How the energy shock has upended the global economy. Just as the world was getting serious about a green energy future, its dependence on fossil fuels struck home with a force not seen since the 1970s. Russia's invasion of Ukraine combined with pressures unleashed by the pandemic to send the price of all forms of energy rocketing, with oil climbing more than 50% in the first half of 2022. That energy shock was at the heart of a surge in inflation that caused hardship and political headaches around the globe. 1. Why do we have an energy shock? Just two years ago, the price of the benchmark US oil futures contract plunged briefly below zero as the pandemic sank the global economy. A year later, the price had rebounded to pre-pandemic levels and kept on rising as revived demand outstripped growth and crude supplies. Then came a wild series of jolts from the waves of sanctions by the US and its allies to shut out Russia, the source of 10% of the world's oil, along with other key commodities from wheat to fertilizer to nickel. More than half of Russia's oil exports go to the countries in the European Union, but markets for energy are global, so changes in supply and demand are felt worldwide. 2. Who got hurt? Consumers were hit particularly hard, since spending on energy is difficult to cut. In the UK, regulators warned that the surge in global natural gas prices was set to drive the average household energy bill up another 42% in October when a price cap is adjusted higher, producing the biggest hit to living standards since the 1950s. In much of the world, retail fuel prices rose even faster than crude. Gasoline topped an average of $5 a gallon, 3.79 liters, in the US for the first time in June, the start of the summer driving season there. The end result was a surge in inflation that the world hadn't seen in decades, with energy making up more than half of the jump in major advanced economies. Beyond price concerns, there were worries that global power grids already strained by climate change could prove even more fragile, leading to blackouts that could put lives at risk. 3. What was the fallout? There was a scramble to increase supplies and re-root fuels to where they were needed, efforts that met with limited success. The EU phased in a partial ban on Russian oil and bought more liquefied natural gas on world markets to wean itself off of Russian gas pipelines, which accounted for 40% of supply. By mid-June, Russia, for its part, had cut off gas flows to four EU countries. US President Joe Biden's administration asked oil refineries about the feasibility of bringing back mothballed capacity. There were other responses as well, to cool the surge in inflation the US Federal Reserve and its counterparts were expected to crank up interest rates in the most aggressive monetary policy tightening cycle in decades, China and Japan were exceptions. That won't bring energy costs down right away, but the aim is to slow economic growth to such an extent that inflation fizzles out. 4. Could it drag on? By early June, there was no sign of an end to what had become a grinding, bloody war in Ukraine and little hope for big boosts in energy production, with the oil-rich Opaque nations agreeing to only a modest increase in oil output. The price of the West Texas Intermediate Oil Futures contract climbed above $120 a barrel, and a potential post-pandemic resurgence in consumption in China, the world's biggest crude importer, threatened to add even more upward pressure. J.P. Morgan Chase and company chief executive officer Jamie Dimmons said that oil had the potential to hit $150 or $175 a barrel and that the bank was bracing itself for an economic hurricane. 5. How does this compare with previous shocks? The vault in prices is comparable to history's two most famous oil shocks, the 1973 Arab Israeli War, which led many crude producers to refuse to sell to countries that supported Israel, and the revolution in Iran six years later that for a time cut out about 7% of global crude supply. But there are differences, economic growth isn't as closely linked with oil as it was in the 1970s, output is much less energy-intensive than it was back then. Fracking shale has made the U.S. the world's biggest producer of oil and gas, bringing America much closer to the energy independence it pursued after gasoline shortages hit home in the 1970s. Still, the crisis was a reminder that the world remains reliant on fossil fuels for more than three-quarters of its energy, a state of affairs that's likely to endure for decades, even as some countries speed up their investment in renewables. The Reference Shelf A Bloomberg economics report on what's driving faster inflation around the world. How Russia's war in Ukraine is choking commodities exports. A blog post from the International Monetary Fund on how the world now gets more mileage from each barrel of oil. Bloomberg Opinions John authors on comparisons with the oil shocks of the 1970s.


The Competitive Programming Club meets every other week on Friday afternoon and we basically get a set of problems that we can see who can solve the most the fastest. And it's just a great place to socialize, to learn new coding skills, to try some cool algorithms, to have some fun, have some food, it's just a lot of fun. You get a lot of skills that you may not necessarily get from just classwork, but what you really get out of it is just the ability to really quickly recognize problems and the ability to think your way to solutions instead of just working from like a PA where the best solution is just kind of spelled out for you, you know, you get to find it yourself. Learning how to program under pressure is a skill in and of itself and everyone at some point has to do it whether it's for a job interview or whether it's for a presentation. You get better at it as you practice it and so really one of the best benefits of the club is having a safe environment for doing that, having people that you can learn from and laugh with and just not have a lot of pressure but practice programming under a time crunch. I went to both of the competitions that we had last year, being able to go on a trip with other CS majors and program alongside them. I've never been able to like program for fun and program with CS majors and hang out at the same time and that unique experience was just so much fun and just made the whole thing totally worth it. So if you're somebody who doesn't really know if they should come out or you know you're on the fence or you're worried that maybe you won't know everything that's going on right away, you shouldn't worry about it at all because like this is a super open and easygoing environment. There are people there who not only will help you but would love to help you. We'll totally welcome you and we just want to see people you know come out so you know I really hope to see you there.


YouTube what's up, man? This is week two We got off to a rough start man. We's on one. We got pop defense was looking rough Defense was looking sorry out there So we're gonna have to turn around this week my man, uh They strapped Jack. He can't I see a little West Coast offense for me. That's definitely a good thing I don't even know what I want to do all the current away option list. No, let's do Classical way, let's go a Little West Coast is he gonna rock a little West Coast offense on me. I like when they try to bring that to my field I like that. I encourage the West Coast playbook. That means I'm not gonna get pounded I am going against there when James. This is the person I chose Julio Jones over So we shall see who has a bigger impact on this game I mean, I picked Julio Jones in the first round. I could have had there when I've talked about it many times Man, sometimes I wish I would have had Derwin instead of Julio just because they have that young defense But last week my man TJ Y and Daniel Hunter, man, they didn't do much of anything You know, so for me are my levels good chat? Is it too loud? I'm saying Is the game sound too loud So I'm gonna get a ball first Gotta establish who they'll gotta establish big strap Jack gotta let him know what it is man. We're on the road High-style territory sometimes I like playing high-style territory a little bit better You know, you got let him know set the tone early. I don't know who 38 is always Brandon bold in my running back Has the ball It's a little I'm a lord a little bit. I'm a look cuz then, you know, let's see See what we got here for the people man. I don't know what chemistry is my Julio Jones has today But we shall find out This is the commissioner of the league Was kind of ass last year Let's see if he learned anything playing against these good people if I I fully expect the victory this game chat This is supposed to be a make sure my man Tyree big strap Jackson gets some XP. That's this type of game I'm going into as you see the first play of the game. He's in just covered three stock or maybe it's covered one I don't know. I'm gonna double team this edge rusher.  I'm gonna be honest This is why you get 95 no power boys Told you that's what we're looking for off the bat That's why you get for shot pair of men and you get big strap jack First play man. That's how you set the tone. I'm telling you. This is this is a run-up to score game and once again, man average offensive line I have Felt like I had all day had a four-man rush really had all day right there great pass lead by big strap I'm saying so let's go now now we have seven nothing now We set the tone 12 seconds in the game. We're up seven nothing now. Let's even saying now. Let's get the ball Now let's put our hands on the ball. That's what it's about. He won't give us the ball right here boys. I See and Made me crazy last game though, but I'm gonna have to put a little bit more pressure on the on the quarterback Here we go.  That's why I like the sweet. I like it sweet.  Come on man. That's rope one baby. That's why we drafted rope one. Let's go I see all the XP. I see all the XP coming off their helmets.  We gotta get some pressure here boys We gotta get some pressure here boys. I mean, I feel like you had everybody open No, but I had everybody. I mean the past Russian this mode is just really non-existent really holy hell TJ White and and and Daniel Hunter absolutely nothing there If he would have just stayed in a pocket, you could have hit either the curl route or the crossing route XP flying off the helmets boys flying off the helmets Just that's the difference between a good player and a great player. That's the difference. I Yeah, I see I see to see at the past Russian to see if M is bad. I see it. I'm disappointed in it So let's say he gave up the cover three bomb first play last time So we'll see what he goes for here All right, so he's gonna be in cover three again That's it. I see a star on the line. We're gonna double team that star Got my star on my offensive line over there Okay, okay big strap Put them things on the money brief shot pyramid I actually had a talk with brief shot pyramid earlier and it's In this off-season during the week, man I had to talk with brief shot pyramid and we talked about, you know, he wants to be a number one receive I said Brashad pyramid. I agree. I agree with you brother I think you can I think you can be a number one receiver in this league We just won't give the big straps from yards. We don't have a brief strap got to take the yards, right chat Marcus, what's up, buddy? Yes, I did that air dame a thousand times man and I can't get I can't get um Let's say he likes cover three he really does chat. I like his middle safety going to the left That means I might be able to bomb him again What was this guy that got free? I could bomb him. He's just covering it Black mama TV my guy Yeah, I can't get him around apprentice. I thought that'd be too cheesy though So I didn't I didn't go for that Dude, it's gonna be a foot race between shark and his safety Me god damn dude like really love you stop looking at the I'm just looking for this bomb right now He's really user in the bomb. Oh Chat this is this is example of looking down the field too far instead of taking drags But luckily my guy is a cover three stock expert. I mean these guys just got at me right there.  