Children put up their hands for ice cream at a day care centre in Montreal on Friday, August 18, 2006. As strange as it might sound to many Canadians, some Quebec parents are prepared to hit the streets in protest to demand the choice of paying more for their children’s day care. (Ian Barrett/Canadian Press)

Here's a start to determining how Canada stacks up against other developed countries in the world when it comes to early education child care. In a study of 14 countries by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), we rank dead last.

Canada spends 0.25 per cent of its gross domestic product on early education child care, which means for children under age 6. Denmark tops the list, spending two per cent of its GDP on early education child care.

The list looks like this:

1. Denmark
2. Sweden
3. Norway
4. Finland
5. France
6. Hungary
7. Austria
8. The U.K.
9. The U.S.
10. The Netherlands
11. Germany
12. Italy
13. Australia
14. Canada

The latest Canadian attempt to improve early education child care was Prime Minister Stephen Harper's Universal Child Care Benefit, which began in July 2007, providing parents with a taxable grant of $1,200 a year for each child under 6.

This replaced the Liberal government's $5-billion, five-year program, which Ottawa, the provinces and territories agreed to in the fall of 2005. The goal was to create 250,000 additional child-care spaces by 2009. The Liberal plan also called for a further $6-billion, five-year program to follow the first program.

The new Conservative government allowed the Liberal program to spill over for a year, then replaced it with the Universal Child Care Benefit, which critics say resembles the "baby bonus" introduced after the Second World War, providing parents with children 16 and under monthly grants of $5 to $8 each. (A $5 grant in 1945 would be worth about $60 in 2007.)

Martha Friendly, executive director of the Child Care Resource and Research Unit at the University of Toronto, calls the Conservative program "simplistic," and says its fundamental flaw is that it is not child care.

As for early education child care across Canada, Friendly told CBC News: "There is some very good child care in Canada, but it is the exception. Most of it is poor or mediocre."

Child care spaces

The child-care proposals of both the Liberals and Conservatives promised to create hundreds of thousands of child-care spaces. The Conservative plan was to allot $250 million in tax credits for employers or non-profit organizations to create child-care centres for the children of employers or local children.

But when businesses showed little interest in the plan, the government decided to disburse the $250 million to the provinces and territories with no strings attached.

Child-care advocates say an unfortunate result of the Conservative plan — both the $1,200-a-year handouts and the tax credits to create child-care spaces — is that it tends to arouse interest from large, for-profit providers interested in what University of Toronto economist Cleveland Gordon calls "child care on the cheap."

Already, only months after the Conservative plan, an Australian child-care chain called 123 Busy Beavers Learning Centres has acquired about 15 centres in Canada, mostly in British Columbia, with some in Alberta and Ontario.

Morna Ballantyne of Canada's Code Blue for Child Care says despite the homegrown name, Busy Beavers "is closely linked to the world's largest child-care corporation, ABC Learning Centres of Australia and the 123 group of companies. This linked group of companies operates over 2,500 programs worldwide in Australia, the United States, Britain, New Zealand, China and other countries."

Child-care advocates say these promises to create new spaces through incentives are catchy campaign tactics but useless when it comes to placing youngsters in well-equipped, effective day-care centres.

When Mike Harris was the Conservative premier of Ontario in the 1990s, he undertook a similar plan to induce regular businesses to create child-care spaces on their premises, but nothing came of it.

Monica Lysack, the former executive director of the Child Care Advocacy Association, says the Liberals' $5-billion, five-year program would not have solved Canada's child-care needs, but it would have been a bold step in the right direction. The best thing about it — Friendly agrees — is that it would have been a good start on a co-operative, federal-provincial early education child-care program.

Lysack says politicians love to talk about child-care "spaces," yet the federal government itself provides no direct child care for the children of its thousands of employees.

Quebec's system

Lysack says the best child-care system in Canada by far is in Quebec. Montreal ranks at the top of all Canadian cities, with enough spaces for about 45 per cent of preschool children. Saskatoon is at the bottom, with spaces for only 6.9 per cent.

Quebec started its day-care system in 1997, offering spaces at the bargain rate of $5 a day, which now is $7 a day. Demand quickly surpassed supply and by 2007, there were long waiting lists. The federal Liberals' child-care plan used Quebec's system as a model.

Getting back to the OECD study ranking countries for child-care quality, it said Canada's system was "a chronically underfunded patchwork of programs with regulated spaces for fewer than 20 per cent of children six years old and younger. By contrast, Denmark's percentage was 78, France 69 and Belgium 63.

Canada tries to do it on the cheap, not recognizing that investing in good child care brings excellent returns.

Cleveland Gordon, the U of T economist, says that a cost-benefit analysis shows that investing public money in early childhood education brings great returns for children, families and society — twice as much as the costs incurred.

"It is a lesson which the majority of European countries learned years ago," he said. "If it makes sense to spend considerable public dollars on the education and care of children when they are six years of age, it almost certainly makes sense to spend considerable public dollars on the education and care of children when they are much younger.

"Young children, two to five years of age, need good quality preschool, education and care; they need loving, supportive, development care. Most of our young children in Canada do not get this care."