time.

Brad Sallows said:
However, I doubt that the cost of childcare discourages people with the potential to earn high income and a desire to work.

It discourages them from having more children though (because kids are expensive, and they have to pay for them, unlike those who are on social assistance), and the statistics exist to show that people living in poverty tend to have more kids. And since income has a high correlation with IQ, it's safe to say that discouraging high-income earners from having kids while encouraging zero-income earners to have more kids is probably not going to be very good for society in the long run for obvious reasons.
 
ballz said:
It discourages them from having more children though (because kids are expensive, and they have to pay for them, unlike those who are on social assistance), and the statistics exist to show that people living in poverty tend to have more kids. And since income has a high correlation with IQ, it's safe to say that discouraging high-income earners from having kids while encouraging zero-income earners to have more kids is probably not going to be very good for society in the long run for obvious reasons.

Minor thread hijack:

If you can find this movie, watch it. It underscores the above point in an hilarious, tongue in cheek manner.

Now back to your regularly scheduled discussion.
 
I know a lot of people with good to high incomes, and the reason they don't have more children - or any children - is because they don't want to.  Economics does not really factor into it.  Subsidized child care is just gravy for high earners who have children.

Subsidized child care might move a few non-working single mothers (whose only prospects are low wage jobs) into the work force, but the calculation involves more benefits (programs) than just "wage" and "childcare".  The assumption that all of the social program costs disappear when a person enters the work force at a low wage level is invalid.  It is entirely possible - likely, at the lowest income levels - that the foregone benefits and/or clawbacks will not equal the cost of the childcare.  Finally, the "$20K wage" - "$10K childcare" is only valid for the first child.  Now assume there are two, or three, and even that oversimplified accounting ends up as a net loss.
 
Brad Sallows said:
I know a lot of people with good to high incomes, and the reason they don't have more children - or any children - is because they don't want to.  Economics does not really factor into it.  Subsidized child care is just gravy for high earners who have children.

As much as I appreciate individual mileage, I'll take this argument with a grain of a salt. You pretty much said the reason they don't want to have to children is "just because..." That's not an actual reason... Whether they tell you about it or not, whether they actually consider and think out loud precisely why they don't feel like having any or any more children, to think that the economics behind it doesn't factor into at least most people's decision is pretty unrealistic in my opinion. So far out of all the people I know, the economics of it has certainly been one of the bigger topics.

Brad Sallows said:
Subsidized child care might move a few non-working single mothers (whose only prospects are low wage jobs) into the work force, but the calculation involves more benefits (programs) than just "wage" and "childcare".  The assumption that all of the social program costs disappear when a person enters the work force at a low wage level is invalid.  It is entirely possible - likely, at the lowest income levels - that the foregone benefits and/or clawbacks will not equal the cost of the childcare.  Finally, the "$20K wage" - "$10K childcare" is only valid for the first child.  Now assume there are two, or three, and even that oversimplified accounting ends up as a net loss.

The 20k and 10k actually comes from the Nfld numbers of a single mother with *two* kids (I researched this stuff when writing a paper about this). Individual provinces will vary, but being in Newfoundland and writing the paper for a university in Newfoundland, I was using Newfoundland numbers as an example. IIRC, it was still cheaper to put up to *four* kids into the centre-based childcare.

There was no assumption that the social program costs "disappear" when someone joins the workforce, I realize the small amount of taxes they would be paying would not offset the costs of the actual childcare. The "assumption" was that in Newfoundland, if a person works 40 hours a week at minimum wage, they will no longer qualify for social assistance (hence, the ~20k expense is gone). This is not an assumption, it is a fact. Yes, it will still cost ~10k a year to provide childcare for those two kids, but since the person no longer qualifies for social assistance which was costing the gov't 20k a year, then they have reduced their expenses by ~10k.

