Flowers are nice on Mother’s Day but ensuring access to quality care and quality care work would be better. And last much longer.
Mothers are primary users of care services and primary providers of care, both paid and unpaid. But Canadian governments at all levels still cling to neoliberalism and the shop-worn idea that the private marketplace knows best. They persist in cutting back on public services, allowing for-profit operators to fill the vacuum and in some cases, aiding and abetting for-profits to deliver the publicly funded care that remains. As a result, the quality of care and the jobs in the care economy suffer, with a disproportionate impact on women.
Indeed, cutbacks have been shifting more of the care work to women, to be done without formal training and without pay. This has been accelerating during the pandemic.
The differences between care jobs in the public sector and for-profit sector are becoming blurred as governments apply ‘lean and mean’ organizational strategies taken from the for-profit sector. The impact is particularly hard on racialized and newcomer mothers who are concentrated at the bottom of the care work hierarchy and the Indigenous mothers who have the greatest difficulty accessing care.
Why public care services?
Let us count some ways.
1. The quality is higher, in part because the rich must use the same services as the poor. When everyone’s in, everyone has a vested interest in good services.
2. Administrative costs are lower. We spend less on billing, chasing down unpaid bills and sorting out the deserving from the undeserving.
3. Accessibility can be planned, not market-driven, ensuring more equitable services especially in areas that don’t attract private investment.
4. Access to care is more affordable for more people, based more on need than on ability to pay.
5. Wasteful duplication of services can be eliminated.
6. There are more avenues for democratic decision-making, with input from people receiving and providing care.
7. Jobs are better, especially for the predominately female and increasingly racialized labour force.
8. The province’s employers save money because costs are shared and risks are pooled across a wide population.
9. Advances in areas such as cataract surgery, early learning pedagogy and preventive measures can be shared across populations, improving everyone’s health.
10. Public commitments to standards can develop consistency across services and regions.
All aspects of the care economy are in stress and so are mothers, in large measure as a result of privatization. The next time there’s an election in your neighbourhood, challenge candidates to commit to a different path. Better public care will require our attention at every turn… long after Mother’s Day comes and goes.
Pat Armstrong, Marjorie Griffin Cohen, Laurell Ritchie and Armine Yalnizyan are members of The Care Economy Group
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