Alberta’s Day Care Controversy: From 1908 to 2009—and Beyond (review)

University of Calgary sociologist Tom Langford has made an integral contribution to the study of public policy, day care, Alberta politics, and the effects of neo-liberalism in this book. Langford’s broader research has focused on globalization, labour, and the politics of early learning and child care. In this text he adroitly situates contemporary issues in a historical context, while offering some salient points of current and future policy battles in the province.

Langford’s introduction and conclusion frame the study with both skill and thought-provoking comparisons. It can be argued that many of the day-care policies implemented in Alberta in the past three decades are similar to those in most Canadian provinces (Manitoba, and particularly Quebec, are the exceptions). However, Langford is persuasive in demonstrating that Alberta’s day-care system actually has many similarities with Texas, where widespread privatization has led to a proliferation of for-profit centres. Langford is correct in placing day care in the context of the decentralized nature of the Canadian federation; broader federal-provincial relations are an ongoing theme of this day-care history. Langford argues convincingly that free enterprise conservatism became the key organizing principle of Alberta’s day-care system by the early 1990s, was superseded by pro-family conservatism in the late 1990s, and had by 2009 returned to a free enterprise conservatism coloured by elements of an inclusive liberal blueprint imparted by the Stelmach government (p. 325).

Following the introduction, Langford begins Chapter 2 with an overview of Alberta’s first day nursery in Edmonton in 1908 through to Second World War developments. He moves quickly through the first 50 years. Chapter 3 focuses primarily on the 1960s, a period that he sees as reflecting broad social change—although the patriarchal gender order, in the context of day care, did not change significantly. Chapter 4 explores the 1970s and the increasing importance of day care not only in Alberta’s major centres, but in more remote locales across Alberta. Chapter 5 looks at the years 1979 to 1982, which Langford sees as a watershed period in the momentous political struggles and new directions in policy that followed. Chapter 6 continues by analyzing the resulting expansion of commercial day care in the 1980s and 1990s. The next chapter looks at day care from 1984 to 1999, when the increasingly neo-liberal state promoted more private responsibility for child care by both families and the market. Chapter 8 focuses on the handful of municipalities that championed lighthouse or model programs in their communities with the support of the federal, rather than the provincial, government. Langford’s final chapter puts the contemporary trends and patterns in a historical perspective while broaching the most significant recent developments and future policy issues.

Alberta’s Day Care Controversy reflects intensive research with primary sources being drawn from an impressive range of sites including but not limited to archival collections, interviews, newspapers and periodicals, and government documents. The book is inherently multidisciplinary and draws both theoretically and methodologically from the fields of sociology, history, and public policy. Langford focuses on the group care of Alberta’s youngest children while the adults who are normally responsible for them work or attend school (p. 2). He takes primarily a political-economic approach and argues that Alberta serves as an interesting case study because of the relative parity of commercial and non-commercial child-care sectors (although this does change over time) and the resulting conflicts between commodification and de-commodification (p. 6). Influenced by social history scholarship, Langford locates inequalities of gender, class, immigrant status, and age as integral to an understanding of the history of day care in Alberta (p. 7). Insofar as controversy, the author stresses that one of the defining and most important features of day care as a policy issue in Alberta is that it has often engendered strong positions and intense lobbying and mobilizing efforts from a diversity...