Like it or not, by paying a single mother with two kids over 20k a year in social assistance, the people in Newfoundland are really, at the end of the day, paying money to look after her kids anyway. It only stands to reason that you can get more "bang-for-your-buck" using centre-based systems, because it's cheaper to pay 3 workers 50k/year to look after 30 kids, rather than pay 15 moms each 20k a year to look after their own two kids (now, for the record, I acknowledge that *this* is oversimplifying things due to the costs of inefficiencies and bureaucracy associated with anything the government touches).

My worry about these kind of calculations is that you cannot predict what's going to happen to these costs when unions and such become involved. The other thing of concern for me is, it is hard to predict just how many single mothers would actually join the workforce if this program became available. My gut-feeling says that if you told them "we are cutting your social assistance down to 15k a year, but we'll offer childcare for $7/day," most of them would prefer to work.

Also I know I keep drawing back to the Newfoundland example, but since any childcare programs in Canada would probably be provincially-run, it just makes sense to analyse it province-by-province. Whether it works for Quebec's specific case, I do not know, although I assume it does and apparently there has been evidence (stated earlier...although there was no source provided) that says it does.
 
In many societies, having lots of children is a way of providing for your own care in old age, as well as effectively having something to trade, either labour or marriageable daughters. Even in today's society, where children are a net cost rather than a net asset, some of these factors still come into play.

The real issue with subsidized anything is there is no proper signalling as to what the true cost is, so demand will ramp up, even if supply cannot be raised to meet the increased demand. Daycares charging artificially low prices to the parents will be overwhelmed by demand, and can only respond by rationing, much like what has happened to Canadian health care. The rationing may not be obvious like multi year waiting lists, general service decline and reduction of options offered at the daycare will be the most likely response, while expensive tax funded overhead will continue to increase.

What is not factored into any of these calculations is the well known observation that children raised at home by their parents (in a two parent household) are the ones who have the best life outcomes, whereare the incentives to promote that outcome?
 
The tradition of the 'squeaky wheel' is hundreds of years old in Quebec, and it has generally worked well for them. We shouldn't be too suprised by it. It would be nice to see them grow up a little one of these days though:

Thunder gusts: Popular disturbances in early French Canada

http://www.erudit.org/revue/hp/1979/v14/n1/030833ar.pdf
 
Thucydides said:
In many societies, having lots of children is a way of providing for your own care in old age, as well as effectively having something to trade, either labour or marriageable daughters. Even in today's society, where children are a net cost rather than a net asset, some of these factors still come into play.

Without a doubt there is more than just "money-in money-out" considered. But, the financial implications of children are surely considered by most people deciding whether or not to have kids.

Thucydides said:
The real issue with subsidized anything is there is no proper signalling as to what the true cost is, so demand will ramp up, even if supply cannot be raised to meet the increased demand. Daycares charging artificially low prices to the parents will be overwhelmed by demand, and can only respond by rationing, much like what has happened to Canadian health care. The rationing may not be obvious like multi year waiting lists, general service decline and reduction of options offered at the daycare will be the most likely response, while expensive tax funded overhead will continue to increase.

Agree. The effect of subsidizing something that costs $450/month by $443/month is going to warp the market. Like I said about unions, one of my fears is that would should be a $40-50k/year profession could become a $100k/year profession once there is a big shortage of qualified people and a big push by the government to hire more.

Thucydides said:
What is not factored into any of these calculations is the well known observation that children raised at home by their parents (in a two parent household) are the ones who have the best life outcomes, whereare the incentives to promote that outcome?

This I don't agree with. I am not saying it's not true, but I have found it hard to find any conclusive consensus about "stay-at-home vs 'working' mom," or "in-home care vs daycare," etc. The only thing that there seems to be a consensus on is that high-quality daycares produce good results, and low-quality produce poor results (big surprise, I know ::)). I would suspect this is the same for children with lazy/uninvolved parents vs children with involved/caring/nurturing parents in the stay-at-home situation.

