 Welcome and thank you for joining our event today. My name is Laura Bornfront and I am the director of Early and Elementary Education in the Education Policy Program at New America. Our Education Policy Program focuses on equity for students who are underserved by their schools and society at large. We also take a broad view examining learning environments and public education systems of all kinds, starting with those serving our littlest ones and continuing up through adulthood. We know that the way our country currently funds and delivers early care and education is not working well for most children, families or educators. And in the U.S. there is no single early care and education system. There are siloed funding streams that sit in multiple federal agencies and even more programs at the state and local level. Paying for early care and learning is largely left to families and can exceed the cost of college in many places. And the educators who teach and care for our youngest children are paid much less than what they should be for the valuable, essential and complex work they do. The COVID-19 pandemic has brought a bright light to the fragility, inadequacies and inequities of the existing early care and education policies and systems in the U.S. And the pandemic has brought a sense of urgency to make changes, to reimagine what could be. President Biden's American Families Plan would make significant investments in early care and education infrastructure, greatly expanding families access to quality programs. The plan calls for $225 billion over 10 years in child care funding to make child care more affordable, improve the quality and invest in the ECE workforce. Under the plan low to middle income families would pay no more than 7% of their income for high quality care for children up to age five and the families struggling the most wouldn't pay anything. The plan also calls for spending $200 billion to establish a national partnership with states to offer free, high quality pre-k to all three and four-year-olds, potentially benefiting five million children and saving the average family $13,000. It's time the United States truly invests in quality early care and education and early childhood educators. The economy is stronger with quality early care and education, women and families are stronger with quality early care and education and children have better long-term outcomes with quality early care and education. There is a lot we can learn from other countries around the world about what works and what doesn't when it comes to funding, designing and delivering early care and education. And today we're here to talk about lessons from one of them. In 1997, the Canadian province of Quebec invested in creating a universal childcare system guaranteeing a spot for every child who needed one. Now the Canadian government is proposing to build on the Quebec model in order to offer universal childcare across the country. What can the US learn from Quebec as we attempt to move toward establishing our own equitable, high quality universal system here in the US? In a moment, we'll dig into that question. First, some of you may not be as familiar with New America. Our organization is dedicated to renewing the promise of America and strives to explain and uncover the implications, both the challenges and opportunities inherent in a time of dramatic technological and social change. I invite all of you to join today's discussion on Twitter with the hashtag universal ECE, put comments or put questions in the Q&A or the chat box, and let's get started. So I'm happy to introduce Bridget Schulte, our moderator for today's panel discussion. She's the director of the Better Life Lab, a collaborator on this event today and a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist formerly of the Washington Post. Join me in welcoming Bridget. Bridget. Thank you so much, Laura, and thank you for that wonderful and sobering introduction to today's discussion. So as Laura mentioned, the Better Life Lab and the Early Ed program we are co-hosting this event today, Better Life Lab is the work family justice and gender equity program at New America. And we're really excited about having this deep dive discussion. And so what I'd like to do, I'm going to introduce the panelists. We're going to have a bit of discussion, but then we really want to open it up. We've got a number of participants, lots of questions. So we want to make sure that we make time for your questions. So please do put them in the Q&A and the chat. We'll monitor them and we'll open them up for questions toward the end. So let me welcome our panelists. First we have Catherine Hack, and forgive me if I'm pronouncing that incorrectly. Catherine, you can correct me. She's an associate professor at the University of Quebec in Montreal. She's an economist who researches families and children and has studied the impact of Quebec's universal child care, their program on child well-being, as well as women's labor force participation. Next we have Brenda Jones-Harden. She's the Allison Richmond professor for children and families at the University of Maryland. She researches the use of early childhood interventions to promote more positive results in low-income families. Her current research projects include family child care, really looking at family child care and using early head start dollars to improve infant and toddler care. We also have Elliot Haspel. He's a program officer at the Robbins Foundation. He's an early childhood and K-12 education policy expert and writer. He started his career as a fourth grade public school teacher in Arizona. He's also author of Crawling Behind, America's Child Care Crisis and How to Fix It, as well as numerous articles and essays. And finally we have Christa Japelle. She is also an associate professor at the University of Quebec in Montreal, and she's a well-known expert on the quality of early childhood environments and programs to improve services. She's also done longitudinal research on child care for more than 25 years and is a real expert on what's happening in Quebec. So let's dive right into the conversation. Catherine, let's start with you. As Laura pointed out, Quebec has a universal child care system. Right now it's gotten an awful lot of attention, both for good and for ill. There's some real controversy around it. So let's dive into that. What's true? What's not true? What's worked? What hasn't? And most importantly, what we can learn. But before we can do that, Catherine, can you talk about how did this all start? Tell us the history. Back in 1997, when this started, what was going on? And tell us what happened. Yes. Thank you. Thanks for the invitation. I'm really pleased to be here today. So if you think about how it all happened, it started a long time ago, way before the 1997 reform. So as early as 1974, we had different