Source: Telegraph-Journal
Mission: Twenty years later, Margaret Norrie McCain's focus is still on nurturing the minds of young children. She hopes politicians won't abandon an issue that transcends politics and election campaigns.
On a muggy late-spring afternoon, with the smell of an approaching thunderstorm thick in the air, Margaret Norrie McCain settles into an armchair and, like the true Maritimer she is, meanders into the story.
The air is still and the house is silent except for her voice, which is soft, but so articulate and sure-footed that it demands complete attention.
The sunroom overlooks the back gardens of the gracious old home she shares with her husband, the billionaire businessman Wallace McCain, in the treelined neighbourhood of Rosedale in Toronto.
The years living in the big city haven’t taken away any of the genuine warmth and humility with which she fills the room. She could just as easily be sitting in her family home on the hill overlooking the St. John River in Florenceville, watching thunderheads roll down the valley.
“I’m giving you the science first,” she says.“In the years zero to three, children’s environment and their experiences actually turn their genes on or off.
“We used to wonder what had the greatest inf luence, nature or nurture.
We’re not even talking about either.
Now we’re talking about this intricate dance between nature and nurture. You are born with certain genes, but your experiences can actually turn on or turn off the genes you are born with.
“Once they are turned off, we don’t know how to turn them back on. So a baby’s brain in those first three years becomes hard-wired to be violent, or to not be able to learn to full capacity, or to have physical or mental health problems down the road. It’s an absolutely growing, mind-boggling science.”
McCain, now 75, is more determined than ever to put what she considers the most important public policy question directly before political leaders. That question, simply put, is: What is society’s role to provide for the healthy development of our children in their earliest years? For McCain, the story always must begin with the science, the facts that ground the policy.
It was with these facts, in this same room, that she began educating Shawn Graham about early childhood development before he became premier.
When he was leader of the Opposition, she arranged for him to visit the Bruce/ WoodGreen Early Learning Centre in Toronto, which is a demonstration site, the laboratory for a new way of integrating child care and learning for children aged two to six.
McCain made sure that during his visit, Graham also sat in her sunroom and had a long conversation with Jane Bertrand, one of the researchers on the project, who is now the program director of the Margaret and Wallace McCain Family Foundation.
After Graham became premier, his government announced the creation of four early childhood development demonstration centres and formed a partnership with the McCain Foundation to fund five more, along with an accompanying university research program.
When it became clear that the September election in New Brunswick would be a horse race, McCain wrote to Opposition leader David Alward explaining why he should not abandon the early childhood programs started by the Liberal government should he become premier.
“I know that Shawn Graham could be defeated and I’m so worried,” McCain says. “You just get roots in the ground, you get legs and you get things growing and then all of a sudden you get a new government (that) wants to cancel everything.
“I sent David Alward a long email, almost pleading with him not to abandon what we’ve started. Because he comes from Carleton County and that’s where our biggest investment is, I don’t think he’ll cancel it. I think he’ll stay with it. He says he will. He answered my email. He said,‘don’t worry.’ ” For McCain, early childhood development is an issue of such importance for the future of the province that it transcends politics and election campaigns.
Her advocacy with New Brunswick’s political leaders is the continuation of years of work that has influenced early childhood development policy around the world.
Today, McCain can say exactly where it all started. But at the time, almost two decades ago when she was invited to lunch at the grand white mansion on Waterloo Row in Fredericton that is the residence of the president of the University of New Brunswick, she remembers wondering just what she was doing there.
She had been invited to lunch by then- UNB president Robin Armstrong, and was joined by then Liberal minister of health Dr. Russell King and Dr. Fraser Mustard, the founding director of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research.
Mustard was touring the country, talking to ministers of health about his latest area of research – the new science about the brain development of children in their earliest years. His research suggested that the experiences of children from birth to age six determines the course of their lives, that it is in those years that the brain is hard-wired in ways that absolutely determine learning potential, physical and mental health, even such intangibles as coping skills and resiliency in stressful situations.
“I’ve never felt so stupid in all my life,” McCain says. “I didn’t have a clue what they were talking about. Dr. Armstrong and Dr. Mustard were way ahead of me.
“I sat there like a bump on a log wondering, ‘why am I here?’ Why have they pulled me into this?’ ” When she left the meeting, she went home with a stack of reading material supplied by Mustard. As she read these studies about the brain development of children, she realized why they had pulled her into their orbit.
Before she met Mustard, McCain had been raising her four children in Florenceville and beginning her journey in philanthropy as a founding director of the Muriel McQueen Ferguson Foundation, which has a mission to eliminate family violence through public education and research.
“All of a sudden all the light bulbs went on,” she says. “If we really want to eliminate violence, we may never get there totally, but to work toward it, we have to start back in the earliest years when children’s brains are being hard-wired to be violent.”
