Childcare promises broken
The Grand Forks Gazette
30 Aug 2006
By: Kyra Hoggan

EXCERPT

Cash and kids - the two don't seem to go together here in the Boundary region as new legislation has experts worried that meeting monthly bills will be just a little bit harder for families in the area.

Louise Heck, program coordinator for the Boundary Child Care Resource and Referral (C.C.R.R.), says childcare reform funding promised by the federal Liberals has now been rescinded, true to campaign promises, by the Conservative Harper government.

In its place, monthly payments of $100 a month are slated to go out to families with children under six years of age - but Heck says the equation is not quite as simple as it looks at first blush.

"That's $1,200 a year - and it's taxable income that will alter your G.S.T. rebate and Child Tax Benefit calculations, not to mention subsidies or medical claims that are calculated based income, and so on," she says. may bump your income up just enough that you don't qualify for as much." The people closest to the brink economically will likely be hardest hit, she says.

"And what about children 6 years old and over? Are we just going to send them home alone?" asks Heck. "The federal/provincial agreements that we lost laid the foundation for a childcare system - $100 a month per child isn't going to build a system. It's not going to provide the legislation, the infrastructure, the staffing for a child care system, one that could meet the different needs of children and families throughout the community," she says. "It's extremely frustrating." She says a tight market for child care in Grand Forks is evidence of an already-challenging effort to keep good early childhood educators, whose education level regulated by government but whose income is determined by market forces, generally peaking at no more than $9 to $13 an hour.

The only answer, she says, is the one that just slipped out of reach - a universal childcare system that proactively spends for a strong and healthy population at the outset, in their first five years, instead of spending money on band-aids for the resulting problems through health, welfare, and penal systems after the damage is done.

"Of course it will be expensive," says Heck. "But it's less costly in the long run than fixing poor care and mistakes.

"Parents can't be productive in the workplace without adequate childcare.

The system should be like a library - you don't have to use it if you don't want to, but all our children will have access to it, to the best care we can provide them.

Lisa Murray, director of communications for the federal Minister of Human Resources and Social Development, says there will still be monies going to early childhood development programming, and the federal government is working to see that the $100 isn't used as an excuse to clawback other sources of funding.

"All 13 provinces and territories have agreed not to use this to claw back social assistance programs," she says, but admits she's unsure what will happen with CTB and GST rebates as well as municipal aid like daycare subsidies.

"The other half of the Universal Childcare program is to create up to 25,000 new daycare spaces per year beginning in 2007, at the cost of $250 million per year.

"Throughout the summer, our department has been carrying on consultations with the widest, most diverse group of stakeholders possible to figure out how to best deliver this funding. It's still very much under discussion, how we should set this up so they can create the spaces as easily as possible and with as much flexibility as possible." She says this is in response to an increasingly diverse Canadian population.

"A lot of Canadians don't do the nine-to-five thing. We need to reflect a changing work reality," she says. "The $100 payments are only part of a much larger plan that is still in the making." While Murray says any judgement now may be premature, Heck isn't inclined to agree...

"That's $633.3 million to B.C. over five years - he's (Harper's) taking with one hand far more than he's giving out with the other," she says, adding there's no way to predict the exact impact this will have on already over-burdened social programming, since a lack of quality childcare will likely have consequences reaching far into the next generation.

"We know the first five years are critical - that's when children do the bulk of their learning," she says.