groups of people advocating for universal child care. So it was a movement that was starting in the late 70s and people pushed for it. And eventually it came to fruition in 1997 when Pauline Marois, our Ministry of Education, put this universal system in place. So it didn't come up overnight. So tell us a little bit about it. How does it work? Is everything working beautifully? Is it really at truly universal? And particularly, as we've heard here in the United States, there are people who say this is a great model. There are also people who say there's some real passions that it wasn't good for children. Studies that have shown ties to not so great child outcomes. So tell us a little bit more about how it works. And tell us more about some of this controversy. And what is it that we need to be listening to? And can you put it all in context? What do we need to understand better about it? Yeah, of course. So first, most of the literature, the scientific literature on the Kebuk child care reform refers to the first 10 years of the program. So since then, we don't have data. So we cannot really give you an update on what's going on right now. So you have to think about it as the first 10 years, first 12 years when we were implementing the system. The system had two goals in mind. So the first one was to raise the labor force participation of women and allow them to juggle the demands of work and family. And the second objective was to help with child development to make sure that all kids were well prepared for school. So if you look at the first goal, the system really delivered well on that one. So in Quebec, the labor force participation of women with children raised by 12 percentage point, that's huge. We were way behind other Canadian provinces and now we're at the top. So we've been at the top since then and we're remaining at the top and no one is catching up with us right now. So this was one of the goals. It helped, it helped women maintain their relationship with the labor force and it also helped single mothers be able to work because often their income doesn't allow them to pay for childcare and work. So a system like this will allow them to be full participants in the labor force. The second objective was child development. So this is where controversy happens. On the first one, everybody agrees. On the second one, there's more controversy. So if you look at the early years and Krista will talk about it, but you have to think about the fact that the system doesn't provide a uniform level of quality. The system, as it was designed in 1997, had a high quality model in mind, but as it developed and different parties came into power, the different services started to appear. So it is universal, but not everyone has access to the same thing and we can come back to this later. So when you look at the impact on kids, it's more mixed. So when they're in, then when they're little, we of course see that they get more runny nose and things like this because they're in a community. So they catch a bit more little disease, nothing major, nothing to worry about. But when you look at it later, those effects tend to fade away. Where the big controversy happened and that has been cited in different media is the paper that was rising, that was claiming that the child care reform raised criminality in Quebec. So we had more crimes because of this reform. The truth is, if you look at the crime rate in Quebec of young people, it's always been lower than in the rest of Canada. So before we implemented this, we had less criminality. It was a factor of two thirds of what you observe outside of Quebec. And today it's still lower. So what happened is our crime rate declined a bit over time, but in Canada, the crime rate declined a bit more, but we're still below. We don't have more crimes than what we had before. So this system did not create criminals overall, not at all. So our view is that if you think about the second goal, because we didn't invest in quality enough, we have more of a neutral impact on kids on average. So let's dig into that. You know, Chris, I know we wanted to get to you later, but since, you know, Catherine, since you said you brought up quality, Christa, can you talk a little bit about that? And what is it about the system and the way that it's set up that ensures that some kids get high quality and some kids don't? And really kind of talk a little bit about what was supposed to be designed and what actually happened and how that impacted quality. Thank you, Richard. Yeah, I think I, you know, it's a very complex question. A, it was set out to be a universal system, but universal means that like in some European countries, a child or family has the right to a place, but it's not universal because we don't have enough spaces. There's still thousands of families waiting for a subsidized place. And the results that Katrina presented are very interesting because it depends how you analyze data. You know, economists have a very, I'm a psychologist, Katrina is an economist, and we have very different ways of looking at data. And the analysis that that Katrina cited are difference in difference in difference, which is a different way from the developmental psychologists who look at a cohort, which is followed over years. And you look at did they go to childcare? What type of childcare? Because there are big quality differences between the not-for-profits, the for-profits, the home-based care is lacking because, you know, people are not very well trained. And we saw, and a lot of my colleagues have published very good articles on that, that the children who were in center-based care, especially children from low socioeconomic backgrounds, benefited from it and benefited for school readiness, for later achievement, even now we have data for high school completion. It doesn't make much of a difference because equality is generally, unfortunately mediocre. It doesn't make a much difference for children who are stimulated at home, but it makes a big difference for children who don't get much at home. And that's where we should, we should put the money to provide them with high quality environments because they can make a difference. And I mean, we've seen that in American studies, you know, the classics like the Perry preschool, the Carolina, and so on project. And we are, we're having a tough time right now because with a pandemic, we also lost a lot of educators. And recruiting educators, I'm sorry, maybe I'm going over the topic I'm supposed to talk about, recruiting educators is very difficult because it's not a very attractive job. And I always liked the image of a zookeeper makes more money than a childcare educator, you know. And so how do we as a society value that work? That's a big systemic question. But there are positive effects of the childcare system for the most vulnerable if they get into childcare, because