By now it is well-known that securing quality and affordable childcare is a challenge for most families across Canada. Multi-year waitlists for daycare making it nigh-on impossible for parents to rejoin the workforce when desired or resorting to ad hoc patched solutions. And when the kids are finally old enough to begin school, they are met with the challenges of before- and after-school care because once again, our workforces were not designed with parents in mind. Our organizations were designed for families that have one working parent and one stay-at-home parent.
But society has grown. The world has evolved. Our workplaces have not.
We continue to discuss the grave labour shortage in our country and the federal government’s solution is to increase immigration. As immigrants arrive, they recognize the dire housing crisis that faces our country. If you’re lucky enough to find decent housing, you face the quick realization of needing to work, sometimes more than one job, due to the high cost of housing and living in Canada matched with insufficient wages. But wait, how do you work if you don’t have childcare for your children? Great question.
In Germany, parents can sue the government for failing to provide childcare. In 2013, Germany declared that every child over the age of one has the legal right to a space in a public daycare facility. Unlike Canada, access to childcare in Germany is a core public matter and a legal obligation held by the government to encourage parents to work. These modernized family focused policies are how we create systemic change which present a myriad of benefits to our economy, gender equity, and quality of life.
To add fire to the childcare crisis we are facing in Canada, there’s a new wave of school boards across the country experimenting with a four-day school week. In theory this sounds wonderful and progressive. The practical issue, however, is that our institutions have not fully caught up to this four-day work week trend, leaving parents yet again to seek already lacking childcare options. Of course the benefits of more quality family time and improved mental health among students and staff are important, however we need to approach these kinds of systemic changes more holistically to ensure we aren’t increasing the barriers for working parents, in particular mothers, who are disproportionately impacted.
Because of the pervasive gender pay gap in Canada, when it comes to making a decision on who will need to take a step back from their career to assume family responsibilities such as a four-day school week, it usually comes down to dollars and cents, and as such it is women who historically pay the price of these type of underdeveloped ideas. It is for these reasons, and many others, that gender inequality continues to persist not just in Canada but worldwide. The UN stated in March that it could take close to another 300 years to achieve full gender equality and that has grave societal and economic implications for all of us.
Canada has a critical role to play in advancing gender equality and we need to begin thinking through our challenges, such as childcare for all ages from an intersectional lens and implement family focused policies that protect parents. If we want the engines of our country to keep propelling forward, we need to think about the economic implications of our policies and how these policies are advantaging or disadvantaging the very people who are raising the next generation of Canadians. Perhaps it’s time to take a page out of Germany’s policy book and begin solving one of the very foundational challenges of this country.
Sonja Baikogli Foley is a DEI consultant and the co-founder of Maturn.com
