Anne-Marie Hubert is part of a group of prominent business people in Quebec calling for the government to keep funding quality child-care, and to rally Canada’s business community to the cause.Adil Boukind/The Globe and Mail
A group of prominent Canadians is calling on corporate leaders to support high-quality early childhood education, saying it is a “nation-building investment in Canada’s future.”
The open letter signed by nearly two dozen high-profile business leaders and philanthropists was put together by Montreal-based organization B2ten.
Originally, the privately funded organization was founded to help Olympic athletes perform their best at the Vancouver Games in 2010. Since then, it has also developed a national program to teach educators how to encourage active play for children in more than 1,000 child-care centres through its arm Active for Life.
“The purpose of the letter is to create awareness and recognition, asking others to consider quality early childhood education as critical to Canada’s future and prosperity,” said JD Miller, president of B2ten.
“In doing so we look to spark reflection, for leaders to recognize the importance of early education and consider how they can act to support its growth and development.”
The letter comes as many child-care advocates say they are concerned about the future of the Canada-Wide Early Learning and Child Care plan, which promised to reduce daycare fees to an average of $10 a day by this year.
Several provinces still have yet to achieve that goal, including Ontario, where fees are capped at $22 a day, and Alberta, where the daily fee is capped at $15. The number of new spaces under the plan is also approximately 80,000 short of the original goal of 250,000 new spaces by this spring.
Getting the support of Canada’s corporate sector is crucial to hold governments to their word, said Morna Ballantyne, executive director of Child Care Now, a national non-profit advocacy group.
“It’s especially important at this time because the health of the economy is on everybody’s minds, especially because of the current trade war that the U.S. has started against Canada,” she said.
Earlier this year, the federal government announced $5.4-billion in new child-care funding in addition to the more than $58-billion that has already been given to provinces and territories since 2021.
But that new funding is only for the next two years, leaving some advocates doubting the future of the program beyond 2028.
The 23 people who signed the letter include businessman and philanthropist Stephen Bronfman; Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children CEO Dr. Ronald Cohn; the deputy chairman of Power Corporation of Canada, André Desmarais; Nathalie Larue, an executive vice-president at Desjardins Group; former federal attorney-general Peter MacKay; and Anne-Marie Hubert, who was a former EY Eastern Canada lead and is now chair of the Canadian chapter of the Institute for Human Technology and a board member of B2ten.
“The hope is that we’re going to have a number of business leaders that are going to say, ‘This is important,’ and that we’re going to change the conversation from a social issue to an economic issue,” Ms. Hubert said.
Mr. Miller said he hopes the letter will encourage business leaders to support quality child care in a wide range of ways, including advocating for it with provincial governments, considering offering child care for employees and partnering with less-privileged communities where spaces are lacking.
The letter highlights the benefits of high-quality child care, including stimulating children’s social, emotional, cognitive and physical development, improving school readiness and increasing parents’ work force participation.
“Each dollar invested yields significant economic and social returns,” the letter states.
Catherine Haeck, a Montreal-based economist who specializes in the economics of early childhood education and development, said with the uncertain future of the federal program, the letter comes at an opportune moment.
“There cannot be uncertainty because otherwise people don’t know what’s happening won’t open a child-care [centre],” she said.
A report released earlier this year by the Centre for the Study of Living Standards, an Ottawa-based non-profit organization, examined the impact of the federal child-care plan and concluded that 29,000 mothers found employment between 2021 and 2025 thanks to the deal.
The result of those jobs has been a direct GDP increase of $2.7-billion a year, according to the study.
Access to high-quality child care not only improves women’s labour force participation, but it also plays an important role in early development, which saves governments significant costs later in life, Ms. Hubert said.
“We won’t have the quality of workers we need. We have less workers than we need. We have challenges with immigration. It’s a very low cost to invest in early childhood education versus the cost of developing cognitive skills, behavioural skills, social skills at a later stage,” she said.
Mr. Desmarais, an early support of B2ten, said he hopes the letter helps start a national conversation about the importance of child care not merely when it comes to its economic benefits but also around helping children’s development, particularly when it comes to leading active lifestyles.
“We’ve just got to do this if we want to have a great country and maintain our vision of who we are,” he said.