What's up, buddy? Nice punt W. You're in a dome and you can't put it out of bounds Yeah I mean, it's a third and 20 you're not looking for the dragon is wide open. You're looking down the field And that's my fault. All right, come on kid. Come on this iPhone. Oh gun trips tight. And that's what you like, huh?  I mean, dude, I just it's just the zero. I do auto flip. There's some reason they always want to use auto flip They really do about time for inside zone, huh kid? Yep Come on man, that's miles Jack. That's why we got linebackers About time for you know when it's about time for bum to run inside zone honey. Good job More xp fly when the xp When the xp flies off their head, man Let's see what it been texting you Single back wing foot. What?  I want to get rid of tj y and daniel hunter. They have been beyond disappointing I'll tell you what though miles jack Touching souls No black mom. I don't play against gun heavy.  I'm the coolest Me come on man.  Come on. Let's go for it.  Oh, you want to take a field goal? Oh, there it is Give this is awesome. See if em is awesome And it goes so fast it's seven minutes accelerate the clock it goes it's seven minutes, but it goes so fast Y'all the ones yeah, I want eight minute tournament games. I want eight minute best of 11 eight minute tournament games My dead ass goes fast like I've had two possessions And I've only had two possessions because he punted and went three and out All right, come on. Let's go stock cover three. Let's all right Dude, it really goes fast. Look the game's gonna last as long as any other game There we go. Come on stock cover three. Come on Come on computer hits sticking. Let's go Let's go for another bomb. No, see this is this is what happens chat. This is this is what happens Let's go for another bomb Big strap. Oh, this is definitely a touchdown So when you have a defense where you have to go chase the bomb every time that's not good defense Like when you have to run down and chase the bomb every play, that's not good defense I'm trying to rock him to sleep. He's chasing the bomb every time Julio got a block sometimes in this package man.  Jesus he boxed me that play Dude action Jackson is it man. He is it the worst player in the league. It's me We're we're threading this one the shark We're threading at the shark. I don't care I don't know what's under the AP that's there when the run's on them We're going for it. It sucks I did it for the AP for the xp laid out for the xp Might have been a mistake Big strap jack got to get there for me man And once again, look here we are we're under two minutes. It's already clock. Come on. I form tight.  Are you are these kids serious with the with the uh, with the custom playbooks? I guess they are serious. I guess that's a Are we seriously running out of cluster now? Is that that's what we're doing? We're running out of cluster Jesus Christ, man.  I'm about to make a custom playbook for this. Watch how crazy it's gonna be when I go to mesh post When I audible from from wide ships to mesh post Oh boys, we gotta get a turn over here. I would just think it'd turn over. Let's go Come on, man. It is 14 to 3 Gun cluster. Okay. I like it. I respect it. That's how we hit. Good job. That's how we hit I like everything about right there. Oh, we got a sack on the board. Daniel Hunter with the sack Well, of course big strap is the real deal TJ My boy's getting pressure now you guys send five and six chat. You can't just send two out of bounds.  It's the best defense Quarterback meat tastes sweet So I really do wish I got good at running Nickel normal Because I feel like it's the best the most versatile defense. I think as far as send pressure and Send coverage at the same time you really run that was that like really a call that you made in this situation Damn, I didn't I didn't play for that at all Nice block right there boys. Nice block. Nice. Nice. Just loving the block right there Man only had 14 points man. This was supposed to be a stat padding game Disappointed in that so far youtube man Here we go. We're gonna get this is his last ditch effort See chat when you get into these situations, it's 14 to 3 He's on the verge of going under water. He has to put together a good drive to not go under water This is going to be he is going to scratch for everything he got on his drive Every one yard every third and four everything He's going to leave it all out here this drive because he knows if he doesn't go down here get points on this drive It's gg's So we'll see what he does. I fully expect him to come out some type of grounding pound. Oh gun cluster. Okay We like that on dude like That's what you do when you don't know what to do. I mean jesus christ. Everybody got going on hot route Oh, he hit me with a laser.  I guess he does. Who was that? We're all kiddle.  You go watch it on youtube tomorrow if you missed it We'll see if i'm way different.  This is drive right here. Hey, you got time I appreciate it. Come on man.  He wasn't ready for it had to run with a quarterback I mean i told you how what what player we on right now chat. I'm telling you this is the last ditch effort He exactly he knows what's on the line right here That he knows what's on the line the whole game is on the line. He's taking a whole third quarter with him There we go. I form slot This could be a rpo though. Let's do that Yeah He won't rp on me. Fuck. I look like damn y'all hunter with three sacks man. Let's go kid That was a good great play call there, man No, he uh, dude, he's leaving all out on the line here single black tight flecks He went to a will route last time in this situation.  I guess you guys were in there. We just got blocked He scored seven points and took a thousand minutes to do it If you go for two years obnoxiously too early to go for two, but matton's telling him to go for two.  It's just We just gotta take this there chat Let's all julio get in the second catch of the game I think julio actually has jukebox and I just didn't allow him to juke It's really an impressive defensive performance from prime time Oh, he's getting physical with me here chat. Okay Okay, now let's spread out the kuchi hole here chat.  I really do I just hate I hate this guy. I really hate this guy I'm so used to double teaming now that I went to id the mic and I double team the outside line back here Really really rb was open. Thank you. I appreciate I felt everybody was open on that play But I appreciate you guys telling me nonetheless, man for real You too, but I want you to if you guys see me miss anybody, man Please just let me know in the comments below who I missed And at what point did I miss them? I'm just so mad that I'm just got two touchdowns with with captain strait I'm very disappointed. I only have two touchdowns with him. This was this was a cake it up run up the score game And I have two touchdowns with him So naturally that's a very disappointing performance so far Yep, my six seven quarterback my six seven quarterback the ball's hitting people in the head Who the guy getting cut? He pinched his line. I think he's a thousand percent bluffing the blitz right here chat What do you guys think he's a thousand percent bluffing it? Julio, you better have caught that Julio.  He's raging that he just gave that up.  He was the first overall pick actually Oh big strap.   Maybe because it's a wheel route instead of a Cover four drop specialist man Cover four drop specialist Come on. You're not gonna blitz me man. You already know you're not gonna blitz.  How is my 60 now he's he started at 64 overall, but now he's 69 overall Now for me, um Yeah, he's too good. I'll be all the way honest with you guys chat. He's too good Gun trips tight in Hunter Lonnie Dang y'all hunter has four sacks chat Yeah, king. I just really I just don't know where to start with that honestly, but yeah I mean, I guess we all thought about it mvs big lasers That's right. Can you see, you know, you know about the coochie spots called drea pace hit the sub bro gun trips tight in That was roquine, baby That was roquine, baby Man, we need some pressure right there Roquine Kelly, what's up? I got the eagles dominating. That's what I got.  Come on Schwartz. I mean really just cover three rush four.     He's the man Tyree Jackson Mvs is ball.  Hopefully he kill himself right here. He should run the ball out My team was getting more pressure in the nickel Mvs got four of them things Damn, who you all got no touchdowns TJ let's go I'm calling time out man. We gotta get the ball back to our superstar. Am I streaming?  I'm gonna see what it do I'm gonna see what it do jack Some people can't be on stream Murphy and we've been popping we've been popping the last couple. Oh, yeah Miles that's we hit hard champ. I'm telling you got these lineback.  We had everybody. We had everybody right there It's gotta step up a little bit better. That's what's crazy.  Like come on man Fast thing I did bro mvs mvs I just see a wall Instagram a lot. That's all Come on boys. It's time to get us another sack Time to get us another sack here boys.  You already know he ain't want that You gotta add something else for your offense, man But this was week two. Let's take a look at the stats Perfect quarterback rating for tiger jack 23 or 29 six touchdowns. No picks He did fumble on one scramble could have had a russian td four carries 29 yards did fumble twice could have four carries 29 yards 363 through the air six touchdowns definitely pop receiving um mvs four touchdowns parryman caught a bomb shark had a touchdown Julio six catches asian peterson out the backfield did a little bit of work I don't remember when he caught the ball, but bang Defensively, man, we had Four sacks from daniel 102 from tj y liney ballantyne with a sack Um marquis blaring wilkins sharing in a sack there What's about toll tax miles jack tackles for loss look at liney ballantyne two tack rope quad behind the line Justin Simmons miles jack just a dominant game. Let's talk about picks roquine had a pick We see daniel hundred miles jack lining ballantyne with the force fumbles Same guys with fumble recovers big day for the defense. Honestly big day for tyree jackson, man That's what we need to go up the side. Let's see if we can get some any any type of improvements To my team that would help Defense showed up a little bit more pressure remember a little bit. I didn't brush three really ever When I did I still got died it. So we definitely got some xp, man Definitely got a pop and what we got some people to upgrade tyree jackson You know, that's the number one person we go for they told me keep going improviser to get me um And he helped get me What is called escape artist? I don't know if I'll get there But let's see man breaksack awareness through accuracy short throwing the pressure those are all good things He's at a 69 overall man creeping up to that 70 overall He is the key to my team mr. Tyree big strap jack Um, rinie harrison definitely need this guy to get better man.    I'm excited about him um, taylor decker my left tackle Just pass protector everything man. This is this is a young pupil of mine Pass block finesse pass block power. Those are good things man star development 25 This one my left tackle pretty much the whole year. I don't really I don't know who bj finley is Let's see.  