they're also underrepresented in childcare. You know, it's interesting that you said that in the United States, one of the things that we always say, or often say is that an early educator or childcare worker actually earns less than a parking lot attendant. So, you know, poverty wages here, where that one and two are earned such little money that they qualify for a public benefit. But if we can stay with you, you know, and then I want to I want to open it up to Elliott and Brenda talk to talk about the US context, but to still try to understand Quebec. You know, what what was the original idea? Was everybody supposed to be in a certain type of care? And then, you know, you talk about, you know, for profit and not her profit and home based, what ended up happening just just systemically, what was supposed to happen? What ended up happening? And is that part of kind of why you get these uneven results? Well, the idea was to provide all children independent of their socioeconomic background with high quality care. And the idea was to develop these early childhood centers, which are which are not for profit. And they were actually also conceived to include family and provide all kinds of services. And the demand was extreme. I mean, women could go back to work and pay $5 a day for child care. And that I mean, like I've been said, I mean, our rate surpassed the rate and the rest of Canada, because we were in the past, we didn't have high that high labor force participation. So that was a tremendous demand. And in 1997, 1998, the government said, Oh, by 2000, we have all the kids in child care. But that was actually not feasible. And so to meet the demand, a cheaper way to create spaces was the family, the home based care, which grew rapidly. And of course, I guess we share that in many countries, home based care is not like Brenda will certainly talk about that. It's not high quality. And people don't need much training. And then there's post we have a curriculum, they're supposed to, you know, implant, if you say that, this kind of curriculum. And the sector grew rapidly. And then I mean, it's, it's all political depends what kind of party is in power. And there was a moratorium on the for profits. A number of them sign most of them signed an agreement with the government to offer the low parental contributions basis. And then a liberal market based government came into power. And they developed for profits that were not subsidized, but introduced a tax credit for the parents at the end of events. So the, right now, there are more children in for profit settings than they are in in the in the CPUs in the not for profit setting. So of course, research has shown nationally and internationally that the for profits are of lower quality. That's why we have these mixed results, you know, and one sad fact is that in low income neighborhoods, there are fewer non profits, not for profits. And also, I mean, we have all these statistics, thank God, we have lots of research. You can also see that children from underprivileged backgrounds are more likely to be in poor quality settings. So the whole the whole goal of kind of address social inequality hasn't worked so far. And, and I think we're collectively we're brainstorming, what can we do? And I hope the money we get from the federal government. I hope that the provincial government will invest it in creating spaces in the not for profit sector in poor neighborhoods and support support the staff and find qualified staff big challenge. Does that answer your question? Yeah, well, this is this is great. Catherine, I wanted to jump in and then I want to I want to get to Elliott and Brenda to talk about the US context with Catherine. Yeah, go ahead. Yes. And to just add on on Chris's point, which I agree with them completely. And we've shown in some of our paper that indeed lower socioeconomic children didn't really access the higher quality modes of care as much as others. But when you think about developing a system, so if I'm thinking about the US thinking about this, it's important to keep in mind that when you're going to roll out a system like this, and when we did roll it out, we we had in mind that the pressure of demand would be high, because we we first rolled in the four years old, then the three, then the two, then the one to kind of create this space. But even by doing this, the pressure of demand was so high, that it created political pressure to just quickly open spaces that were cheap, because parents wanted to work, they wanted a space. So it's almost impossible to create a system of high quality overnight. You don't have like millions of thousands of people at home right now that are highly qualified to do that job. So you need to think about it as something that will develop over time, and in which quality will always remain a top priority so that you always monitor quality. So I think it's important to be realistic about how fast this can happen. So, Elliott, let me turn to you at this point. You know, you've been following, you know, not only trends around the world, but really looking at the US context, you know, and I just saw one of the, you know, OECD puts out all these wonderful country by country comparisons and looking at US investment in childcare. And we are down, like we are like second or third from the bottom, like we are close to, we are close to nothing. And I know that we have had some, some, you know, with the Biden plan and some bailouts. But, you know, some people would argue that's just trying to help us kind of get back to where we were before the pandemic, which as Laura pointed out, was not a very good place. So talk in a little bit about the US context and, you know, as you're listening to Krista and Catherine, what are you picking up about, what are the real important lessons that we need to learn in this context here? Yeah, I appreciate that. And, you know, I think one of the first lessons is like, don't let anyone like go waving around Quebec as some like cudgel to, you know, universal childcare over the head with, which is what unfortunately some folks in the US try to do the story there is clearly much more complicated. And I appreciate, you know, because then you have to be sharing sharing the reality up there. You know, I think a couple of things we think about a childcare system that works for parents that works for the providers that works for children. There are a few pillars. And actually, you know, I appreciate numerical, you all put out this care index report a couple years back, they've been talked about these. And, you know, you have to think about, you know, affordability, you have to think about access and you have to think about quality, right? These are sort of the three legs of the three-legged stool. And I think what Quebec teaches us is that you really can with the universal system, successfully handle the sort