Why have provinces not adopted more robust child care programs ?

Compared to other advanced democracies, Canada is a laggard when it comes to investing in child care. Current research has mainly focused on accounting for the federal government’s failure to put in place an ambitious child care program (White, 2014; Collier, 2010; Jenson, Mahon and Phillips, 2003; Mahon and Phillips, 2002; Friendly, 2001;). Strangely, very little work has sought to explain why provinces outside Quebec have failed to put in place such a program. Some authors have compared Quebec with Ontario or British Columbia (Haddow, 2015; Mahon, 2013; Collier, 2001), but a systematic account of provinces’ child care policy remains to be produced. This paper aims to fill that gap. Based on an exhaustive literature review, a comparative analysis of Canadian provinces’ political dynamic and interviews conducted in Quebec, this paper argues that a combination of three factors – all present only in Quebec help explain Quebec’s exceptionalism with respect to child care: (i) A left-of-center party ready to act as a ‘protagonist’ initiating a major child care reform; (ii) a party system characterized by the absence of a right-wing party ready to act as an ‘antagonist’ rolling back a progressive reform; and (iii) a shared understanding among parties and civil society associations that child care is an exclusive provincial responsibility. Without this shared understanding, cash-stripped provincial government suffering from vertical fiscal imbalance aren’t likely to invest in child care programs. The Puzzle: Canada and Quebec from a comparative perspective. Child care policy is one of the pillars of the “social investment turn” taken in the 1990s and 2000s by advanced welfare states. Social investment aims to shift public expenditures away from passive social policies, such as unemployment insurance and pensions, toward active social policies, such as work-family conciliation policies and training (Hemerijck, 2013; Bonoli, 2013). Active social policies tend to be defined loosely in terms of three characteristics. First, active social policies address the “new” risks associated with women’s entry into the workforce and post-industrialization (e.g. single parenting, obsolete skills) — in contrast to the “old” risks of male breadwinner industrial economies (e.g. illness, old age, and unemployment). Second, active social policies are viewed as springboards and favour instruments fostering human capital and employability, such as vocational training and education, whereas passive social policies are viewed as safety nets and use policy instruments such as income replacement. Third, active social policies seek to (re)integrate the non-employed into the labour market, thus functionally differing from the “passive” social policies of the post-war era, which chiefly sought to protect workers from excessive reliance on the market (Esping-Andersen, 1985). As shown in figure 1, public expenditures in ECEC increased substantially over the last three decades, from an average of 0.3 % of GDP in 1980 to 0.9% in 2013 across OECD countries. Despite an emerging international consensus concerning the benefits of childcare investment on human capital development and women labour market participation (OECD 2017), as well as widespread public demand for more public investment (White and Friendly 2012), Canada didn't join the bandwagon and remained a laggard in terms of childcare spending. In contrast, the Quebec government invested in an ambitious childcare program in 1997, which now puts Quebec spending relatively close to the OECD average. From this broad comparative perspective, Quebec’s trajectory is standard, 1 while the Rest of Canada's low investment path is a puzzle.