I like it. Okay, okay drc the old wild veteran man Let's just give him I always like slot for my gore corners because it makes them tackle and block shed and stuff Like look block shed man covers play rec pursuit and tackle That's actually got him a nice little boost for drc Who has the same exact face as rinie harrison if you've been paying attention for the last two minutes Him and rinie harrison literally are the same player same plus seph the vile I don't care about Matter of fact, look at this guy. Look at this guy. Does he not look like an intern somewhere? Jesus All right, so we're feeling good going in a week two Breakout player man this listen that brashad param and told me he was ready to break out had over a hundred yards My goal was to get him over a hundred yards man Let's see what I told you I was priming for big things this week I want to be a top receiver NFL man today with a great start brashad param and maybe Look development trade upgrade the brashad param and now a star upgrade That's huge. That's my 95 speed 6-2 receiver to get him to night to get him boom xp That's huge for brashad param Man, that's nice. I mean, that's a big deal Congrats on the victory bang. We'll talk soon. All right. Taylor been okay. Okay So i'm excited about brashad param and getting uh Well, they told me before the game so you guys didn't see Before the game brashad param and say I want to talk he said I want to be a breakout receiver And they gave me a what I could you catch two touchdowns or you go over a hundred yards and brashad param went over a hundred yards So that was big to get him to go to a star upgrade a star uh Development that's tough. So hopefully he'll get another talk and then we'll be able to get him to Superstar development, but hey man, my my best player is really uh The best players really stood out there now. Let's take a look at my stats on the year Through three picks the first game with tyree, which was ugly But I mean we're up to 128 quarterback rating 604 yards three three picks in that game seven touchdown passes Been sacked 12 times. That's too many You know, i'm not bad. I'm not mad at him at all. I mean asian piercer has two carriers through two games tyree jackson man 76 yards rushing receiving param and is dominating mvs shark really not getting involved that much but pretty spread out between these three julio obviously with the most catches Defense miles jackman just being a monster sacks on the year daniel hunter with five sacks already man That's that's a nice season so far two games Hopefully so if you if you spread that out over the year two games eight Eight times five is what chat. I don't know it's 40.  I guess that's taylor gang just throwing playing bums Touchdown seven tyree got seven Okay, i'm not mad at that i'm not mad at that Okay, man. I'm not mad at it. I'm not mad at it I would love the eagles to get clowny, but this was week two hit the like button man I like what I saw from tyree jackson. He's gonna keep improving for sure


Okay it is May 3, 2017 which means it's time for me to talk about what I did in April and as you can see I'm not at home. I'm traveling again. I'm gonna be doing some interesting things this weekend. I'll let you know about all that later. Right now I want to point out that I published my tour of Powell's bookstore in Portland, Powell's City of Books. It's on the 50th Street channel. It's the first installment of the 50th Street Portland tour. Go look at that. There's a link here and in the description below. The subscribership here on YouTube at the ThinkBolt channel is past 740 now. Last month it was only 700 so the subscribership is climbing and the rate at which it's climbing is still slowly increasing which is good. My other social networks for 30 second sci-fi are not growing. They've all just stopped. In fact I'm continuing to update them. In fact there's still more stuff at the tumbler than there is here on the YouTube channel so you should go look at that. Speaking of which, this book here, I finished reading this in April. I never mentioned this here on this channel and in my monthly updates. I should have mentioned it two months ago. Somehow I forgot but when I did get it in the mail I did post it on the tumbler and it got attention there and on Facebook too which nothing I post at those places usually gets any attention at all but people like this. This is going to be my next review so look for that. I also read this New Voices 1 from 1977. This is one of the things that I bought at Powell's when I was there. In fact I still I'm bringing that whole stack of books from Powell's with me and I'm going to be reading those while I travel. This is a mixed bag it was mostly good and it'll be my review after that one. This is haunted by Chuck Palaniuk. I talked about this in my last monthly wrap-up. I'm halfway through it. It's really unpleasant. It's very well written though. I don't know if I'll finish it. I may push through it. The other thing that I'm reading right now is Every Heart a Doorway by Seanan McGuire. This became available for a free download for two days only when the sequel was released just last week. I posted about it on tumbler, Facebook and Twitter, Instagram. If you're not following me on those then you didn't see it. Anyway I am thoroughly enjoying this. I'm enjoying every page of it. This will definitely be a review in the future. That's it for this update. I would like to ask each of you who were saying this to do something for me. Please leave a comment in the description telling me how you found this channel and why you subscribed and which videos you have enjoyed most and what you want to see more of because I don't know. I'm not getting that kind of feedback. I see other YouTubers who have less than half my subscribership and yet their videos get thousands of views. I don't know what they're doing. If any of you have any clues about that let me know. Okay, see you next time. Bye.


Welcome and thank you for joining our event today. My name is Laura Bornfront and I am the director of Early and Elementary Education in the Education Policy Program at New America. Our Education Policy Program focuses on equity for students who are underserved by their schools and society at large. We also take a broad view examining learning environments and public education systems of all kinds, starting with those serving our littlest ones and continuing up through adulthood. We know that the way our country currently funds and delivers early care and education is not working well for most children, families or educators. And in the U.S. there is no single early care and education system. There are siloed funding streams that sit in multiple federal agencies and even more programs at the state and local level. Paying for early care and learning is largely left to families and can exceed the cost of college in many places. And the educators who teach and care for our youngest children are paid much less than what they should be for the valuable, essential and complex work they do. The COVID-19 pandemic has brought a bright light to the fragility, inadequacies and inequities of the existing early care and education policies and systems in the U.S. And the pandemic has brought a sense of urgency to make changes, to reimagine what could be. President Biden's American Families Plan would make significant investments in early care and education infrastructure, greatly expanding families access to quality programs. The plan calls for $225 billion over 10 years in child care funding to make child care more affordable, improve the quality and invest in the ECE workforce. Under the plan low to middle income families would pay no more than 7% of their income for high quality care for children up to age five and the families struggling the most wouldn't pay anything. The plan also calls for spending $200 billion to establish a national partnership with states to offer free, high quality pre-k to all three and four-year-olds, potentially benefiting five million children and saving the average family $13,000. It's time the United States truly invests in quality early care and education and early childhood educators. The economy is stronger with quality early care and education, women and families are stronger with quality early care and education and children have better long-term outcomes with quality early care and education. There is a lot we can learn from other countries around the world about what works and what doesn't when it comes to funding, designing and delivering early care and education. And today we're here to talk about lessons from one of them. In 1997, the Canadian province of Quebec invested in creating a universal childcare system guaranteeing a spot for every child who needed one. Now the Canadian government is proposing to build on the Quebec model in order to offer universal childcare across the country. What can the US learn from Quebec as we attempt to move toward establishing our own equitable, high quality universal system here in the US? In a moment, we'll dig into that question. First, some of you may not be as familiar with New America. Our organization is dedicated to renewing the promise of America and strives to explain and uncover the implications, both the challenges and opportunities inherent in a time of dramatic technological and social change. I invite all of you to join today's discussion on Twitter with the hashtag universal ECE, put comments or put questions in the Q&A or the chat box, and let's get started. So I'm happy to introduce Bridget Schulte, our moderator for today's panel discussion. She's the director of the Better Life Lab, a collaborator on this event today and a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist formerly of the Washington Post. Join me in welcoming Bridget. Bridget. Thank you so much, Laura, and thank you for that wonderful and sobering introduction to today's discussion. So as Laura mentioned, the Better Life Lab and the Early Ed program we are co-hosting this event today, Better Life Lab is the work family justice and gender equity program at New America. And we're really excited about having this deep dive discussion. And so what I'd like to do, I'm going to introduce the panelists. We're going to have a bit of discussion, but then we really want to open it up. We've got a number of participants, lots of questions. So we want to make sure that we make time for your questions. So please do put them in the Q&A and the chat. We'll monitor them and we'll open them up for questions toward the end. So let me welcome our panelists. First we have Catherine Hack, and forgive me if I'm pronouncing that incorrectly. Catherine, you can correct me. She's an associate professor at the University of Quebec in Montreal.  