LESS ACCESS,WORSE QUALITY

High-quality child care is a boon for children and buffers some of the long-term negative effects of growing up in straitened circumstances. Yet, just one in seven Canadian children has access to regulated care. Within this, poor children have worse access and are over-represented in lower-quality care arrangements. Canada's policy architecture, as reviews of Winnipeg, Quebec, and Vancouver demonstrate, generates inequities of access and quality that reproduce neighborhood socioeconomic gradients of class and racialization. Poor children are systematically disadvantaged by a national approach that relies on privatized partnerships with the voluntary sector to implement public child care policy. Equalizing poor children's access to quality child care remains a pressing Canadian challenge, and will require policy and delivery redesign.