I also think there is a some consensus that a child really needs to be socializing with other children and learning to play and share with others, etc, at around 3-4 years old, before they go to school, which is usually one of the arguments for some form of daycare.
 
ballz said:
This I don't agree with. I am not saying it's not true, but I have found it hard to find any conclusive consensus about "stay-at-home vs 'working' mom," or "in-home care vs daycare," etc. The only thing that there seems to be a consensus on is that high-quality daycares produce good results, and low-quality produce poor results (big surprise, I know ::)). I would suspect this is the same for children with lazy/uninvolved parents vs children with involved/caring/nurturing parents in the stay-at-home situation.

I also think there is a some consensus that a child really needs to be socializing with other children and learning to play and share with others, etc, at around 3-4 years old, before they go to school, which is usually one of the arguments for some form of daycare. 

An July 11, 2011 article from Maclean's that reports on Quebec's childcare program. Re-produced under the usual caveats of the Copyright Act.

A surprising new study says Quebec’s $7-a-day daycare is leaving children worse off
by John Geddes on Monday, July 11, 2011

In public policy, few subjects are as sure to spark fierce debate as child care. Prime Minister Stephen Harper portrays a stark divide when he talks about his Conservative policy of giving parents $100 a month for every child under six, and how he scrapped the previous Liberal government’s plan to pour billions into deals with the provinces to expand subsidized daycare. “We took money from bureaucrats and lobbyists,” he says, “and gave it to the real experts on child care, and their names are Mom and Dad!”

If daycare advocates have lost the battle in Ottawa, at least for as long as Harper is in power, they’ll always have Quebec as a beacon of hope. Starting in 1997, the province implemented a low-cost universal child care policy along the lines of the European model. The number of subsidized daycare spaces in the province soared to 210,000 last year, from just 77,000 in 1997. Nothing like it has been tried anywhere else in North America.

But now three Montreal researchers have studied the Quebec experiment, focusing on how the rapid expansion of $7-a-day daycare seems to be reflected in Quebec kids’ scores on a school-readiness test. Their findings are potentially explosive. “In summary,” they write, “the effects of the program are found to be negative for five-year-olds and less convincingly negative for four-year-olds.”


The study, entitled “Quebec’s Childcare Universal Low Fees Policy 10 Years After: Effects, Costs and Benefits,” is co-authored by Université du Québec à Montréal economists Pierre Lefebvre, Philip Merrigan and Francis Roy-Desrosiers. They look at the main goals of Quebec’s daycare policy—allowing more mothers of young children to work outside the home, and enhancing prospects of success in school for kids, especially those from lower-income families. On letting more moms enter the labour force, the program has been a smashing success, dramatically boosting their participation rates.

The paper is far more contentious, however, when it turns to how children are affected by Quebec’s incentive for parents to put their kids in care at a younger age and for more hours each week. The data comes mainly from a massive, ongoing Statistics Canada project called the National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth. The NLSCY tracks the progress of thousands of young people: its latest stage, for example, looks at 35,795 children from less than one to seven years old, and youths from 14 to 25. Such a deep data pool allows researchers to make broad comparisons among groups.

For kids at the ages that the Montreal economists studied, the NLSCY has scores nationwide for more than 10,000 four-year-olds and more than 18,000 five-year-olds. All those children were given what’s called the Peabody Picture and Vocabulary Test, an oral test that’s widely used to gauge verbal ability. The results are adjusted by age group to a mean score of 100; variations above and below that level are what matter.

Sampling seven years of NLSCY data, the Montreal researchers found no conclusive evidence that Quebec’s daycare policy had changed PPVT scores markedly for four-year-olds. Still, they cautiously flag some negative indications for the children of mothers with low education, calling these variations in PPVT results “large enough for policy-makers to worry about.”