Next we have Brenda Jones-Harden. She's the Allison Richmond professor for children and families at the University of Maryland. She researches the use of early childhood interventions to promote more positive results in low-income families. Her current research projects include family child care, really looking at family child care and using early head start dollars to improve infant and toddler care. We also have Elliot Haspel. He's a program officer at the Robbins Foundation. He's an early childhood and K-12 education policy expert and writer. He started his career as a fourth grade public school teacher in Arizona. He's also author of Crawling Behind, America's Child Care Crisis and How to Fix It, as well as numerous articles and essays. And finally we have Christa Japelle. She is also an associate professor at the University of Quebec in Montreal, and she's a well-known expert on the quality of early childhood environments and programs to improve services. She's also done longitudinal research on child care for more than 25 years and is a real expert on what's happening in Quebec. So let's dive right into the conversation. Catherine, let's start with you. As Laura pointed out, Quebec has a universal child care system. Right now it's gotten an awful lot of attention, both for good and for ill. There's some real controversy around it. So let's dive into that. What's true? What's not true? What's worked? What hasn't? And most importantly, what we can learn. But before we can do that, Catherine, can you talk about how did this all start? Tell us the history. Back in 1997, when this started, what was going on? And tell us what happened. Yes. Thank you. Thanks for the invitation. I'm really pleased to be here today. So if you think about how it all happened, it started a long time ago, way before the 1997 reform. So as early as 1974, we had different groups of people advocating for universal child care. So it was a movement that was starting in the late 70s and people pushed for it. And eventually it came to fruition in 1997 when Pauline Marois, our Ministry of Education, put this universal system in place. So it didn't come up overnight. So tell us a little bit about it. How does it work? Is everything working beautifully? Is it really at truly universal? And particularly, as we've heard here in the United States, there are people who say this is a great model. There are also people who say there's some real passions that it wasn't good for children. Studies that have shown ties to not so great child outcomes. So tell us a little bit more about how it works. And tell us more about some of this controversy. And what is it that we need to be listening to? And can you put it all in context? What do we need to understand better about it? Yeah, of course. So first, most of the literature, the scientific literature on the Kebuk child care reform refers to the first 10 years of the program. So since then, we don't have data. So we cannot really give you an update on what's going on right now. So you have to think about it as the first 10 years, first 12 years when we were implementing the system. The system had two goals in mind. So the first one was to raise the labor force participation of women and allow them to juggle the demands of work and family. And the second objective was to help with child development to make sure that all kids were well prepared for school. So if you look at the first goal, the system really delivered well on that one. So in Quebec, the labor force participation of women with children raised by 12 percentage point, that's huge. We were way behind other Canadian provinces and now we're at the top. So we've been at the top since then and we're remaining at the top and no one is catching up with us right now. So this was one of the goals. It helped, it helped women maintain their relationship with the labor force and it also helped single mothers be able to work because often their income doesn't allow them to pay for childcare and work. So a system like this will allow them to be full participants in the labor force. The second objective was child development. So this is where controversy happens. On the first one, everybody agrees. On the second one, there's more controversy. So if you look at the early years and Krista will talk about it, but you have to think about the fact that the system doesn't provide a uniform level of quality. The system, as it was designed in 1997, had a high quality model in mind, but as it developed and different parties came into power, the different services started to appear. So it is universal, but not everyone has access to the same thing and we can come back to this later. So when you look at the impact on kids, it's more mixed. So when they're in, then when they're little, we of course see that they get more runny nose and things like this because they're in a community. So they catch a bit more little disease, nothing major, nothing to worry about. But when you look at it later, those effects tend to fade away. Where the big controversy happened and that has been cited in different media is the paper that was rising, that was claiming that the child care reform raised criminality in Quebec. So we had more crimes because of this reform. The truth is, if you look at the crime rate in Quebec of young people, it's always been lower than in the rest of Canada. So before we implemented this, we had less criminality. It was a factor of two thirds of what you observe outside of Quebec. And today it's still lower. So what happened is our crime rate declined a bit over time, but in Canada, the crime rate declined a bit more, but we're still below. We don't have more crimes than what we had before. So this system did not create criminals overall, not at all. So our view is that if you think about the second goal, because we didn't invest in quality enough, we have more of a neutral impact on kids on average. So let's dig into that. You know, Chris, I know we wanted to get to you later, but since, you know, Catherine, since you said you brought up quality, Christa, can you talk a little bit about that? And what is it about the system and the way that it's set up that ensures that some kids get high quality and some kids don't? And really kind of talk a little bit about what was supposed to be designed and what actually happened and how that impacted quality. Thank you, Richard. Yeah, I think I, you know, it's a very complex question. A, it was set out to be a universal system, but universal means that like in some European countries, a child or family has the right to a place, but it's not universal because we don't have enough spaces. There's still thousands of families waiting for a subsidized place. And the results that Katrina presented are very interesting because it depends how you analyze data. You know, economists have a very, I'm a psychologist, Katrina is an economist, and we have very different ways of looking at data. And the analysis that that Katrina cited are difference in difference in difference, which is a different way from the developmental psychologists who look at a cohort, which is followed over years. And you look at did they go to childcare? What type of childcare? Because there are big quality differences between the not-for-profits, the for-profits, the home-based care is lacking because, you know, people are not very well trained. And we saw, and a lot of my colleagues have published very good articles on that, that the children who were in center-based care, especially children from low socioeconomic backgrounds, benefited from it and benefited for school readiness, for later achievement, even now we have data for high school completion. It doesn't make much of a difference because equality is generally, unfortunately mediocre. It doesn't make a much difference for children who are stimulated at home, but it makes a big difference for children who don't get much at home. And that's where we should, we should put the money to provide them with high quality environments because they can make a difference. And I mean, we've seen that in American studies, you know, the classics like the Perry preschool, the Carolina, and so on project. And we are, we're having a tough time right now because with a pandemic, we also lost a lot of educators. And recruiting educators, I'm sorry, maybe I'm going over the topic I'm supposed to talk about, recruiting educators is very difficult because it's not a very attractive job. And I always liked the image of a zookeeper makes more money than a childcare educator, you know. And so how do we as a society value that work? That's a big systemic question. But there are positive effects of the childcare system for the most vulnerable if they get into childcare, because they're also underrepresented in childcare. You know, it's interesting that you said that in the United States, one of the things that we always say, or often say is that an early educator or childcare worker actually earns less than a parking lot attendant. So, you know, poverty wages here, where that one and two are earned such little money that they qualify for a public benefit. But if we can stay with you, you know, and then I want to I want to open it up to Elliott and Brenda talk to talk about the US context, but to still try to understand Quebec. You know, what what was the original idea? Was everybody supposed to be in a certain type of care? And then, you know, you talk about, you know, for profit and not her profit and home based, what ended up happening just just systemically, what was supposed to happen? What ended up happening? And is that part of kind of why you get these uneven results? Well, the idea was to provide all children independent of their socioeconomic background with high quality care. And the idea was to develop these early childhood centers, which are which are not for profit. And they were actually also conceived to include family and provide all kinds of services. And the demand was extreme. I mean, women could go back to work and pay $5 a day for child care. And that I mean, like I've been said, I mean, our rate surpassed the rate and the rest of Canada, because we were in the past, we didn't have high that high labor force participation. So that was a tremendous demand. And in 1997, 1998, the government said, Oh, by 2000, we have all the kids in child care. But that was actually not feasible. And so to meet the demand, a cheaper way to create spaces was the family, the home based care, which grew rapidly. And of course, I guess we share that in many countries, home based care is not like Brenda will certainly talk about that. It's not high quality. And people don't need much training. And then there's post we have a curriculum, they're supposed to, you know, implant, if you say that, this kind of curriculum. And the sector grew rapidly. And then I mean, it's, it's all political depends what kind of party is in power. And there was a moratorium on the for profits. A number of them sign most of them signed an agreement with the government to offer the low parental contributions basis. And then a liberal market based government came into power. And they developed for profits that were not subsidized, but introduced a tax credit for the parents at the end of events. So the, right now, there are more children in for profit settings than they are in in the in the CPUs in the not for profit setting. So of course, research has shown nationally and internationally that the for profits are of lower quality. That's why we have these mixed results, you know, and one sad fact is that in low income neighborhoods, there are fewer non profits, not for profits. And also, I mean, we have all these statistics, thank God, we have lots of research. You can also see that children from underprivileged backgrounds are more likely to be in poor quality settings. So the whole the whole goal of kind of address social inequality hasn't worked so far. And, and I think we're collectively we're brainstorming, what can we do? And I hope the money we get from the federal government. I hope that the provincial government will invest it in creating spaces in the not for profit sector in poor neighborhoods and support support the staff and find qualified staff big challenge. Does that answer your question? Yeah, well, this is this is great. Catherine, I wanted to jump in and then I want to I want to get to Elliott and Brenda to talk about the US context with Catherine. Yeah, go ahead. Yes. And to just add on on Chris's point, which I agree with them completely. And we've shown in some of our paper that indeed lower socioeconomic children didn't really access the higher quality modes of care as much as others. But when you think about developing a system, so if I'm thinking about the US thinking about this, it's important to keep in mind that when you're going to roll out a system like this, and when we did roll it out, we we had in mind that the pressure of demand would be high, because we we first rolled in the four years old, then the three, then the two, then the one to kind of create this space. But even by doing this, the pressure of demand was so high, that it created political pressure to just quickly open spaces that were cheap, because parents wanted to work, they wanted a space. So it's almost impossible to create a system of high quality overnight. You don't have like millions of thousands of people at home right now that are highly qualified to do that job. So you need to think about it as something that will develop over time, and in which quality will always remain a top priority so that you always monitor quality. So I think it's important to be realistic about how fast this can happen. So, Elliott, let me turn to you at this point.  