Those of us who regularly Google "child care Ontario" can't help but notice the growing number of local news items that describe the pandemonium threatening child care across the province. This includes not only last week's major report from Toronto Children's Services but news items in local media outlets in Waterloo, Ottawa, Parry Sound, Cambridge, Sudbury, Sault Ste Marie, Cornwall (and probably others that I haven't seen). These calculate coming centre closures and cuts, exploding parent fees, burgeoning space and subsidy waiting lists, centre vacancies in high need neighbourhoods while children go un-served-all the signs of a collapsing child care free-market that doesn't work.

It's time for the Ontario government to step up to prevent this from continuing.

I'm sure I'm not alone in that young children and low income single mothers don't immediately leap to mind when I hear "stop the gravy train." "Stop the gravy train" elicits images of highly-paid executives or well-pensioned fat-cat employees drawing high salaries and not putting in a decent day's work. But for most Canadians, three-year-olds in child care, single mothers struggling to pay the rent and feed the kids, and notoriously poorly-paid early childhood educators would hardly seem to be cruising along on any kind of gravy train, even in the caboose.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but the mountain of evidence about the value of good child care should be more than enough to convince Canadian policy makers to act -- if there's any interest out there in evidence-based policy making. Early childhood education and care (ECEC) has been studied from the perspective of child development and early educational advantage, anti-poverty, balancing work and family, human rights/children's rights, women's equality and smart economics. New studies looking at child care every which way appear with exasperating regularity.

But few analyses have asked mothers of young children what they need, what's missing and what they think should be done about child care.

When Erin George found out she was pregnant, the first thing she did was rush to a child-care centre to put her not-yet born daughter on the waiting list. Then she called her husband with the news.

"Because I know how hard it is to get child care in this city," said George, holding her five-week-old daughter Quinn at Friday's press conference.

Even though maternity leave is only 12 months long, children are considered infants in the child-care system until they're 18 months old. That gap creates headaches for new mothers like George because there aren't a lot of spaces for infants in the system.

As the Canadian Union of Postal Workers has been locked in down-to-the-wire strike talks with Canada Post, many Canadians have forgotten that it was the fight for paid maternity leave that kept postal workers walking the picket line for 42 days in 1981. As a result, CUPW became the first national union to win a settlement for paid maternity leave -- topping up to 93% the 15 weeks of benefits at 60% of earnings the federal government had begun paying to eligible new mothers (with 20 weeks of insurable earnings) in 1972.

Four more years.....

For those of you who -- like me -- believe that a national approach is necessary if Canadian families are ever going to win high quality accessible early childhood services, the federal election results are a bitter pill to swallow. There is no doubt that the 2006 cancellation of the hard-won bilateral Early Learning and Care agreements by the minority Conservative government set child care back five years. Now, with a majority government with a reluctant attitude to early childhood education and child care in place for a four year fixed term, careful strategic thinking about challenges and opportunities is more important than ever.