Not all support day-care demonstration delighted or distressed?
Cariboo Press -- Kamloops This Week
31 Jan 2007

Proponents of a plan to close city day-care centres next week should be sent to the corner, according to some Kamloops parents.

Notices were posted in Kamloops day cares Monday, informing parents of a one-day walkout next Tuesday, as an act of protesting recent government cuts to child-care funding.

Mary-Ellen Everatt, director of the Kamloops YMCA-YWCA child-care resource and referral centre, hopes parents and employers will join child-care workers at the rally, scheduled for noon at city hall.

They will be protesting government cuts to child-care, announced at the beginning of this month and amounting to $455 million, which translates into day care-dependent parents being charged $40 more per month.

"Sadly, sometimes the squeaky wheel gets the grease. We just hope parents will understand," Everatt said.

Not all parents agree.

Tammy Schneider, whose stepchild attends Summit Daycare in Sahali, said some parents can't afford a day off work to look after their children.

"I support a demonstration, but not when it's such an inconvenience."

Schneider said she is free to look after her child on Tuesday, but had she not been, her husband would have had to take a day off work.

"We can't afford the loss of income," she said, adding the majority of parents with children in day care work full-time, or they are single parents providing the household's only source of income.

Parents should sacrifice a day's salary and make a "value statement" by joining the protest, said Val Janz, manager of the Make Children First program run by Interior Community Services.

"I hope they will choose to make children a priority," Janz said, noting 70 per cent of Kamloops parents need day care because they are working.

Parents were forced to pay more for day care after the federal Conservatives scrapped a national child-care program earlier this month....

Kamloops Conservative MP Betty Hinton has said the money is more than what was previously available to Canadian parents.

Janz disagrees.

She said the federal government took money out of child-care services and gave it to parents to compensate.

Meanwhile, the provincial child-care program was left gutted, Janz said.

The provincial government capped new spaces, which are sorely needed in Kamloops.

The B.C. Liberals also pared back budgets for child-care resource and referral centres, like the one in Kamloops, which now operates on the lowest budget in its 15-year history.

"The reality is, $100 is not enough," Janz said.

To compensate for the cuts, Kamloops day cares were forced to raise their fees to honour raises for their workers, wage hikes that were approved after the Liberal plan was instituted.

Everatt said not all parents will be able to afford the increase, a situation leading to a two-tiered system.

"We want all families to have the right to quality child care and choice," she said.

Parent Darcy Chapman, whose five-year-old son Avery also attends Summit Daycare, opposes the federal cuts and said the $100 per month allotment is not enough.

"It's important to protest, but that's just not the right way to go about it," she said of Tuesday's planned protests.

What do you think? Are day-care operators doing the right thing by closing their centres next Tuesday to protest government cuts? Or are they simply making life more miserable for parents who need day care?