And we are down, like we are like second or third from the bottom, like we are close to, we are close to nothing. And I know that we have had some, some, you know, with the Biden plan and some bailouts. But, you know, some people would argue that's just trying to help us kind of get back to where we were before the pandemic, which as Laura pointed out, was not a very good place. So talk in a little bit about the US context and, you know, as you're listening to Krista and Catherine, what are you picking up about, what are the real important lessons that we need to learn in this context here? Yeah, I appreciate that.   You know, I think a couple of things we think about a childcare system that works for parents that works for the providers that works for children. There are a few pillars. And actually, you know, I appreciate numerical, you all put out this care index report a couple years back, they've been talked about these.  These are sort of the three legs of the three-legged stool. And I think what Quebec teaches us is that you really can with the universal system, successfully handle the sort of affordability and the access, right? Like, $5 a day. I mean, you're jaw kind of drop, Bridget, and I might do it like for parents who are shelling out, you know, $10,000 plus, you know, a year for childcare. I mean, that is truly like would be would be life changing in ways that would trickle down to their children as well with reductions of family stress, access, right? Like being able to know that you can get a slot, you know, like that's that's obviously something we know that we can do. And, you know, I think that perhaps Catherine can touch on this later. We also know that like it pays for itself in many, many ways. The down payment number can be large, but you get a lot of that back from that maternal employment, you know, and also tells us that there's huge demand, right?  And so I think the key or Quebec teaches us is that we need to design the US system very thoughtfully. And we need to design it in a way that is going to prioritize quality, because I think what we know in the US, and, you know, with respect to Dr. Javelle, like, you know, the home base care can be very high quality, you know, a center base can be very high quality, right? Like we can have high quality care just about, anyway, you can get high quality care from a grandparent or an aunt. But what's required is having the support systems in place, having the trainings in place, having, you know, the ability for the providers to get a good enough wage that they're themselves not super stressed out, you know, you mentioned right, half of the childcare workforce is on some kind of public assistance. If you're worried about putting food on your table or where your own child is getting childcare from, you're not necessarily like super attentive with the, you know, two-year-old is in front of you. So I think there's a lot of lessons around quality. Something Dr. Javelle said to me when I, her and I talked a while back was we need to go slow and go thoroughly. And I think that's absolutely true when we think about, you know, what comes next, whether that's the Child Care for Working Families Act, which is a lot of what the American Families Plan is based off of, or some other piece of legislation that the design needs to be very, very careful. But what Quebec does prove is that if you do this, if you actually put in the money in the investment, universal system, it's going, the people want it, they need it, and it's going to have massive, you know, benefits for families writ large. Because if you, if we're going to solve the quality piece, then, you know, access, affordability quality are all working in tandem, and you're really doing good things for women's equity, you're doing good things for working families, you're doing good things for children, and you're making sure that all families have the opportunity to flourish. And then the last thing I'll just highlight before I pass it off back to you is, you know, Quebec, just like, you know, the U.S. system is not a mandatory system. These are about having choices. It's about having options. It's about pluralism, right? Like all of these sort of principles, which we would want in the U.S. system, I think, are reflected in Quebec. And, you know, when they'll talk about this, I think near a little bit later in other provinces as well as Canada is now starting to go nationwide. And this is not some small Scandinavian outlier. I think about Finland here, right? This is a large diverse nation that is literally right next door. So I think we can learn a whole lot from them. Yeah, I love that. You always see it, you know, exactly. Here's a, here's a country that's often seen as sort of more in the model of the United States, the UK, Canada, Australia, you know, many in our political system like to think of comparing to these kinds of countries. So we are going to get to that, you know, what Laura also mentioned, sort of what's coming down the pike for Canada. But Brenda, let me turn it to you. We've had some discussion about family homes and family care and low-income families and how, you know, there have been some really good benefits in Quebec for children, particularly, you know, in low-income families, but that it's really uneven, that there isn't the same access. They are not access, they don't have the same access to quality. And I think in our previous conversations, you were saying that family homes, what is it, you know, more than a third of all infants and toddlers in the United States are in family homes. And that's, it's really the sort of the choice or the option for many low-income families. So talk a little bit about what you've heard from Quebec and where family homes fit into what we need to be thinking about moving forward. Sure. Thank you for this invitation. But before I go sort of taking a deep dive into home-based child care, I do want to make a few contextual comments that really do guide my own thinking about what the lessons are from Quebec and how they can help us in the States. First of all, I do think, although certainly we're going to see what happens across Canada soon, that is very, very different from the United States. And I just want to make sure that we pay attention to that context. We live in a country that's very, very heterogeneous. We have a lot of minorities in this country. And as all of you know, not only is there this high correlation between minority status and poverty in this country. So when we talk about low-income, we have to think about race and immigration and all that kind of stuff more than other countries. But we also have to think about our early childhood workforce. Like Elliot said, many of our workforce is on public assistance. And we have to say many of our workforce are women of color as well. So I think we have to really take that into consideration as we think about this. The other thing that I want to say is that in the United States, we do not, as Elliot said, do not have a system. And I harken back to my advisor Ed Ziegler and one of the biggest disappointments of his career was that he couldn't push us forward on a childcare system. And it saddens me to think that even after his death, we still don't have it. But I feel like we're making progress. We're doing things. We're getting better. But the one thing that we have had, I do believe, is an emphasis on what can happen to families below the poverty line. So if you think about Early Head Start, for example, that is high-quality childcare that's provided to children under the poverty line. Although, as Elliot and everybody on this call probably knows, Early Head Start really does only access a very, very small percentage of eligible children. So that's one thing we really, really need to be working on. But at least we know that we can build this kind of system for low-income children. What we have not done at all is try to address the needs of the working poor who are right above that federal poverty line. Pre-K, we've done a better job with it, but certainly not for childcare, particularly for kids who are birthed to three. So I wanted to also make a comment, though, about Early Head Start. One of its initiatives that is most recent is this idea of leveraging Early Head Start dollars to improve the quality of childcare. I think that is a really good strategy. We got a lot of work to do in that domain. The money doesn't always go where it should go, but at least you're getting some childcare centers to say, I want to try to do some work to raise the quality. So I wanted to make those comments. But back to your, Bridget, to what you were asking about home-based childcare. I mean, this is really relevant to my own area of interest, which is the only reason I'm thinking about it, which is how do you serve low-income and minority families? And we do know because minority families, low-income families, work non-traditional hours, they cannot use center-based care in the same way. I mean, an eight to six kind of program just doesn't work for them when you work at a fast food restaurant and you don't get off till midnight. So what family childcare does, home-based childcare with relatives or with unrelated people, is provide you a space to put your children that's safe that will give you the flexibility as a low-income worker that you need. Now until we get to the point that we can do that in center-based programs, we have to think about supporting these family childcare providers. Yes, absolutely. As Krista has said, the quality is lower. We know that. We know it has a lot to do with what we pay them. We know it has a lot to do with the fact that they're not regulated to the same extent. The standards for them are very, very different. But there are examples of how you can create, for example, networks. And one example is what has happened in New Haven, Connecticut with the All Our Ken effort, where they're really trying to create these networks of family childcare providers. We have a big one in my state of Maryland, where they get lots of peer support, but also free professional development and materials and all that kind of thing that really do help them improve quality. But one of the things that I actually am learning from one of my graduate students who's actually doing her dissertation on family childcare is the thing that we don't talk about as much is the relationship that these families have with their providers. So not only are they getting childcare, they're getting support themselves, how to be a better parent, how to navigate the workspace and your space at home, how to think about stress and how to help yourself calm down, all these kinds of things that you don't typically get from center-based providers because one, you get different ones all the time. You're not having the same person do the same thing. But also these are providers who often are families for five and six years. They have multiple children that go through them. They're there from the time the kids are babies to when they go to school. So these are long-term