of affordability and the access, right? Like, $5 a day. I mean, you're jaw kind of drop, Bridget, and I might do it like for parents who are shelling out, you know, $10,000 plus, you know, a year for childcare. I mean, that is truly like would be would be life changing in ways that would trickle down to their children as well with reductions of family stress, access, right? Like being able to know that you can get a slot, you know, like that's that's obviously something we know that we can do. And, you know, I think that perhaps Catherine can touch on this later. We also know that like it pays for itself in many, many ways. The down payment number can be large, but you get a lot of that back from that maternal employment, you know, and also tells us that there's huge demand, right? We now have empirical evidence, you often hear this about, you know, well, maybe we're just catering a certain, you know, to the elites, which I think is a canard, but, you know, clearly, like the demand is there. And so I think the key or Quebec teaches us is that we need to design the US system very thoughtfully. And we need to design it in a way that is going to prioritize quality, because I think what we know in the US, and, you know, with respect to Dr. Javelle, like, you know, the home base care can be very high quality, you know, a center base can be very high quality, right? Like we can have high quality care just about, anyway, you can get high quality care from a grandparent or an aunt. But what's required is having the support systems in place, having the trainings in place, having, you know, the ability for the providers to get a good enough wage that they're themselves not super stressed out, you know, you mentioned right, half of the childcare workforce is on some kind of public assistance. If you're worried about putting food on your table or where your own child is getting childcare from, you're not necessarily like super attentive with the, you know, two-year-old is in front of you. So I think there's a lot of lessons around quality. Something Dr. Javelle said to me when I, her and I talked a while back was we need to go slow and go thoroughly. And I think that's absolutely true when we think about, you know, what comes next, whether that's the Child Care for Working Families Act, which is a lot of what the American Families Plan is based off of, or some other piece of legislation that the design needs to be very, very careful. But what Quebec does prove is that if you do this, if you actually put in the money in the investment, universal system, it's going, the people want it, they need it, and it's going to have massive, you know, benefits for families writ large. Because if you, if we're going to solve the quality piece, then, you know, access, affordability quality are all working in tandem, and you're really doing good things for women's equity, you're doing good things for working families, you're doing good things for children, and you're making sure that all families have the opportunity to flourish. And then the last thing I'll just highlight before I pass it off back to you is, you know, Quebec, just like, you know, the U.S. system is not a mandatory system. These are about having choices. It's about having options. It's about pluralism, right? Like all of these sort of principles, which we would want in the U.S. system, I think, are reflected in Quebec. And, you know, when they'll talk about this, I think near a little bit later in other provinces as well as Canada is now starting to go nationwide. And this is not some small Scandinavian outlier. I think about Finland here, right? This is a large diverse nation that is literally right next door. So I think we can learn a whole lot from them. Yeah, I love that. You always see it, you know, exactly. Here's a, here's a country that's often seen as sort of more in the model of the United States, the UK, Canada, Australia, you know, many in our political system like to think of comparing to these kinds of countries. So we are going to get to that, you know, what Laura also mentioned, sort of what's coming down the pike for Canada. But Brenda, let me turn it to you. We've had some discussion about family homes and family care and low-income families and how, you know, there have been some really good benefits in Quebec for children, particularly, you know, in low-income families, but that it's really uneven, that there isn't the same access. They are not access, they don't have the same access to quality. And I think in our previous conversations, you were saying that family homes, what is it, you know, more than a third of all infants and toddlers in the United States are in family homes. And that's, it's really the sort of the choice or the option for many low-income families. So talk a little bit about what you've heard from Quebec and where family homes fit into what we need to be thinking about moving forward. Sure. Thank you for this invitation. But before I go sort of taking a deep dive into home-based child care, I do want to make a few contextual comments that really do guide my own thinking about what the lessons are from Quebec and how they can help us in the States. First of all, I do think, although certainly we're going to see what happens across Canada soon, that is very, very different from the United States. And I just want to make sure that we pay attention to that context. We live in a country that's very, very heterogeneous. We have a lot of minorities in this country. And as all of you know, not only is there this high correlation between minority status and poverty in this country. So when we talk about low-income, we have to think about race and immigration and all that kind of stuff more than other countries. But we also have to think about our early childhood workforce. Like Elliot said, many of our workforce is on public assistance. And we have to say many of our workforce are women of color as well. So I think we have to really take that into consideration as we think about this. The other thing that I want to say is that in the United States, we do not, as Elliot said, do not have a system. And I harken back to my advisor Ed Ziegler and one of the biggest disappointments of his career was that he couldn't push us forward on a childcare system. And it saddens me to think that even after his death, we still don't have it. But I feel like we're making progress. We're doing things. We're getting better. But the one thing that we have had, I do believe, is an emphasis on what can happen to families below the poverty line. So if you think about Early Head Start, for example, that is high-quality childcare that's provided to children under the poverty line. Although, as Elliot and everybody on this call probably knows, Early Head Start really does only access a very, very small percentage of eligible children. So that's one thing we really, really