The issue of funding 'private for-profit' daycare is where the daycare lobby gets internally conflicted between its left and right. The bed-mates start to fight, and as in most divorces, money is the issue. After all we are not talking small change: $18.5 billion [1] was the latest gross under-estimate—up from $10 billion [2] only one year before—offered by Fraser Mustard and Margaret McCain.

The left asks itself "whether a quarter of a loaf [is] better than a whole loaf"[3]: do we compromise our principles and accept public funding of 'for-profit' daycare or insist on funding for only 'non-profit'? In the pursuit of achieving non-profit purity in the federal daycare Bill-303, they have raised the spectre haunting Canada, the spectre of 'big box' foreign daycare chains.

The right has no such qualms about tax payers' money subsidizing for-profit daycare. For the Fraser Institute, if (a big if) there is to be 'preferential treatment' of institutional over parental child care, the private sector should be included. For World Bank daycare promoters, Fraser Mustard and RBC Vice President Charles Coffey, there is a "business imperative" and a need for partnership with business [4]. For the Liberals (long supported by corporate Canada), "previous Liberal approaches to child care have not focused on this… the profit/non-profit debate must not distract from the real goal," explains one Quebec Liberal MP. [5]

Of course the left ought to know—even if they don't like to mention it—that even Quebec funds for-profit daycare. The false claim of 'universality' would be even more false without the daycare spaces provided for profit. Parents using these centres would have opposed being excluded by a 'non-profit only' rule. And government cannot choose to fund for-profits only if they are not part of a big box chain: a business is a business.

The fact is that non-profit community collectives run by volunteer parent boards—the '70s image sold by the daycare left—are hardly up to taking on the massive task of overseeing daycare for all 5 million children under 13 in Canada. The image of selfless volunteers in church basements does not apply to this social mega-project. The YMCA is a multi-national big-box daycare chain and the largest seller of daycare in Canada. Though it is technically a non-profit, it is not one in the daycare lobbyists' sentimental sense of a local volunteer-run community group.

Don Giesbrecht, President of the tax-funded Canadian Childcare Federation, states that daycare industry workers are "generally fairly altruistic…nobody's in this job to get rich"[6]. We need to cut out this sentimentality around non-profits. Millions of people have done trillions of hours of unpaid work in non-profit groups and society is grateful to them. But increasingly, paid staff are undeservingly inheriting the legacy of gratitude due the unpaid workers. Staff in non-profit organizations are not Mother Theresa: they are in paid jobs. They do these jobs exactly because they are paid, otherwise they could take on unpaid work of which there is plenty available. The same can be said of public sector jobs.

University of Toronto daycare economists, Drs. Gordon Cleveland and Michael Krashinsky, have examined this issue. Their claim that that non-profits provide higher quality care than for-profit daycares is frequently cited. But in their not-frequently cited OECD paper, they state that the line between non-profit and for-profit is blurry: "if the government will only deal with non-profit centres, then for-profit centres have a significant incentive to masquerade as non-profits by incorporating themselves under the non-profit statute." [7]

These economists point out, "Relying on non-profit organisations to eliminate opportunistic behaviour can however be problematic." Though we are loathe to admit that non-profits can be 'opportunistic', this masquerade can easily be affected by an opportunistic individual with a few friends willing to sign up as board members in order to register as a non-profit organization. They can then 'hire' the initiator as the executive director with almost all the responsibility—including setting his/her own pay. Non-profit compensation is not subject to limits and can be…profitable: there was a fuss in Quebec over $100,000 salaries.

The Non-Profit Trojan Horse

Kindergarten: Rebranding State-Run Big Box Daycare

Divided They Fall?

Notes