relationships that one of the things that we're learning is that we don't measure that as a particular benefit of these programs and a particular aspect of quality. It doesn't sort of fit into our notions of what process quality is all about. So I wanted to make that comment. The other comment that I really wanted to make is we have not put a lot of our public dollars into home-based childcare. We're much more willing to put it in a center-based care and Head Start programs that aren't family, kin and neighbor care. But if we could think about how we can, for example, help parents use those subsidies that they get from Child Care Development Fund to pay for home-based childcare. Or we can think about using early Head Start dollars more intentionally to pay for home-based childcare. I think we would be in a better place. And the other quick thing I'm going to say before I'm going to turn it over back to you is that I think we have to think about the regulation part of home-based childcare. We have a lot of home-based childcare providers who say, I don't even want to go through this. The requirements that you all have for me for health and safety, for staffing, it's just more than I can afford. And a lot of our home-based childcare providers are, yes, they're business owners, but they are really small business owners who don't make a lot of money off of this. And so we're asking them to do a whole lot in order to be regulated and therefore be, you know, have access to these public funds and the subsidies, etc. So I think in the U.S., we need to do a lot of work around that space. Yeah, you bring up so many excellent points, Brenda. Thank you so much, you know, especially if thinking about the, you know, these are people who are very small, very dedicated to what they do. If you look at the family home providers in California that have banded together to form a provider union, you know, one of their rallying prizes, we make five bucks a day, you know? And this is, that's not a parent paying five bucks a day, like in Quebec, that's what people are earning, you know? So before we go on to kind of like the bigger picture in Quebec, I really wanted to go back to, again, I'm sorry, not to Quebec, but to Canada and what's coming next. Katherine and Krista, I wonder, can you answer some of the questions that Brenda and Elliot brought up about caregivers and caregiver wages?   You know, has the Quebec experiment looked at that, tried to address that and really made the connection, as Elliot was saying, of, you know, a well compensated staff or educators with how important that is for quality. Can you talk a little bit about that? Yeah, yeah. I mean, we, you know, if you compare the wages of child care providers across Canada, Quebec isn't that bad, but put it in perspective. And if you work in an early childhood center, not for profit, after 10 years, your salary is about $25 an hour, Canadian. Okay. If you work in the for profit sector, and a lot of people who are not qualified are going into the for profit sector, of course, the wages are much lower. So this is that it's not much money. And that explains also that there is a huge turnover. I mean, people like to work in the not for profits because they're unionized, they have, you know, the benefits that come with being unionized, whereas in the for profit, there's such a huge turnover because the conditions, the work conditions are terrible. And the home based providers, and it's really interesting what you're saying, Brenda, there are, we're seeing a development in, I mean, in the home based care, people are off can offer if they're associated or accredited by a coordinating office, they can offer presently. And I think that's a question somewhere somebody asked presently the fee is $8 and 50 cents for center based care, publicly funded center based care. And even in the for profits that have made this this deal with the ministry and in family based childcare, but their days, you know, and it comes back to quality issues like ratio, I don't know about the states, but we have for home based care, one provider for six children. If you have an assistant who earns less, you can have nine children, but six children all day long, and you're supposed to, you know, they're fed in our, they're supposed to get good food. And from our observation, that's not always the case. Hot dogs are very prevalent. And so you look at it, you know, you're, you are allowed to children younger than 18 months already. Whoa. And then changing diapers, taking care of the kids, stimulating the kids, implementing an educational program, that's impossible, you know, it is really, and I agree with Brenda, we should, A, we should cut the ratios, even center based care, cut the ratios and support the people. And in home based care, a lot of people have opted out of the, especially during the pandemic, out of the coordinating office, because there were lots of demands in terms of hygiene and safety. And you wonder what's happening there, because we have a parallel system in home based care, you can also, without being accredited by a coordinating office, you can also, you can have six kids in your home, which is like, we call unregulated care. And we have, it's a gray zone, we don't know how many there are, you know, it's, it's, and you wonder what's going on there. And in the Quebec launch, you do no study on child development. We, we follow, it's a while back, the data, we followed a child and through the parent and the child, we got into all kinds of care settings. Among them, those unrank unregulated family based care. And of course, they're even of lower quality than the family based care. So a lot of our children are in, in settings that, you know, that, that, that don't reassure me. And an interesting thing is, because in that Quebec study, we also had data on the family socioeconomic data. And we realized parents who lived in poor neighborhoods and had their children in family based care or for profit, the quality of those settings were lower than children who lived in more affluent neighborhoods and were in the, you know, whereas the quality wasn't different for the not for profits. So I mean, another argument that there, there are more regulations and there's more a culture of striving to reach a certain quality level and maintain it, which these days for the pandemic is like very critical. So what our model, what our model shows is when you invest in a public system, a universal system that's not yet universal, it does change children's life. And we know that children's development before age five is critical. So this is why we decided to invest in this and we need to do more and make it more uniform. So, so let's get to that. You know, we're getting a lot of questions, which is awesome. And so as I've been monitoring them, there's some questions that have that have come up that we've actually already answered, which is great. But there is, you know, there are some questions very specifically on that that point about investment.  You know, how did that compare before? And then we're also getting a question like how is it funded, you know, was there a dedicated stream from a new tax, you know, and if so, what was the nature of it? So how it worked originally is that other programs we had for lower income households, or for example, the baby bonus that we had before were stopped and reinvested in the childcare system. So the net cost of the intervention was not extremely high for Quebec at the time. So it was money that we had in other safety pro safety net program that we were we reallocated to that program. And it depends on the childcare space, the type of space we're talking about the cost to the government, but for a place in the higher quality mode of care, you're talking about $15,000 per year. So this is our highest quality mode of care. And with the commitment of the federal government that we've that was recently advertised, because you have to understand that we we've run this program independently. So we're really relying only on provincial tax dollars. So it was really difficult to make it a more generous and expand the system beyond and above what we've already done. But as soon as you start to be able to invest in federal dollars, then it becomes a different story. So if the extra money that will come through the childcare budget from the federal government is allocated to our childcare system, we could deploy it and have only the higher quality mode of care for all children that do attend childcare. Because to Elliot's point, it's a system that's not compulsory, we allow parents to decide what they feel is best for their family. So families that decide to stay at home or the father stays at home is very difficult now here too. That's okay too. But the system is there to allow you to work or study if you feel this is the best solution for your family. So it's interesting that you talk about choices, you know, and Quebec also has a very generous paid family medical leave program. And it also really encourages men to take it. The rates have become much higher in recent years. And it's very interesting that sounds like Quebec, like many other countries is using paid family leave as a real way to address infant care. The first year is with the family and then you go to childcare. And this is what's best for child development. And that fathers and mothers should share the first year. So you were mentioning what's coming down the pike and Elliot and Brenda, I want to bring you back into the conversation here. So the Canadian government has just agreed to spend billions of more dollars over five years and sort of expand what they did in Quebec more broadly. Talk about the lesson learned there. What kind of dollars are we talking about and is something like that possible in the United States? And along with that, if I can sort of piggyback another question, there's another question from the audience is like, so how do you kind of balance that go slow and be thorough that Krista and Catherine are talking about. And some of these timelines, you know, where you've got to spend the money in a certain amount of time, you know, talk about sort of the just the practicality of the go slow, the need for money and the politics here. Brenda and Elliot, can you, this will be sort of the kind of last couple of questions here. Yeah, I'm happy to start and then Brenda, if you want to join in. So I first of all, I think we should put the numbers in context. So $30 billion over five years is what the federal Canadian government has pledged. If you very roughly sort of population adjust us to them, that would be about $240 billion over five years, you know, that's just $40, $50 billion. It's a lot of money. I mean, for context, the US government currently puts a few in somewhere $25, $30 billion a year into sort of all sorts of child care funding sources. So it would be a lot. It's also sort of in line with what's being proposed in the Child Care for Working Families Act. And I think we need to distinguish between two things. There's the pandemic response bucket of money, right? So the American Rescue Plan and the other stimulus is that happened in 2020. And that is time limited money that we have to expand it by 2024. It has to be used for various things. Proposals like what's in the American Families Plan, the Child Care for Working Families Act and there warrants a universal child care and early learning bill. Those are permanent moving forward. So let's just very briefly, the Child Care for Working Families Act has a ramp up period of three or four years. I may get some of these details slightly wrong. But after about four or five years, it becomes a sort of a permanent entitlement where the appropriation is how much money it takes to make sure that everyone within the states have access to child care if they want it.  