need to be working on. But at least we know that we can build this kind of system for low-income children. What we have not done at all is try to address the needs of the working poor who are right above that federal poverty line. Pre-K, we've done a better job with it, but certainly not for childcare, particularly for kids who are birthed to three. So I wanted to also make a comment, though, about Early Head Start. One of its initiatives that is most recent is this idea of leveraging Early Head Start dollars to improve the quality of childcare. I think that is a really good strategy. We got a lot of work to do in that domain. The money doesn't always go where it should go, but at least you're getting some childcare centers to say, I want to try to do some work to raise the quality. So I wanted to make those comments. But back to your, Bridget, to what you were asking about home-based childcare. I mean, this is really relevant to my own area of interest, which is the only reason I'm thinking about it, which is how do you serve low-income and minority families? And we do know because minority families, low-income families, work non-traditional hours, they cannot use center-based care in the same way. I mean, an eight to six kind of program just doesn't work for them when you work at a fast food restaurant and you don't get off till midnight. So what family childcare does, home-based childcare with relatives or with unrelated people, is provide you a space to put your children that's safe that will give you the flexibility as a low-income worker that you need. Now until we get to the point that we can do that in center-based programs, we have to think about supporting these family childcare providers. Yes, absolutely. As Krista has said, the quality is lower. We know that. We know it has a lot to do with what we pay them. We know it has a lot to do with the fact that they're not regulated to the same extent. The standards for them are very, very different. But there are examples of how you can create, for example, networks. And one example is what has happened in New Haven, Connecticut with the All Our Ken effort, where they're really trying to create these networks of family childcare providers. We have a big one in my state of Maryland, where they get lots of peer support, but also free professional development and materials and all that kind of thing that really do help them improve quality. But one of the things that I actually am learning from one of my graduate students who's actually doing her dissertation on family childcare is the thing that we don't talk about as much is the relationship that these families have with their providers. So not only are they getting childcare, they're getting support themselves, how to be a better parent, how to navigate the workspace and your space at home, how to think about stress and how to help yourself calm down, all these kinds of things that you don't typically get from center-based providers because one, you get different ones all the time. You're not having the same person do the same thing. But also these are providers who often are families for five and six years. They have multiple children that go through them. They're there from the time the kids are babies to when they go to school. So these are long-term relationships that one of the things that we're learning is that we don't measure that as a particular benefit of these programs and a particular aspect of quality. It doesn't sort of fit into our notions of what process quality is all about. So I wanted to make that comment. The other comment that I really wanted to make is we have not put a lot of our public dollars into home-based childcare. We're much more willing to put it in a center-based care and Head Start programs that aren't family, kin and neighbor care. But if we could think about how we can, for example, help parents use those subsidies that they get from Child Care Development Fund to pay for home-based childcare. Or we can think about using early Head Start dollars more intentionally to pay for home-based childcare. I think we would be in a better place. And the other quick thing I'm going to say before I'm going to turn it over back to you is that I think we have to think about the regulation part of home-based childcare. We have a lot of home-based childcare providers who say, I don't even want to go through this. The requirements that you all have for me for health and safety, for staffing, it's just more than I can afford. And a lot of our home-based childcare providers are, yes, they're business owners, but they are really small business owners who don't make a lot of money off of this. And so we're asking them to do a whole lot in order to be regulated and therefore be, you know, have access to these public funds and the subsidies, etc. So I think in the U.S., we need to do a lot of work around that space. Yeah, you bring up so many excellent points, Brenda. Thank you so much, you know, especially if thinking about the, you know, these are people who are very small, very dedicated to what they do. If you look at the family home providers in California that have banded together to form a provider union, you know, one of their rallying prizes, we make five bucks a day, you know? And this is, that's not a parent paying five bucks a day, like in Quebec, that's what people are earning, you know? So before we go on to kind of like the bigger picture in Quebec, I really wanted to go back to, again, I'm sorry, not to Quebec, but to Canada and what's coming next. Katherine and Krista, I wonder, can you answer some of the questions that Brenda and Elliot brought up about caregivers and caregiver wages? You know, and here we do have this undervaluing, invisible labor, you know, poverty wages. You know, Krista, you had mentioned the zookeeper makes more than, you know, an early educator or a child care worker. You know, has the Quebec experiment looked at that, tried to address that and really made the connection, as Elliot was saying, of, you know, a well compensated staff or educators with how important that is for quality. Can you talk a little bit about that? Yeah, yeah. I mean, we, you know, if you compare the wages of child care providers across Canada, Quebec isn't that bad, but put it in perspective. And if you work in an early childhood center, not for profit, after 10 years, your salary is about $25 an hour, Canadian. Okay. If you work in the for profit sector, and a lot of people who are not qualified are going into the for profit sector, of course, the wages are much lower. So this is that it's not much money. And that explains also that there is a huge turnover. I mean, people like to work in the not for profits because they're unionized, they have, you know, the benefits that come with being unionized, whereas in the for profit, there's such a huge turnover because the conditions, the