Their findings for five-year-olds, though, are more pronounced. They discovered “sizable negative and significant effects.” For example, they found that Quebec’s child care policy reduced the PPVT score for five-year-olds in 2002-2003 by 4.9 points on average. “This is a very large effect,” they say. To give a sense of how large, they point out that, by comparison, a child whose mother has a university degree typically scores three points above a child whose mother has only a high school diploma.

For Quebec five-year-olds who took the test in 2006-2007, compared with their peers elsewhere in Canada, the study says “negative effects” show up for children of both highly educated and less-educated mothers, but tend to be slightly worse for kids whose mothers had a high school diploma or less. In other words, Quebec kids, after many of their parents began taking advantage of the province’s new low-cost daycare, did worse on a basic vocabulary test. “Therefore,” the researchers conclude with withering understatement, “the picture is not quite what it should be for a policy that seeks to increase early literacy skills and better prepare children for school.”

That result is surprising in light of other studies the authors themselves mention. They cite a review of international research published last year by Kaspar Burger, a Swiss education professor, who found “the vast majority” of child care programs positively affect development, and disadvantaged children tend to benefit slightly more than better-off kids. A possible exception is very early daycare. The Montreal researchers refer to previous studies that suggest child care in the first year of life can have adverse effects on test scores and behaviour.

There’s no question that many more Quebec kids are spending more time, often starting very young, in non-parental care. Between 2000 and 2008, the percentage of Quebec’s one-year-olds in child care nearly doubled, from 26 per cent to just over 50 per cent. Back in 2004, before Quebec’s new policy was launched, 45 per cent of kids aged one to four were in daycare, and 68 per cent for more than 21 hours a week; by 2006, 74 per cent were in care, and 83 per cent for more than 21 hours.

The authors don’t shy away from suggesting that longer hours in care outside the home from an earlier age—what they call “intensity”—might be behind those troubling test scores. “Our intuition,” they write, “is that children are simply spending too much time, especially when they are under age three, in daycare for the [Quebec child care] policy to have any positive effect.”

The authors stress that their study remains a working paper. It hasn’t yet been peer-reviewed for publication in a scholarly journal, though they have presented it at academic conferences. Merrigan told Maclean’s the trend lines in the data are not always consistent, which he and his co-authors find hard to explain. They are planning to look at an eighth year of NLSCY data as it becomes available. As well, they are expanding their research to reflect more variables, such as the father’s education level.

The paper is available online and is already being discussed among child care experts. Some are skeptical about its findings. While the Montreal researchers see that “intensity” increase as problematic, advocates for more government spending on child care are inclined to focus more on quality of care. Previous studies have red-flagged problems in maintaining standards as Quebec rapidly added new daycare spaces. Hillel Goelman, a University of British Columbia education professor and child development expert, points out that the study doesn’t distinguish between kids who went to good and poor centres. “The working paper mentions the importance of child care quality,” Goelman says, “but none of the data analyses compare the language performance of children in high- and low-quality child care.”

As well, he questioned the paper’s emphasis on PPVT scores. The test measures only “language comprehension,” he points out, not other language skills, or things like social and emotional development. “Researchers have to be cautious in the use and interpretation of PPVT scores and especially cautious when equating PPVT results with child development,” Goelman says. Merrigan defended relying on the PPVT, calling the test “a good predictor of success.”

Perhaps surprisingly, some advocates of more government funding for child care actually agree that starting kids in daycare very early likely isn’t a good idea. Paul Kershaw, a professor at UBC’s School of Interdisciplinary Studies, calls the Quebec child care policy “without doubt” the best in Canada. Yet he argues that substantial subsidies for daycare should kick in for kids older than 18 months.

Before then, Kershaw says, governments should instead offer far more generous parental leave benefits to allow both parents a chance to stay home. “When we talk about families with young kids, we pit some against the others in very ideological ways,” he says. “It’s about conservatives saying we need kids spending more time at home with parents, especially the mom. The liberals say we need more child care services. The reality is they’re both right. Both ideas are absolutely critical right now.”

