You can’t get much for £5.50 nowadays. A takeaway coffee and a muffin, maybe; a pint and a packet of crisps, outside London. But in parts of Canada, roughly that amount can buy you a day’s childcare. Or it can, at least, if you can find a nursery place.
The country is now three years into a post-pandemic social experiment, offering parents heavily (and expensively) subsidised childcare for what is by envious British standards a staggeringly cheap C$10 a day. The idea is that ultimately this multibillion-dollar state programme will pretty much pay for itself, thanks to the boost in GDP expected to be provided by more parents going out to work. But arguably, its biggest insight has been treating childcare less as some kind of perk the state sadly can’t afford right now and more as what Chrystia Freeland, Canada’s deputy prime minister, calls “social infrastructure”: an essential part of the national plumbing, like commuter trains or fast broadband or any other thrusting great multibillion-pound building project we are wearily prepared to believe will ultimately be worth it.
This has been the demand this past century and a half – that government must solve the servants problem.
As a country gets richer then real wages rise – they’re the same statement. Therefore servants, in rich countries, are expensive. Therefore wimmins want someone, somewhere, to solve the problem of servants. The answer is to tax everyone so that poorer, working class, women still take care of the children of the middle class women.
And that’s all. Everything else about it is an excuse.
It goes without saying that I think there are better solutions, but if this encourages more intelligent women to have kids it’s at least a better way of wasting money than many others.
So I assume the poorer women also take care of their own children at the same time??
Feminism has always been an upper- middle/ middle class women’s thing. Working class women have always had to go out to work.
Bogan: No, the poorer women leave their children in a tax-funded daycare centre so they have the time to go and work in a tax-funded daycare centre.
This all sonds very Soviet Union. The next logical step to to extract the pups at parturition and raise them all in state babyariums.
It has the enormous benefit of requiring lots of Civil Service employment to administer the State’s generosity with Other Peoples Money.
Taxpayer funded childcare is a job subsidy. Consumers then pay for that job’s output twice, once at the point of sale and second via their taxes.
That hides the true cost of production. Is the value of output greater or less than input? Should the work be done at all? Worse, a lot of jobs these days make no profit – bureaucrats for example – so productive citizens are having their wealth transferred to non-producers, or to subsidise activity that costs more than its output is worth.
As for GDP increasing – well it includes Government spending so the spending on childcare will increase GDP, and more people in the economy will raise GDP, but will GDP per capita rise? I doubt it, probably drop as wealth is just shifted from one part of the economy to another, being consumed rather than creating more.
Burning a Rembrandt to toast mashmallows.
The main reason for the high cost of childcare in the UK is the raft of restrictive regulation, particularly the limit on the number of children that each facility can accommodate.
Don’t trust strangers with your children.
John B,
Spot on. Women will go to work and put their kids in “free” childcare because that’s the incentive. Many of them won’t even do the A+B < C check. So, the promise of free looks great.
And you know that if you audited the whole thing (including things like importing carers because women aren't looking after grandad) and proved that without the various thumbs on scales that 75% of mothers with young children probably shouldn't work, you'd be shot down for it. Even though you'd be saying that they'd be happier.
I truly believe that most women don't care about their jobs. They like hanging out with the girls at work. They're all far more excited about some charity baking thing than anything about the job. They earn a small amount of money, net. They'd be happier with coffee mornings, baking, walking the kids to school (which would mean they wouldn't get so fat).
A thirties couple I know have a nanny. I can see one problem on the horizon.
The background is (i) Nanny is fond of the children. (ii) The children are fond of Nanny. (iii) The parents are fond of Nanny. (iv) Nanny very much prefers this family to any she has worked for before.
The future problem stems from the fact that the couple are not Downton-Abbey rich. They won’t be able to afford to let Nanny retire to a cottage on the estate, surrounded by people who know her and respect her, or like her, or love her.
I don’t say it’s a huge problem, or an insurmountable problem, but only that it will cause a bit of heartache in future. It’s yer trade-offs, innit?
‘The main reason for the high cost of everything in the UK is the raft of restrictive regulation’ @Mr Womby- fixed it for you.
@dearieme- I was expecting the problem to be the wife finding out her hubby is shagging the nanny…
The outcome in Quebec (where this idiotic program was first rolled-out) was a decrease in the number of daycare spaces available, and the majority of the subsidized spaces were taken up by upper middle class parents who could afford the un-subsidized rates, but hey, why pass up a bargain.
We have a granddaughter in an un-subsidized day care – round numbers, it’s $60/day (CAD). The provider is a really nice woman who seems to love the kids, and they (at least our g-daughter) love her back. We were talking to her at a birthday party recently, and she said she has no interest in applying for or registering for the subsidized program. First, more paperwork, rules, inspections yadda yadda – she doesn’t have the time or inclination for it. Second, she sees some parental self-selection in action: as she put it (to paraphrase), ‘if people are going to be cheap about their children, I don’t want to take care of them.’
There’s more to this than first sight says:
Taking care of the kids or taking care of the parents? There’s enough ambiguity in that phrase, as written.
We could run that as a Tiffany Acheing plot point and that’s always an interesting thought really. Would it be Granny or Nanny who made the plot revelation to the youngster about that? Or congratulated her for noting it perhaps?
An easy way to check. If the staff are wearing earrings and necklaces and holding their mobile phones then the kids are not being looked after, they are being warehoused.
Same goes for teachers.
Ofsted, are you listening?
(iii) The parents are fond of Nanny.
How fond is Daddy of Nanny? That’s very often the problem. 🙂
Poorly put – sorry for the ambiguity. It was a bit of both – entitled parents, and poorly behaved children. I don’t know her basis for that opinion. I don’t know if I would be that harsh – the differnce is about $10K/Yr per child – not insubstantial if you have two or three kids, and they will each be in day care for four years.