Voici quelques points saillants, tirés de l’article du Globe and Mail :

• • Canada’s child-care system is a fragmented, money-wasting patchwork of programs that provides babysitting for working parents but disregards a growing body of global research that shows educating preschool minds provides lifelong dividends.

• • Canada is languishing in terms of quality and investment in education and care for children.

• • The only province not faltering is Quebec.

• • Canada seemed to be much more focused on child care rather than early development.

• • While more Canadian mothers with young children work outside the home than in almost any other country, Canada invests less than half of what other developed nations devote on average, in terms of economic output, to early-childhood education.

• • While Canada suffers a steep shortage of regulated child-care spaces — enough for less than 20 per cent of children under 6 with working parents — growing numbers of countries are putting in place publicly funded systems of early learning for all children. In the United Kingdom, 60 per cent of young children are in regulated care; in Denmark, 78 per cent.

• • Overprotective child-care workers were frequently forcing their charges to sit down and not move, which runs counter to children’s natural instincts to be active.

• • Unlike other cold-climate countries such as Sweden and Finland, where preschoolers spend hours at a time outdoors, the Canadian children spent almost all of their time inside.