Twenty-Five Years of Evidence — Why Is B.C. Still Failing Its Children?

For 25 years, the Human Early Learning Partnership (HELP) has generated world-leading evidence about the conditions children need to thrive. Yet British Columbia now records the highest rate of early childhood vulnerability in a quarter century — and the highest in Canada.

Dr. Paul Kershaw, a long-time collaborator and Affiliate Faculty member at HELP, asks a difficult question: if the research has been strong for decades, why has policy change been so limited? The answer lies less in evidence than in political choices about how governments allocate public resources. When spending growth flows disproportionately to medical care for older populations, fewer resources remain for the foundations of a healthy society — child care, education, poverty reduction, and family supports. The result is a pattern of public budgets that are, in effect, anti-child and anti-parent.

This talk will challenge child-serving organizations to focus their advocacy where it matters most: the budget decisions that determine how governments divide resources between the young and the old. We must call out ageist budgets that privilege older generations in ways no grandparent would choose — at the expense of their children and grandchildren. That’s how we get B.C. back on a path of investing urgently in wellbeing from the early years onward, so people can thrive at every stage of life.