Seesaw on child care must end: What kind of choice is it when the cost of properly taking care of young children exceeds the ability of single-parent households to afford it?
The Daily News -- Kamloops
January 30, 2007
Opinion

There is a seesaw between Victoria and Ottawa over responsibility for child-care funding. One or the other -- preferably both -- needs to get off its behind and demonstrate leadership.

In their first year in power, Stephen Harper and the Conservatives -- with MP Betty Hinton as their resident defender -- essentially walked away from the federal Child Care/Early Learning Agreement with B.C.

The agreement promised to end Canada's shameful record of supporting child care, which has sunk this country to last place among leading industrial nations for its failure to develop a universal standard. Despite promises dating back more than a generation, the country had made little progress until the Liberal government took a tentative step forward in 2005.

In place of the agreement, the new Conservative government offered a pale substitute that has yet to deliver results. The Tories pay $100 per child to every family in the country with preschool children, leaving it to the discretion of families whether they channel the funds into child care.

"This is about choice in child care," Hinton proclaimed. Yet subsidy amounts to only one-quarter to one-eighth the actual cost of child care.

What kind of choice is it when the cost of properly taking care of young children exceeds the ability of single-parent households to afford it? This creates additional hardship as parents try to figure out whether they can afford to work in order to properly support their families.

What kind of choice is it when there are no child-care spaces to send children even if parents can afford them? This is the case in Kamloops.

Just as they walked away from Kyoto and the First Nations Accord, the Conservatives have swept the table clean on child care as though they had a better plan to dish up in its place, but the substitute doesn't come close....

This is a progressive plan that deserves to be tested but it has so far failed to create a single new space in Ontario, where it was tried before. Furthermore, smaller centres such as Kamloops do not have the corporate presence to enable such a plan to work. There is no indication, so far, that large firms such as Weyerhaeuser, Domtar or Convergys are rising to the bait.

And what does it say of a society when responsibility for attending to the needs of its most precious and vulnerable members is handed, even in part, to private corporations in the form of a tax break? If this is an indication of priorities it adds insult to injury.

A national child-care plan is about ensuring acceptable standards for families that can least afford child care so that children do not slip through the cracks. Common sense -- reinforced by early childhood research in locales such as Kamloops -- points to the critical importance of proper supports during preschool years as key determinants of healthy lives.

Hinton has defended the Tory approach by pointing out that there was no long-term funding attached to the agreement set up by their Liberal predecessors. In fact, there was only a funding commitment for the first of five years, but that did not detract from the validity of the agreement in the long haul.

She has maintained that child care is a provincial responsibility, not a federal one, a stand that demonstrates her ignorance of the issues involved. Child care is everyone's responsibility regardless of jurisdictional dictate.

The province, meanwhile, has compounded the problem by cutting funding to child-care operating grants, the child-care subsidy and child-care resource and referral programs such as that provided by the Kamloops Y.

Why add to the crisis in child care? Because, the province says, the Tories cancelled the Child Care/Early Learning Agreement, removing $455 million in funds transferred to the province for child care over a three-year period.

It is left to the public to stop this schoolyard squabble by demanding intelligent and progressive social policy of senior governments. The city's child-care workers deserve support on their day of protest Feb. 6.