City of Vancouver

An Administrative Report presented to Vancouver City Council on July 20, 2004 highlights the impacts of the provincial government’s child care cuts on Vancouver caregivers and families. “The growing demand for funding is clearly a result of Provincial funding and policy changes and the historic shortfall of adequate funding for affordable child care.”

The complete report is available here.

For the last 14 years the City of Vancouver’s Civic Childcare strategy, has included Civic Childcare Grants to assist programs in the inner city “that serve a population of high need children and/or low income families”. In 2004, the City’s operating budget includes $886,400 for Civic Childcare grants which were approved to offset the cost of: fees; extra staff; quality enhancement; coordinated administration; and food programs.

A snapshot of this report:

“The growing demand for funding is clearly a result of Provincial funding and policy changes and the historic shortfall of adequate funding for affordable child care.”

“The majority of grant applications for the Inner-City funding were for keeping fees low and for food supplement programs.”

The Inner City Bursary Grants “provide fee assistance to low income families to retain and increase enrollment and bring back families that have left programs due to affordability.”

Program operators articulated a number of challenges particularly those related to subsidy; food and financial viability.

On Subsidy: “The number of families with no subsidy has increased, while the number of families with partial; or full subsidies has decreased.”

• A worsening subsidy situation for families and caregivers particularly the delays by the Ministry of Human Resources to finalize authorization for subsidy payments; the requirements that many families must reapply every month or three months; and the loss of the One Stop Access workers who enhanced geographical and linguistic accessibility.
• A worsening affordability crisis as the actual costs of child care fees compared to maximum subsidy make it “extremely challenging” for parents seeking quality affordable child care.

On Food: “Inner city child care programs often provide the main daily nutritious meal for children in their care.”

• “For the first time this year, programs reported having to use the food bank as a source of food for the hot lunch and snack program.”

On Financial viability: “A number of programs indicated a growing fragility and financial instability.”

• The provincial operating grant is tied to enrolment, the detailed administrative reporting does not come with any administrative funding, and the operating grant does not realistically reflect required staffing costs.