work conditions are terrible. And the home based providers, and it's really interesting what you're saying, Brenda, there are, we're seeing a development in, I mean, in the home based care, people are off can offer if they're associated or accredited by a coordinating office, they can offer presently. And I think that's a question somewhere somebody asked presently the fee is $8 and 50 cents for center based care, publicly funded center based care. And even in the for profits that have made this this deal with the ministry and in family based childcare, but their days, you know, and it comes back to quality issues like ratio, I don't know about the states, but we have for home based care, one provider for six children. If you have an assistant who earns less, you can have nine children, but six children all day long, and you're supposed to, you know, they're fed in our, they're supposed to get good food. And from our observation, that's not always the case. Hot dogs are very prevalent. And so you look at it, you know, you're, you are allowed to children younger than 18 months already. Whoa. And then changing diapers, taking care of the kids, stimulating the kids, implementing an educational program, that's impossible, you know, it is really, and I agree with Brenda, we should, A, we should cut the ratios, even center based care, cut the ratios and support the people. And in home based care, a lot of people have opted out of the, especially during the pandemic, out of the coordinating office, because there were lots of demands in terms of hygiene and safety. And you wonder what's happening there, because we have a parallel system in home based care, you can also, without being accredited by a coordinating office, you can also, you can have six kids in your home, which is like, we call unregulated care. And we have, it's a gray zone, we don't know how many there are, you know, it's, it's, and you wonder what's going on there. And in the Quebec launch, you do no study on child development. We, we follow, it's a while back, the data, we followed a child and through the parent and the child, we got into all kinds of care settings. Among them, those unrank unregulated family based care. And of course, they're even of lower quality than the family based care. So a lot of our children are in, in settings that, you know, that, that, that don't reassure me. And an interesting thing is, because in that Quebec study, we also had data on the family socioeconomic data. And we realized parents who lived in poor neighborhoods and had their children in family based care or for profit, the quality of those settings were lower than children who lived in more affluent neighborhoods and were in the, you know, whereas the quality wasn't different for the not for profits. So I mean, another argument that there, there are more regulations and there's more a culture of striving to reach a certain quality level and maintain it, which these days for the pandemic is like very critical. So what our model, what our model shows is when you invest in a public system, a universal system that's not yet universal, it does change children's life. And we know that children's development before age five is critical. So this is why we decided to invest in this and we need to do more and make it more uniform. So, so let's get to that. You know, we're getting a lot of questions, which is awesome. And so as I've been monitoring them, there's some questions that have that have come up that we've actually already answered, which is great. But there is, you know, there are some questions very specifically on that that point about investment. You know, so, you know, Catherine, can you share we're like roughly how much does how much money does put into the childcare system? You know, how did that compare before? And then we're also getting a question like how is it funded, you know, was there a dedicated stream from a new tax, you know, and if so, what was the nature of it? So how it worked originally is that other programs we had for lower income households, or for example, the baby bonus that we had before were stopped and reinvested in the childcare system. So the net cost of the intervention was not extremely high for Quebec at the time. So it was money that we had in other safety pro safety net program that we were we reallocated to that program. And it depends on the childcare space, the type of space we're talking about the cost to the government, but for a place in the higher quality mode of care, you're talking about $15,000 per year. So this is our highest quality mode of care. And with the commitment of the federal government that we've that was recently advertised, because you have to understand that we we've run this program independently. So we're really relying only on provincial tax dollars. So it was really difficult to make it a more generous and expand the system beyond and above what we've already done. But as soon as you start to be able to invest in federal dollars, then it becomes a different story. So if the extra money that will come through the childcare budget from the federal government is allocated to our childcare system, we could deploy it and have only the higher quality mode of care for all children that do attend childcare. Because to Elliot's point, it's a system that's not compulsory, we allow parents to decide what they feel is best for their family. So families that decide to stay at home or the father stays at home is very difficult now here too. That's okay too. But the system is there to allow you to work or study if you feel this is the best solution for your family. So it's interesting that you talk about choices, you know, and Quebec also has a very generous paid family medical leave program. And it also really encourages men to take it. The rates have become much higher in recent years. And it's very interesting that sounds like Quebec, like many other countries is using paid family leave as a real way to address infant care. The first year is with the family and then you go to childcare. And this is what's best for child development. And that fathers and mothers should share the first year. So you were mentioning what's coming down the pike and Elliot and Brenda, I want to bring you back into the conversation here. So the Canadian government has just agreed to spend billions of more dollars over five years and sort of expand what they did in Quebec more broadly. Talk about the lesson learned there. What kind of dollars are we talking about and is something like that possible in the United States? And along with that, if I can sort of piggyback another question, there's another question from the audience is like, so how do you kind of balance that go slow and be thorough that Krista and Catherine are talking about. And some of these timelines, you know, where you've got to spend the money in a certain amount of