If she was interested in healthy human development, she had to focus on healthy early childhood development.
“Early child development is tier one in human development,” McCain says.“It is in these years when your learning, your health and your behaviours are set.”
She gradually became more involved in Mustard’s mission. When she was appointed New Brunswick’s lieutenant governor in 1994, she invited bureaucrats and cabinet ministers to Old Government House for a nice dinner and seated all of them next to the other invited guests – researchers in early childhood development.
“This is what you call sowing the seeds,” she says, sitting back in her armchair and smiling.
Meanwhile, Mustard continued to tour the country and the world talking about the research and advocating for appropriate public policy responses. One of his stops was to speak to the caucus of Ontario premier Mike Harris.
Harris asked him to do an early childhood development study. Mustard agreed, and asked McCain to be his cochair.
“It’s not an exaggeration to say he led the parade and I was flying on his coattails,” McCain says.
The Early Years Study was released in 1999, to a disappointing response from the Ontario government. However, the study took on a life of its own and travelled the world, inf luencing governments in Australia, Brazil, Chile, Argentina and Cuba. The study influenced the policy of the World Bank in developing countries.
Mustard and McCain produced a follow- up study in 2002 and 2007, and today they are working on another. The studies merge the science of child brain development with the reality of societal changes that have seen most mothers entering the workforce and more children in need of quality care and nurturing from birth to age six.
At the heart of the recommendations is the extension of parental leave to one year, preferably two, and the creation of early child development centres linked to the existing education system. These centres create a seamless day of care and learning for children aged two to six.
“None of our recommendations is mandatory,” McCain says. “They are all optional, so that parents have a choice of staying at home, but by creating something that is high quality, believe me, there is going to be a lot of uptake.”
While she continued her work with Mustard, McCain and her husband Wallace decided to create a foundation that would provide funding for the creation of demonstration centres and further research.
“When my husband and I decided that we would move beyond kitchen table philanthropy and create a foundation with some structure and some bones, our plan was that we would be strategic and focused.”
She hired Bertrand, a faculty member at George Brown College in Toronto and a leading Canadian researcher on childhood development, as the foundation’s program director.
Because of her family’s attachment to Atlantic Canada and New Brunswick in particular, the foundation focuses its work in Atlantic Canada.
She notes that there is a special need here. In New Brunswick, 59 per cent of the population is functionally illiterate, which means the majority of the population can read at a basic level and get by, but they couldn’t comprehend a newspaper.
“You can’t be successful if that percentage of your people aren’t going to reach their full potential,” McCain says, “Investing in our people has to be one of the most important things we can do. We cannot have a successful economy, we cannot have a successful society, if 59 per cent of our people are functionally illiterate.
So it’s hugely important to start investing in children at an early age when the building blocks for their learning potential are set in place.”
In 2009, the Graham government launched four early childhood demonstration sites in Bath, Moncton, Robertville and Saint John. In 2010, the government formed a partnership with the McCain Foundation to create five more in Centreville, Keswick, Millville, Perth- Andover and Richibucto. The foundation also provided $500,000 for an accompanying research program at UNB and the Université de Moncton.
The research program will establish a baseline report on the condition of children coming into the school system now, and then, after a few years of investment in child development centres, determine if there has been an improvement. This kind of research becomes a driver for public policy.
“Even though we are known Liberals, I have voted for every party and supported every party,” McCain says. “The Early Years Study was under Mike Harris and I supported him. But I have huge admiration for Shawn Graham. He certainly wants to do what’s right. I don’t know if people really understand the importance of it. He’s moving in the right direction on this issue.”
McCain says that, in an ideal world, all children in Canada beginning at age two would have access to child development centres connected with community schools. The centres would open at 7:30 in the morning and remain open until 6:30 in the evening to accommodate working parents.
The centres would be staffed with teachers and trained early childhood educators. A child wouldn’t know the difference between learning and care.
Parents could choose to stay home with their children, or drop them off at the centre in the morning and pick them up on their way home from work. These schools would become the hub of their communities.
How much would such an ideal program cost at the national level? According to University of British Columbia researchers, about $22 billion a year. (A reasonable estimate would be $300 million to $500 million a year in New Brunswick.) This number is large, McCain says, but it would include everything, including paying early childhood educators more, and creating training programs in universities.
The figure is not all new money.
About $10 billion a year is now being spent across the country in a patchwork quilt of programs with varying degrees of accessibility and quality.
McCain notes that there would be a return for this investment when there is less money being spent on interventions later in life in health care, social services, and transition houses where cycles of violence are being perpetuated.
“Eventually, once you start investing, you get the payback,” she says. “Look what we are spending in Afghanistan. So isn’t it a matter of priorities?”