Cause and effect

The Globe and Mail reports on an alarming drop in the proportion of women in the work force in Alberta. And the apparent primary cause isn't wealth, but a lack of child care:

Women in Eastern Canada are piling into the work force as never before, but in the West they are pulling out...

The pattern is particularly noticeable for women with children under six years old. In Alberta, the participation rate for this group dropped by a full percentage point in 2005, to 64.9 per cent. That's 10 points below the comparable rates in Quebec and Atlantic Canada.

If mothers of young children in Alberta and British Columbia had kept up with Quebec, there would be 30,000 women in the work force there — at a time when employers complain frequently of labour shortages.

And that's not because the mothers' husbands are rich from Alberta's oil and they choose not to work, Ms. Roy said. She found that family income levels made a difference for only 2,000 Alberta women.

Rather, she points to availability of daycare. Alberta has the smallest share of children in daycare — 43 per cent, Statscan said. Indeed, daycare capacity has actually fallen over the past decade, and now the province has fewer than 48,000 spots for 163,400 mothers of pre-schoolers.

It'll be interesting to see how long it takes the corporate sphere in Calgary and Edmonton to figure out that government investments in real child care (both federally and provincially) could do wonders to ease the province's labour shortage. In the meantime, the combination of both federal and provincial governments going out of their way to avoid providing the needed spaces is only hurting the financial base for both parties...not to mention the standard of living for those families facing little choice but to leave a parent at home.