And you can think about learning these lessons to develop a system where everyone can access a high quality program, family-based, center-based, whatever these that they wanted to do. So we do have some proposals on the table moving forward, I think that would let us create a system and it would take an investment similar to what they're doing in Canada. What's really exciting, I think they're doing it. They're not talking about it. Just in the past week or two, the government started to sign these agreements with provinces like British Columbia and Nova Scotia. And the effects going to be pretty rapid because they're going to be able to sort of start filling in some of the affordability. At least in the press releases, they're talking about having the sort of cost of parents within a year and on the way within five years to sort of a $10 a day standard in most places across Canada. And I just think that's, again, this is an example of a country of 30 plus million people across the country as sort of many different kinds of provinces. There's urban, there's rural, there's cities, there's towns, and they're doing it. And so to me, that's very inspiring that we can get it done here. There's no particular reason not to. So I think that we can certainly learn from their experience and do it in some ways. The unfortunate benefit of being slow to the game is you can look at the people who have come before you. And so there is just in the way that in British Columbia did their work, they were able to, in the 2010s, they were able to look back at Quebec, like we can look back at what's been happening, I think, and avoid some of those pitfalls. Brenda, I want you to answer that one. But we've also got one that's really specifically for you. So I'm wondering if I can give you a double header question. And it's really thinking about what do you think also about targeting low income families with programs and income eligibility requirements that become economically segregated, early head start and head start versus approaches that build an economically integrated system. Kind of thinking about that. And then also if there's some, after Brenda has a chance to talk, there's some experience from Quebec as well. So I'll just add a couple of things to what Ellie has said. I totally agree with everything he said. And then I'll get to that specific question. I think the one thing that I always hold in my head is the lesson learned from the NICHD study of early childcare. That is that parents matter. And so I do think that even if we take some risks and we don't have the best quality supports, we do know that children have another context where they can get support. And certainly this relates to your question, middle class children get a whole lot of informal learning activities so that even if they're not in the best childcare, they're going to be okay. Now the low income children, that's another story. I mean, we certainly know that their families are more stressed and have a lot more issues that they have to contend with. So the kinds of resources that they can devote, whether we're talking about financial or psychological resources to their children or less, which is why I am always going to advocate for being more intentional and providing more support to low income children. I know a lot of my colleagues don't agree with me because obviously when you do universal programming, you got the buy-in of everybody and everybody's going to champion it. A lot of people in this country feel like low income parents are in a different category. I mean, look at how we have very different views. We talked about this when we were on the phone about mothers on TANF. They better go to work while those mothers who are not on TANF, yeah, let them stay home with their children. So we have very different expectations of low income families than we do for middle income families in this country. And so that means that the political will to provide for them is less than you would want. So of course, then universal programs generally get you more. But the data to me are so clear. And the data from Quebec really does support this, that it's the low income kids, the kids without resources who really benefit from all of this, from a child development perspective, right? They're going to look better. They're going to be more school-ready, particularly if they're in high quality environments. So from my vantage point, yes, there's this whole issue of economic segregation. But if you really want to put your money where your mouth is, and certainly Krista talked about Abbasid Darian, low income black children. She talked about Perry preschool, low income black children, that when you think about what they can get from these kinds of things, it is much more than a middle class majority kid would get. So of course, I'm going to advocate for that. But I think, you know, there are challenges to that as well. You know, so kind of learning from Quebec, so Krista and Catherine, can you speak to that as well, that kind of, you know, the economically segregated versus kind of the universal approach in Quebec? Well, I fully agree with Brenda.  And I think one lesson that people should learn is that should not be the case. We have advocated for vulnerable families and their children who benefit most from being in good care, that they should not pay anything. You know, it should be free for them. And I would personally much more agree with the, you know, fees that are a certain percentage of your income like it is in Europe. And we all have to finance the system, but in a reasonable way. So I mean, I'm excited about what's happening in Canada. I think it's great. It's moving forward. You know, we had a childcare agenda. I don't remember like many, many years ago, then the government changed and they decided to give the money to the parents. And the whole project kind of fell flat on its face. And now it's back and people are motivated and people are signing agreements and they're lowering. I mean, it's a thrill for parents to pay $10 because the fees are horrendous in some provinces. But $10 a day is a lot for the working poor. We should not forget that. And we should really have a sliding scale for, you know, and up to a certain amount. It's free. And that was because our kids from socioeconomically poor families are underrepresented in childcare. You just mentioned something in the chat. You want to come back on and share that thought and then Catherine, I'll go to you for some final thoughts. Oh, yeah, just really good that actually exactly is the most childcare plans on the table would have those who are making under a certain percentage of the federal poverty line have access to free care with a sliding scale up to a cap. I think the ongoing conversation we're having in the U.S. is does that cap happen at like, you know, a certain level of affluence? Do you just not get any benefit? Or do you literally just again, similar to some Europeans, our public school system here, regardless of your income level, you get some benefit. So that's that's more of the conversation. But I don't know of any major proposal on the plan that would have wouldn't let the poor and the working poor lower middle class folks get either free or extremely low cost care. Right. And Catherine, let me go to you.  I would rather than giving concluding remarks for me, what I would rather do is hear from each of you, lightning round, one thing that we who we in the U.S. need to learn from Quebec to move forward. But Catherine, you wanted to finish your thought and then I'm then I'll go to the lightning round. Yeah. So the one thing I was just going to point out is that we have a Canada child benefit program that is actually designed to help pay for childcare for the lower income family. So the there's like a dual system that run in parallel to each other to allow these families to kind of offset the cost of the $10 per day. But maybe it's not as progressive as it could be to allow for more variety and times in terms of cost, depending on the income level of the family. And I was about to wrap up with my one recommendation, but maybe I can hold on or I can go right away.  Yes. So what I was about to say is that and to Brenda's point and Christa's point, I think what we should have done and that we didn't do and that would have made a huge difference in rolling out this universal system is to first roll it out in low income neighborhood and really put our dollars into those neighborhood and have really high quality childcare there and allow access and make it easy also because at first now it's becoming easier. But at first it wasn't easy for these family to understand how you get on the list who you have to talk to and how it was kind of a process that was a bit informal, not super well organized. So if you could develop a system that grows over time because it cannot happen overnight, but at puts its money first for people who most needed and who most benefit from it, the return on investment will be much larger and quicker. Great. Okay. We'll do Christa, Elliot and Brenda. I'm going to give you the final word. So Christa, one thing really we're right at time. I could just repeat what Catherine said and I think it really requires that we stop working in silos and that we have community organizations that accompany parents who don't really know what to do and help them to find a space because you know they're long waiting lists and if you're not educated parents sign up the day they get pregnant or even before they get pregnant and people who are less literate or less wise about community resources say just take whatever they can get and it's usually lower quality care. But I think we have to work as a community because we have like health services that can be a really good resource to guide parents and to give them advice. So I think it's a responsibility of the whole community and the priority are these children because they start school with you know they're not ready for school or they have lots of special needs and I think that should be our target. I think Catherine that's a good idea. They should have targeted that population first because who benefited of the child care system mostly is the middle class. Elliott, let's go to you. There is massive demand. There is massive need for this. It will largely pay for itself and we have to be really thoughtful about quality across all different types of care which would be accessible so parents have all the choices that they need. I love that. Brenda, last one. Although I'm a developmentalist from a research perspective I'm really interested in this organizational context issue that I've learned from Krista and Catherine about for example for profit not for profit. So I think we need to pay a little more attention to what that looks like in our country and what kind of organizational context might be able to deliver these services in the way in the high quality way that we think they should. All right well this we're just a little over time. I want to thank all of the participants who have joined us today. I want to thank the panelists for taking your time and sharing your wisdom your expertise and your experience. I want to thank Laura and her program. It's a wonderful collaborator and co-host and just loved everything that we heard. The last thing that I'm just going to say is that we are going to put together a one-page sort of takeaway lessons learned. There is a lot of talk here in the United States. There's a lot of misinformation so our one-pager will help put some of that straight with links and data and details and we'll get that all to you in the next couple days. So thanks to all of you. We're so delighted to be here for this very important conversation and have a wonderful rest of the day. Thank you.


