From HELP website:
The government of B.C. has committed to lowering the provincial rate of early vulnerability to 15% by fiscal year 2015. This goal is both commendable and achievable.
With support from the Business Council of British Columbia, United Way of the Lower Mainland and Vancouver Foundation, HELP has completed a groundbreaking research project that quantifies the costs and benefits of addressing early vulnerability in BC.
The resulting report 15 by 15: A Comprehensive Policy Framework for Early Human Capital Investment in BC dramatically illustrates why all of us – individuals, businesses and governments – should care about the real brain drain in BC today resulting from early vulnerability.
Here is the 2009 Strategic Plan for BC that shows the goal of reducing early vulnerability in young children to 15% by 2015. See page 22 Download Strategic_Plan_Sept_2009
Source Jane Boyd - Here is how BC is planning to face this issue - My hope is that on PEI we can make this THE ISSUE rather than the current focus that seems to be about the daycare organizations.
Here is how BC open the issue:
The stock of human capital in British Columbia is key to its long-term economic success. This means early child development is a critical issue for business leaders, because the years before age six set in motion factors that will determine the quality of the future labour force.
Today, only 71% of BC children arrive at kindergarten meeting all of the developmental benchmarks they need to thrive both now and into the future: 29% are developmentally vulnerable.
While the poor are more statistically likely to be vulnerable, the majority of vulnerable children in BC reside in the more populous middle-class. Early vulnerability is a middle- class problem.
A rate of child vulnerability above 10% is biologically unnecessary. At three times what it could be, the current vulnerability rate signals that BC now tolerates an unnecessary brain drain that will dramatically deplete our future stock of human capital.
Economic analyses reveal this depletion will cause BC to forgo 20% in GDP growth over the next 60 years. The economic value of this loss is equivalent to investing $401.5 billion today at a rate of 3.5% interest, even after paying for the social investment required to reduce vulnerability.
Unnecessary early vulnerability in BC is thus costing the provincial economy a sum of money that is 10 times the total provincial debt load.
The implication is clear: governments, businesses, bankers and citizens have ten times as much reason to worry about the early child vulnerability debt as we have reason to worry about the fiscal debt. Reducing early vulnerability is therefore necessary for BC.
