Childcare, co-production and the third sector in Canada

Abstract

This paper reviews Canada's market-based childcare 'system' and considers its capacity to deliver universal services. Canada mainly relies on parent-controlled centres for delivery, in the near absence of publicly-provided services. Canadian childcare is characterized by frustrated national and provincial policy capacity, a high degree of commercial childcare, inequities in service distribution, and the burdening of parent-users (particularly mothers). This form of co-production poses considerable problems for the federal government, which has recently declared its intention to build a national system of early learning and care. The policy architecture makes a national system of early learning and childcare structurally unobtainable. This gap between political vision and local feasibility is explained through an analysis of service delivery, management and policy development. The paper concludes that co-production must shift if Canada is to implement a universal early learning and childcare program, but warns such change does not appear to be forthcoming.

Key words:

• Mothers
• public policy
• social movement
• voluntary sector
• welfare state

Acknowledgement

An earlier version of this article was presented to the session on ‘The Third Sector, Co-Production and the Delivery of Public Services’ at the Tenth International Research Symposium on Public Management, in Glasgow, April 2006. I am grateful to session organizers, Dr Victor Pestoff and Dr Taco Bransden for careful comments, and to co-panelists and audience members for their lively discussion and questions. Thanks to anonymous reviewers for their helpful critiques.

Notes

1 It is estimated that about 10 – 15 per cent of the stock of non-profit spaces are publicly operated. In Ontario, childcare may be delivered by a municipality. In Quebec, school boards may operate school-age care (Doherty et al.2003: 28).

2 The zenith of the co-op daycare movement was the 1970s, and has declined steadily since then.

3 Pestoff (1998) notes that even social democratic and family-friendly Sweden saw ‘a three-fold growth’ in commercial childcare after its 1992 decision to register private for-profit or commercial childcare. It should be noted that in the same period, co-operative and non-profit care also expanded, complementing well-established public-sector provision to positive effect (see Pestoff 1998).