Our View: Spaces needed
Vancouver Island News Group / Peninsula News Review
02 Jun 2006
Opinion

Judging by today's story on the chronic shortage of day-care workers, there's something amiss in both the provincial and federal government approach to caring for pre-school children.

Lost in all the recent talk about annual per-child grants for parents and the creation of new child-care spaces across the country is the question of staff training.

As one industry professional put it, "they can create all the spaces they want, but they've got to fund the colleges so we can hire the people we need."

The sad fact is, that's not happening, at least not in Greater Victoria.

The immediate blame for this problem, at least locally, goes to Camosun College for cutting the second year of its early childhood education program, a mandatory qualification for day-care staff who work with infants and toddlers.

Day-care providers blame the lack of training for a chronic shortage of staff that has forced the closure of a number of infant and toddler programs in recent months.

But Camosun is only partly to blame, since it was provincial government cutbacks that forced the school to axe some of its programs. There's considerable irony in the fact that the province requires day care workers to have infant and toddler certification and the province that cut the funding that used to provide that training.

Locally this has created a situation where workers can't get the training they are legally required to have, at least not without shelling out big bucks at a for-profit school, all in an effort to make a whopping $12-$14 an hour.

Adding to the confusion is the prospect that the federal government plans to cut existing subsidies for child care next spring, after fiscal commitments made by the Liberals come to an end.

This could affect the level of subsidies offered by the province, although Minister of State for Child Care Linda Reid has said those matters remain to be sorted out.

Ottawa says it plans to increase the number of child-care spaces next spring. But it won't take much of a reduction to off-set Ottawa's so-called universal child care benefit of $100 per month, per child. In the same breath, Ottawa says it plans to increase the number of child-care spaces.

So the upshot of all this is we seem to be heading for a situation where we'll have more day-care providers, but no qualified staff to work in those facilities and fewer parents who can afford to send their kids there.

The powers that be need to look at this equation and realize that the numbers don't add up.