Status of Women committee  I guess the first thing would have been to approach it with a spirit of humility and an understanding that most of the subject matter expertise wasn't going to reside in government. It wasn't going to reside with academics or economists. It was going to reside with the child care entrepreneurs who had actually built the infrastructure and were delivering the services.

Status of Women committee  Part of the challenge is the lack of transparency in this program. There's a lack of transparency federally. There's a lack of transparency at some of the provincial levels with respect to how things are rolling out and what's intended versus what's happening. If you think that would add some clarity, then of course it would.

Status of Women committee  I think, first of all, we have to understand that the rollout of the program is quite different depending on what province you're in. Each province and territory for the most part had a well-established system of child care before the implementation of the Canada-wide early learning and child care program.

Status of Women committee  There's a preference in Bill C-35. It was also expressed in the agreements that provinces signed prior to the passage of Bill C-35. All expansion should primarily be in the not-for-profit and public sectors. Right there, when you put a hard cap on the expansion of the sector, what you're doing is telling every supplier this sector relies on—financial institutions, insurance companies, landlords and equipment suppliers—that there's no growth potential for this group of clients.

Status of Women committee  The one thing I will say is this: Here in Ontario, if we look at independent licensed child care programs and the portion of those run as businesses, most are small businesses that are independently owned and operated by women. Independent licensed child care programs make up between 25% and 30%.

Status of Women committee  If there is a plan to fix these kinks, we haven't seen it yet. There's no evidence that there are steps being taken to create that kind of plan. I'd also say there are a lot of smart, dedicated people in Quebec who have invested decades of their lives into trying to deal with the access, staffing and quality challenges inherent in their program, and they haven't fixed it yet.

Status of Women committee  I would say a few things. First of all, there are many licensed child care centres owned and operated by women. In the way the program was implemented.... It was done without a whole lot of consultation and doesn't take into account that there are all of these small businesses.

Status of Women committee  Hi. Thanks for having me here, and thank you for having such a lovely, constructive and good-natured committee. I'm with the Association of Day Care Operators of Ontario, which represents independent, licensed child care programs, both commercial and not-for-profit programs. I've been working with child care organizations since 1993, so the aspect of women's economic empowerment that I know best is child care and, more specifically, child care entrepreneurship.

Human Resources committee  I don't disagree at all with what the previous panellist said. I think that is correct.

Human Resources committee  Are there missing components to the bill? What I would be somewhat concerned about is that we have to be a little careful about inequities, in that there are very lengthy waiting lists. Right now, people who have a space, keep that space. However, we can't create spaces fast enough to serve all of the other folks, particularly the families who really need child care in order to put a roof over their heads.

Human Resources committee  Yes, it has, actually. I would say that happened when the Province of Ontario rolled out its government-run full-day kindergarten program in public schools—FDK. Prior to that, a lot of Ontario families relied on licensed child care centres to provide kindergarten programming. In the first five years of the full-day kindergarten rollout, which moved a lot of the kindergarten programming into public schools, Ontario lost more than a thousand licensed child care centres.

Human Resources committee  I would argue that it's already happening. The data collection and the reporting requirements under the CWELCC program are pretty labour-intensive for child care licensees. I've talked with a lot of licensees about this. The consensus seems to be that at minimum, so far, the CWELCC is taking about four hours of a supervisor's time every week, just for the paperwork related to the CWELCC.

Human Resources committee  Thank you, and thanks for the honour of being with you today. I'm Andrea Hannen from the Association of Day Care Operators of Ontario, or ADCO. ADCO represents independent licensed child care programs, both commercial and not-for-profit. Most of our member centres are run as small businesses, the majority of which are owned by ECEs, early childhood educators.