Kershaw’s bid to straddle the ideological divide on child care policy remains relatively rare. As the research of Merrigan, Lefebvre and Roy-Desrosiers attracts more scrutiny, reaction is likely to divide others into competing camps. It’s a split that continues to play out, not just in theoretical debate, but in real policy, too. The Harper government issued a celebratory news release on July 1 marking the fifth anniversary of its $100 per kid a month Universal Child Care Credit, while in this spring’s Quebec provincial budget, Liberal Premier Jean Charest announced a further $558-million investment to create yet another 15,000 more $7-a-day daycare spaces over the next five years.

The actual study can be found here.

 
It isn't even a $40-50K profession for most people, yet.  Daycare owners and managers do OK, but I get the general impression of sh!t wages for the (mostly) women who are the rank and file.  Parents can be strangely thrifty when it comes to daycare fees.  I am confident that if childcare workers were members of a public service union and daycare were a public service for all, their compensation would soon be comparable to that of teachers.

Employee:child ratios (requirements) range from about 1:4 to 1:8 depending on age and program for non-school-age children in BC, so notwithstanding the age range being maybe 1/4 that of the range of school age, I believe we would quickly find the number of childcare employees similar to the number of teachers in each province.  It is not an end-state that is affordable within current budgets.
 
I doubt it.  ECEs (early childhood educators) already have a wage zone that's pretty established.  I doubt it would rise.  And not all daycare workers have their certifications.  I doubt that their salaries would ever come close to that of a teacher.  Especially if teachers have their say.
 
On top of oldboatdriver's post. Native internal politics are complex and shifting constantly. My guess is that any band that accepts being part of a soverign Quebec would demand a pricey pound of flesh for that support. In fact there might even be a bidding war for their support between Canada and Quebec. Not to mention that some bands might even decide that it's a good time to cede from both Quebec and Canada. It would be very interesting.... 8)
 
Brad Sallows said:
It isn't even a $40-50K profession for most people, yet.  Daycare owners and managers do OK, but I get the general impression of sh!t wages for the (mostly) women who are the rank and file.  Parents can be strangely thrifty when it comes to daycare fees.  I am confident that if childcare workers were members of a public service union and daycare were a public service for all, their compensation would soon be comparable to that of teachers.

The other half works with child care...new rules put in place here in alberta now means that you need a level 2 certification to supervise a facilty that requires a roughly year long course at $5000 tuition.  Not bad when you consider university/collage tuition but for $12/hr and part time work she's now looking else where for employment.

I don't know what the solution is...locally I see lots of folks with nannies as the cost of childcare for two kids is almost equal to the nannies wage...probably better when you figure in all the days childcare services are not available.    Overall the $7 daycare is one of those spending choices by Quebec that appears to be drastically different than elsewhere in Canada and hence becomes a focal point for the underlying frusteration with equalization payment and plotical posturing.
 
My wife was using the "Ihope" centre which is a drop centre for parents with toddlers and infants. We took our oldest there and now our 2nd. Our 2nd kid is quite outgoing and needs to socialize, my wife calls her the "mayor" as she organizes the other kids into games. (she is almost 4). The parent has to remain at the centre, my wife is is diligent in supervision uses the place to relax and let the kid do her thing and only intervenes if there is an issue. In the meantime she reads a book. One of the social workers came up to here and told her that they no longer allow parents to read or use cellphones as they want the parent to "interact" with the child. My wife pointed out that the only reason she came is so the kid can play with other kids and she gets enough intereaction throughtout the week. They insisted, so she said she won't be coming back and likley their policy will drive people away.
So now I get a kid that gets less play time and wife that is more stressed and a non-working stressed ex-lawyer wife/mother is a bit like a old stick of dyamite. There are times when I hate "Experts on child raising" What's amusing is when the experts assume my wife is a dumb village girl based on the colour of her skin, I have seen her shred a few of them it's not pretty.
 
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