VANCOUVER, BC – Having affordable child care remains the number one challenge for women achieving economic success in British Columbia’s labour market. While women have achieved equality with men in post-secondary education, matching and often exceeding their male counterparts in law school and medical school enrollment, women continue to outnumber men in part-time, lower paying jobs earning just three quarters of the salaries their male colleagues earn. Industry experts believe this is primarily due to unaffordable, inaccessible child care.
Yesterday, West Coast LEAF released a new report entitled High Stakes: The impacts of child care on the human rights of women and children. The report concludes the rights of women and children are being violated in complex and wide-ranging ways as a result of the shortage of affordable, high-quality, regulated child care in BC.
“Child care is often framed as an economic issue or in terms of public policy, but it’s important to recognize that the failures of the current services in BC have serious and vast implications for the human rights of women and children,” noted Kendra Milne, West Coast LEAF Director of Law Reform and author of the report. “Because women provide the majority of caregiving for children, not being able to access high-quality, affordable child care leads to a cascade of negative consequences in women’s lives.”
While the report argues lack of child care limits women’s success in the labour market, it should be noted child care is just one of the challenges women face. Either by choice or by obligation, women continue to be the primary caregivers for children. Access to child care will often determine whether women can return to the workforce. This said, the average pay gap between women and men in Canada is $8,000, leaving many families to choose for women to stay home, preserving the higher salary for the family.
While many might debate whether access to child care is a human right, the data strongly suggests that affordable child care significantly increases the rates at which individuals access it. According to Statistics Canada, 58% of parents in Quebec utilized child care in the past year while less than 50% of parents in British Columbia utilize child care.
Minister of Children and Family Development, Stephanie Cadieux, notes that while British Columbia doesn’t have a universal child care system, the Province is providing subsidies to make child care more affordable and that 77 per cent of parents reported they didn’t need to be wait-listed for a child-care facility.
“We offer child care subsidies to lower-income B.C. families, helping nearly 20,000 children each month. Recent changes to the subsidy program now exempt child support payments from the income calculations for the subsidy, which is making more families eligible to receive this additional benefit. We’re also investing approximately $146 million a year in the B.C. Early Childhood Tax Benefit for 180,000 B.C. families with children under the age of six,” Cadieux commented.
Under the Province’s B.C. Early Years Strategy, they’ve committed to creating 13,000 new licensed child-care spaces by 2020. Since November 2014, they have invested $26.5 million to create more than 4,300 spaces throughout the province. This builds on the more than 111,000 child-care spaces they currently fund.
Entering into a multi-decade skills shortage, it will be critical to ensure workers who wish to work have the opportunity. Parents, youth, older workers, Aboriginals, immigrants and those with disabilities, continually post unemployment rates often doubling the unemployment rates for the general population. The data clearly demonstrates that affordable child care will bring more workers into the labour market but is it affordable?
In the coming years, a wave of workers will be retiring, limiting our tax base while increasing demand for healthcare services. Already government is needing to distribute funding to health care and an array of valuable services, many of which the public would say are underfunded. It is estimated universal child care would cost British Columbians $1.5 billion per year, increasing the tax burden and dissuading workers from moving to the province.
While women are encouraged to pursue careers and today make up the majority of students on university and college campuses in British Columbia, the gap between men and women in the workforce continues to be significant. The solutions lie in a combination of government programming, gender equity legislation, enhanced employment standards regulations, building a strong workforce of child care providers and working with employers to provide workplaces and incentives to build a balanced workforce.
BC Labour Market Report 