This document is the fourth version of Child care in Canada: Provinces and territories that the Childcare Resource and Research Unit has produced. The 1998 version has a modified title: Early childhood care and education in Canada: Provinces and territories: 1998. This change of language has a close relationship to a significant shift in the Canadian conception of child care, not only in the child care community but among other sectors of the population as well. A quote from Carol Bellamy, Executive Director of UNICEF sums this up:

There is a growing consensus that child care and early education are inseparable.

In the end of the 1990s, there has been a convergence of ideas about why and how early childhood care and education (or early childhood development services) are important not only for individual Canadian children and families but for Canadian society-at-large. Researchers, policy analysts, and sectoral groups in diverse fields - economics, health and medicine, education, human rights, and business groups - have come to support traditional advocates in feminist, social justice and trade union circles to insist that action on child care is imperative. There is broad recognition that a strategy for developing early childhood services that offer both early childhood education to strengthen healthy development for all children and child care to support mothers' labour force participation is in the public interest.

That Canada does not provide adequate early childhood care and education has been well documented and is not in dispute. Central to the weakness of existing approaches to early childhood development services is that a coherent public policy has not been developed. As a result, there is even more fragmentation and incoherence of services than there was two decades ago. The mishmash of services offers "educational"kindergarten for almost all five-year-olds. However, as it is mostly part-day, and of only one year's duration, Canadian preschoolers' early education opportunities are much more limited than are those of their peers in most countries in mainland Europe where virtually all three-to five-year-olds attend publicly-funded full school-day programs. In Canada, to fill this gap, some preschoolers younger than kindergarten age attend part-day nursery schools - if their parents can afford to pay.

The labour force participation rate of Canadian women with children aged 0-6 has been above 65% for some years, and is higher than it is in many other industrialized nations. Yet as this publication shows, the availability of good quality care for their children has improved little, so that the vast majority of children are cared for in informal arrangements that are by no stretch of the imagination "early childhood education".

While most early childhood care and education services are under provincial aegis, several other early childhood programs with related objectives are fully funded by and the responsibility of the federal government. The federal government also delivers a tax deduction directly to parents to cover the cost of work-related care regardless of the quality or "developmental" value.

Every aspect of early childhood education and child care varies widely across Canada's provinces and territories - the range of services offered, eligibility, funding, statutory requirements for their provision, monitoring and enforcement of standards - and there may be almost as much range within provinces as there is among them. The objectives of programs providing early childhood care and/or education range from "providing opportunities for healthy child development" to "ensuring that children are 'ready to learn' at school-entry age" to "providing a 'head start' for children at-risk" to "supporting the transition of single mothers from welfare to work" to "supporting the workforce participation costs of parents with young children" to "reducing crime in the future".

It is sometimes suggested that this wide variety is an appropriate response to regional diversity in community needs. In reality, however, early childhood care and education services in most of Canada have been developed so incoherently that although each province and territory has a tangle of programs, only a minority of children and families has access to services that provide the reliable "care" parents need or the early childhood education (or early childhood development) services that are of demonstrated benefit. A statement made by a 1988 Senate committee studying child care still rings true in 1999:

Provincial child care programs resemble each other..in what they lack...our intention is...to suggest how rudimentary (the) system really is. (Subcommittee of the Standing Committee on Social Affairs, Science and Technology, Senate of Canada, 1998: 1)

This version of Provinces and territories, in a very small way, tries to contribute to closing the gaps among the variety of child care, early childhood education, and child development services. The reader will note that most of the information continues to be concerned with regulated child care rather than with kindergarten, Aboriginal Head Start or other related services. The mandate of the Childcare Resource and Research Unit (CRRU) and this publication is regulated child care. Yet some information is provided about other early childhood services in an attempt to foster conceptualization of early childhood programs holistically rather than maintaining them as different "silos" with different funding and different eligibility.

In closing, it is important to note the frailty of much of the data included in this publication. There continues to be little reliable, recurrently collected cross-Canada data about regulated child care, kindergarten, or related early childhood services. Most data were kindly provided by provincial/territorial governments, and every attempt was made by CRRU to ensure that the same categories of data were used from jurisdiction to jurisdiction as well as from year to year. Data sources, with appropriate reservations, may be found in the section titled EXPLANATORY NOTES.

Martha Friendly