time, you know, talk about sort of the just the practicality of the go slow, the need for money and the politics here. Brenda and Elliot, can you, this will be sort of the kind of last couple of questions here. Yeah, I'm happy to start and then Brenda, if you want to join in. So I first of all, I think we should put the numbers in context. So $30 billion over five years is what the federal Canadian government has pledged. If you very roughly sort of population adjust us to them, that would be about $240 billion over five years, you know, that's just $40, $50 billion. It's a lot of money. I mean, for context, the US government currently puts a few in somewhere $25, $30 billion a year into sort of all sorts of child care funding sources. So it would be a lot. It's also sort of in line with what's being proposed in the Child Care for Working Families Act. And I think we need to distinguish between two things. There's the pandemic response bucket of money, right? So the American Rescue Plan and the other stimulus is that happened in 2020. And that is time limited money that we have to expand it by 2024. It has to be used for various things. Proposals like what's in the American Families Plan, the Child Care for Working Families Act and there warrants a universal child care and early learning bill. Those are permanent moving forward. So let's just very briefly, the Child Care for Working Families Act has a ramp up period of three or four years. I may get some of these details slightly wrong. But after about four or five years, it becomes a sort of a permanent entitlement where the appropriation is how much money it takes to make sure that everyone within the states have access to child care if they want it. And so if you think about that, that would give you time to sort of ramp up. And you can think about learning these lessons to develop a system where everyone can access a high quality program, family-based, center-based, whatever these that they wanted to do. So we do have some proposals on the table moving forward, I think that would let us create a system and it would take an investment similar to what they're doing in Canada. What's really exciting, I think they're doing it. They're not talking about it. Just in the past week or two, the government started to sign these agreements with provinces like British Columbia and Nova Scotia. And the effects going to be pretty rapid because they're going to be able to sort of start filling in some of the affordability. At least in the press releases, they're talking about having the sort of cost of parents within a year and on the way within five years to sort of a $10 a day standard in most places across Canada. And I just think that's, again, this is an example of a country of 30 plus million people across the country as sort of many different kinds of provinces. There's urban, there's rural, there's cities, there's towns, and they're doing it. And so to me, that's very inspiring that we can get it done here. There's no particular reason not to. So I think that we can certainly learn from their experience and do it in some ways. The unfortunate benefit of being slow to the game is you can look at the people who have come before you. And so there is just in the way that in British Columbia did their work, they were able to, in the 2010s, they were able to look back at Quebec, like we can look back at what's been happening, I think, and avoid some of those pitfalls. Brenda, I want you to answer that one. But we've also got one that's really specifically for you. So I'm wondering if I can give you a double header question. And it's really thinking about what do you think also about targeting low income families with programs and income eligibility requirements that become economically segregated, early head start and head start versus approaches that build an economically integrated system. Kind of thinking about that. And then also if there's some, after Brenda has a chance to talk, there's some experience from Quebec as well. So I'll just add a couple of things to what Ellie has said. I totally agree with everything he said. And then I'll get to that specific question. I think the one thing that I always hold in my head is the lesson learned from the NICHD study of early childcare. That is that parents matter. And so I do think that even if we take some risks and we don't have the best quality supports, we do know that children have another context where they can get support. And certainly this relates to your question, middle class children get a whole lot of informal learning activities so that even if they're not in the best childcare, they're going to be okay. Now the low income children, that's another story. I mean, we certainly know that their families are more stressed and have a lot more issues that they have to contend with. So the kinds of resources that they can devote, whether we're talking about financial or psychological resources to their children or less, which is why I am always going to advocate for being more intentional and providing more support to low income children. I know a lot of my colleagues don't agree with me because obviously when you do universal programming, you got the buy-in of everybody and everybody's going to champion it. A lot of people in this country feel like low income parents are in a different category. I mean, look at how we have very different views. We talked about this when we were on the phone about mothers on TANF. They better go to work while those mothers who are not on TANF, yeah, let them stay home with their children. So we have very different expectations of low income families than we do for middle income families in this country. And so that means that the political will to provide for them is less than you would want. So of course, then universal programs generally get you more. But the data to me are so clear. And the data from Quebec really does support this, that it's the low income kids, the kids without resources who really benefit from all of this, from a child development perspective, right? They're going to look better. They're going to be more school-ready, particularly if they're in high quality environments. So from my vantage point, yes, there's this whole issue of economic segregation. But if you really want to put your money where your mouth is, and certainly Krista talked about Abbasid Darian, low income black children. She talked about Perry preschool, low income black children, that when you think about what they can get from these kinds of things, it is much more than a middle class majority kid would get. So of course, I'm going to advocate for that. But I think, you know, there are challenges to that as well. You know, so kind of learning from Quebec, so Krista and Catherine, can you speak to that as well, that kind of, you know, the economically segregated versus kind of the universal approach