How long do we have till you want to put me on we're gonna go live in about a minute In a minute.  Well, okay, so people on Facebook. Let's see you do this now So, let's just let me just welcome them and you take care of your technology So hi everyone This is what the app is going on in Latin America code pinks weekly Webinar 20 minutes of hot news from Latin America. We apologize for the technical difficulties today We've had issues on both sides of the Um Technological loop this morning, so we're about 30 minutes late and I hope some of you are still with us And we will we be recording this webinar and posting it on YouTube and Facebook so Today We have Wyatt Reed reporting live from La Paz, Bolivia Wyatt is on assignment with the gray zone project and We are very fortunate to have 20 minutes of his time today to share with you what he has seen Since his arrival in La Paz shortly after the coup of Sunday, November 10 And as a journalist where he's gonna share with us a little bit of what he's seen on the ground but also what's happening with media coverage in and out of Bolivia and And the state of and the condition that journalism journalists are working under right now, so We'll talk with Wyatt for about 20 minutes and then We'll take 10 minutes a Q&A if any of you have additional questions For him so welcome Wyatt so happy to have you here and I so thank you for your patience with the technology this afternoon Yeah So you're really bad at the moment again Can you you were really good when you were sitting up against the wall Yeah, we can hear you it's it's garbled a little It's much better. So let me where should I start? Why don't you start with Wyatt how you got there and when you arrived and let us give us a quick overview of what you've witnessed And then let's talk about the state of the media coverage And and then what journalists on the ground are experiencing does that sound like a fair conversation, right? Yep. Yep. Yep. So I have been here about two weeks now And I just got into Santa Cruz Then I'm a lot of majority of my time So I've seen a lot seen things really shift from a much more sort of militarized militant ongoing sort of really massacres is the only way to characterize them to Now we're at the point where this new government has more or less achieved, you know, what they call pacification. So this Essentially looks like a very sort of fun easy piece, right? We have Reducing right yes coming out of the synthetic gas plant, you know where they massacred so many people to clear that out so things are in many ways looking normal, but beneath the surface, it's very much a scary place to be especially who are Trying to either pose this to or to sort of expose the So in that sense, I Guess, you know right now. I haven't seen a whole lot of of Santa Cruz The only thing here for a few hours, but what I have seen is is a march of people here who are are being forced to sort of pay for this huge increase in energy consumption that occurred as you know, this three-week period of sort of police repression against, you know, these massive protests that could We just we just lost you know nothing to do with this and So they stayed inside their houses and it was a extremely hard Yeah, you're you're very garbled at the moment. Yeah, you're so there Yeah, we're here. Yeah So I was trying to explain Today there was a big Well, yeah, we just lost you again, okay everyone give us a few minutes for Wyatt to reconnect. All right. Oh good. Okay. Are you there? So we let what the last thing I heard was the police repression over the over the gas Okay, we can hear you Start again So I arrived in Santa Cruz today and there's a big protest against the election inside during the police repressions against, you know, anti-coup protesters It's been some of the hottest weeks of the year so far here in Santa Cruz So naturally this led to a massive increase in electricity consumption And so people are seeing their electrical bills jump up three times in many cases And you know, that's really untenable for a lot of working-class people and what's kind of interesting is around this time last year. There was a So we've lost you again Okay, that's good stay right where you are I'm trying not to move it up. Don't move Same thing happened in the last year, right? With the Alice government there was an increase in electrical use and an increase in thing about that was those bills 5,000, you know, kilowatt hours So that really only affected business owners, you know So the people who came out to protest that last year were the civic committees of Santa Cruz And that's really where Macho and under Macho Cut his teeth as the civic committee here But I think that sort of shows you kind of the difference between these two governments and their Their rationales for doing things and their justifications and also Really who they favor and to they who they do not who they disadvantage so in that sense, you know only having been here for a few hours in Santa Cruz, I think I'm getting a clearer picture This new government and what it means for working people here So let me ask you something yesterday there was an article published in the Hill here in DC and it was I don't not sure if you had a chance to see it there, but it basically Basically criminalized the moralist government and Denied that a that a coup actually took place on November 10 and this is we're seeing More and more of that narrative here in the state is that Typical of what's coming out of Bolivia now. How is the how are you seeing the the media? managed and or produced Because what you're sharing with us right now, we are really not reading or seeing here in the US well Yeah, I mean, it's funny because you know for I think maybe the first time in recorded history The people in the US actually have a slightly clearer picture of what's happening Bolivia than the Bolivians do right Because here there's just absolutely no No alternative voices allowed on the air at all. So if anybody wants to find out what's really happening They have to go to social media Because the only channels that are allowed on the air of these You know essentially state propaganda at this point, you know any any single channel that questions what's happening has been very much purged at dissenting voices and You know those who you know might otherwise You know not go along with this that have been bought off So really there's and well, that's not even to mention right tell us to her and RT They'll sort of last through international channels that you would be able to get on cable. Those are gone as well So even if you have you know the package whatever You just you can't find a single bit of information that isn't more or less pro-coup propaganda So yes, obviously, you know the The narrative United States is extremely wrong, but somehow here it's even wrong You know At least I think there are a few outlets who are willing to publish you know these reports by like for example the Center for Economic Policy and Research and you know the similar academics including you know a There was a big open letter published yesterday by a lot of well-regarded academics Demanding that The OAS retract Offered a $500 reward for anybody who would ask these questions. Yeah, you know of of the OAS sort of Morning Demanding to know, you know, where how exactly they can justify Continuing to to keep up this charade that there was somehow some you know fast inexplicable discrepancy between the Later full results and the final ones So yeah, in that sense, you know, obviously in the United States It's hard to find out what's going on in Bolivia But if if you're in Bolivia really the only way to find out is is is going yourself Or you know having access to these alternative media channels, you know a lot of assistance to Bolivia You know funnily enough, it's there's a meme page on Facebook called such a let's you know It's essentially one of the main sources of how people are finding out So, you know, that's kind of the level that we're at so we have a couple I want to just mention since You're talking about alternative media. We should remind the audience that you are on the ground in Santa Cruz, Bolivia now On assignment with the great project and the audience can check gray zone calm for your work And then also I want to remind listeners that Code pink or we have a Bolivia news page code pink org slash Bolivia news. So those are two sources for all of you to reference in addition to what you and so Wyatt, can you tell us a little bit we some of the things that I have personally read is that there's been some physical Threats to journalists as well as just blacking out media sources. Have you seen or heard of any Yeah, I mean So I you know have friends who work with You know what I'm really is one of the last remaining voices Calling the other side of the story of lattice is fancy of Bolivia And one of them was Help for 24 hours and in a location where you know, he was not allowed to Brother his friends, but they refused to tell them where he was They said that he wasn't there and they made him sign this, you know Document saying that he wouldn't participate in social media, which is you know, not only ridiculous But also illegal and even under Bolivian law so We're really facing this situation where You know, if you're facing City that is arbitrary and Is itself in many ways criminal and then you're you're facing a question from these sort of fascist Groups that are sort of doing the dirty work of the coup And they really don't have any rules at all because you know as as other colleagues from They watched someone who attempted to fail right and and they're sort of youth vanguards as they as they took to the streets wearing these you know helmets and gas masks and massive shields and waving batons and You know, she's filming them and and they start screaming her surrounding her blowing whistles in her ears Sort of tactics that are familiar to people who have dealt with the right wing Latin American diaspora before But Then they immediately called for a cab up to her inside of this vehicle and She disappeared and she's gone, you know, and nobody has She's not it's if she is dead, but it's certainly not anything that's going to be investigated by the police so it really is a terrifying moment for the leftists who are Focal about their opposition and to refuse to stay silent So Wow, this is you know, we're just not seen hearing about this in in the mainstream US media as you know So how for you personally do you have any personal stories you can share with us? Have you found yourself relatively safe in your reporting or Has it been a challenge for you as well? Clearly you haven't been disappeared yet And we hope to God that that's not going to Be an issue and you've been there for two weeks now, correct? And you're able to remain relatively safe I want to ask you something you mentioned something You mentioned the word the government's arbitrary Behavior and this is the interim and or coup government as Most of us would say interim government as the US State Department would refer to it the the coup government was to believe constitutionally call for elections within 90 days of Declaring itself the government and my understanding that's now been pushed back to sometime in April that is that correct? Do you have any? Knowledge as to what's happening with impending elections Well, that's it's definitely a real possibility To the best of my knowledge that hasn't been formalized in any way yet and as far as I'm aware At least the presumption right now is that they're going to be held on January 22. So obviously as you guys say it's It's many people are sort of banking on that need moved back And the government is constantly sort of providing rationale in terms of this posted terrorism and sedition to words they use all the time about anybody who's doing anything that's perceived as going against the great You know very easily charge the sedition or charge the parents So as the election stands, I mean the the mobs party is is planning on participating to the best of their ability they're Congress which candidates signal field in these foot-on-foot elections And terms of whether or not they're to be trusted it's You know, I certainly wouldn't Especially, you know without extremely extraordinarily robust international observation system that you know includes Nations that are So international organizations With the exception of the OAS, I think you and I would argue they should not that that and that body should not participate on any level at this point Right because obviously at this point the OAS main main participation believe it has been as a cheerleader of the two at the instigator They are quote-unquote This was really the main justification in a lot of ways for two Both internal and external So, yeah So why we are at our 20 minutes of hot news and I so thank you for your patience with the technology Issues today. Is there anything you'd like to add before we sign off? Anything that Yeah Really just wanted to take a minute to thank you all with code change and thank everybody for tuning in remind people to keep checking back with Coding and with brazen I've got a lot of medium material that I'm hoping to push out, you know, as soon as possible through both these outlets and you know really We're the other ones telling the story right now, right? There's there's not a whole lot of people on the ground from any kind of international media And so, you know, I think it's it's it's up to us to be able to tell the stories for these people It's a wider audience because they're having trouble Even to each other So I want to thank you again so much for you know all the help that I've got And, you know Okay, thank you so much be safe and let's definitely have you come back and talk with us again Great, yeah, we'll do it again and I'll make sure we've worked at the Okay, we're just happy to have you with us and we know that you're traveling in places where the technology Isn't always the best and we had some issues on our end as well today Also, so I just want to remind the audience that you can find Wyatt's work at the Grey Zone He is on assignment with the Grey Zone project right now in Bolivia And so look for his work at greyzone.com and also Visit codypink.org Slash Bolivia news will be sharing our own work as well as Wyatt's contributions as well And please join us next Wednesday December 11th at 12 p.m. Eastern for another 20 minutes of hot news From Latin America. Thank you so much everyone. Thanks Wyatt. So appreciate it.