Home › Policy Articles: Children & Family: Daycare & Childcare: 2002

This article by Jane Jensen and Rianne Mahon uses child care as “a lens to examine governance relations, both democratic and intergovernmental” between cities, provinces and the federal government. The first section describes the patterns and practices of accountability in Canada, specifically analysing three Canadian cities (Toronto, Hamilton and Vancouver), coming to the conclusion that modernizing these patterns and practices poses quite a conundrum as all cities are far from equal. The second section thus challenges the universal validity of three assertions: “That decentralization will automatically foster more integrated services; that decentralization will necessarily undermine equity and that Canada’s constitutional arrangements make it impossible for municipalities to have a direct relationship with the federal government”, concluding that the most important factor in determining whether a “danger” or an “impossibility” exists in any of the aforementioned assertions is “political, not constitutional or institutional.” The third section then offers means of progressing from the lessons learned in the first two sections. It offers, for instance, the idea that “there is a trade-off between equity across space and local knowledge of needs.”