in Quebec? Well, I fully agree with Brenda. And, you know, we, I mean, we have, and that touches a little bit on what Elliot mentioned, we have one fee for everybody. And I think one lesson that people should learn is that should not be the case. We have advocated for vulnerable families and their children who benefit most from being in good care, that they should not pay anything. You know, it should be free for them. And I would personally much more agree with the, you know, fees that are a certain percentage of your income like it is in Europe. And we all have to finance the system, but in a reasonable way. So I mean, I'm excited about what's happening in Canada. I think it's great. It's moving forward. You know, we had a childcare agenda. I don't remember like many, many years ago, then the government changed and they decided to give the money to the parents. And the whole project kind of fell flat on its face. And now it's back and people are motivated and people are signing agreements and they're lowering. I mean, it's a thrill for parents to pay $10 because the fees are horrendous in some provinces. But $10 a day is a lot for the working poor. We should not forget that. And we should really have a sliding scale for, you know, and up to a certain amount. It's free. And that was because our kids from socioeconomically poor families are underrepresented in childcare. You just mentioned something in the chat. You want to come back on and share that thought and then Catherine, I'll go to you for some final thoughts. Oh, yeah, just really good that actually exactly is the most childcare plans on the table would have those who are making under a certain percentage of the federal poverty line have access to free care with a sliding scale up to a cap. I think the ongoing conversation we're having in the U.S. is does that cap happen at like, you know, a certain level of affluence? Do you just not get any benefit? Or do you literally just again, similar to some Europeans, our public school system here, regardless of your income level, you get some benefit. So that's that's more of the conversation. But I don't know of any major proposal on the plan that would have wouldn't let the poor and the working poor lower middle class folks get either free or extremely low cost care. Right. And Catherine, let me go to you. And then I want you all to be prepared. I would rather than giving concluding remarks for me, what I would rather do is hear from each of you, lightning round, one thing that we who we in the U.S. need to learn from Quebec to move forward. But Catherine, you wanted to finish your thought and then I'm then I'll go to the lightning round. Yeah. So the one thing I was just going to point out is that we have a Canada child benefit program that is actually designed to help pay for childcare for the lower income family. So the there's like a dual system that run in parallel to each other to allow these families to kind of offset the cost of the $10 per day. But maybe it's not as progressive as it could be to allow for more variety and times in terms of cost, depending on the income level of the family. And I was about to wrap up with my one recommendation, but maybe I can hold on or I can go right away. You go you go first. Yes. So what I was about to say is that and to Brenda's point and Christa's point, I think what we should have done and that we didn't do and that would have made a huge difference in rolling out this universal system is to first roll it out in low income neighborhood and really put our dollars into those neighborhood and have really high quality childcare there and allow access and make it easy also because at first now it's becoming easier. But at first it wasn't easy for these family to understand how you get on the list who you have to talk to and how it was kind of a process that was a bit informal, not super well organized. So if you could develop a system that grows over time because it cannot happen overnight, but at puts its money first for people who most needed and who most benefit from it, the return on investment will be much larger and quicker. Great. Okay. We'll do Christa, Elliot and Brenda. I'm going to give you the final word. So Christa, one thing really we're right at time. I could just repeat what Catherine said and I think it really requires that we stop working in silos and that we have community organizations that accompany parents who don't really know what to do and help them to find a space because you know they're long waiting lists and if you're not educated parents sign up the day they get pregnant or even before they get pregnant and people who are less literate or less wise about community resources say just take whatever they can get and it's usually lower quality care. But I think we have to work as a community because we have like health services that can be a really good resource to guide parents and to give them advice. So I think it's a responsibility of the whole community and the priority are these children because they start school with you know they're not ready for school or they have lots of special needs and I think that should be our target. I think Catherine that's a good idea. They should have targeted that population first because who benefited of the child care system mostly is the middle class. Elliott, let's go to you. There is massive demand. There is massive need for this. It will largely pay for itself and we have to be really thoughtful about quality across all different types of care which would be accessible so parents have all the choices that they need. I love that. Brenda, last one. Although I'm a developmentalist from a research perspective I'm really interested in this organizational context issue that I've learned from Krista and Catherine about for example for profit not for profit. So I think we need to pay a little more attention to what that looks like in our country and what kind of organizational context might be able to deliver these services in the way in the high quality way that we think they should. All right well this we're just a little over time. I want to thank all of the participants who have joined us today. I want to thank the panelists for taking your time and sharing your wisdom your expertise and your experience. I want to thank Laura and her program. It's a wonderful collaborator and co-host and just loved everything that we heard. The last thing that I'm just going to say is that we are going to put together a one-page sort of takeaway lessons learned. There is a lot of talk here in the United States. There's a lot of misinformation so our one-pager will help put some of that straight with links and data and details and we'll get that all to you in the next couple days. So thanks to all of you. We're so delighted to be here for this very important conversation and have a wonderful rest of the day. Thank you.