Funding drops for child care centre: Move comes after feds pull contributions to provinces
09 May 2007
by Mark Nielsen
Prince George Citizen

The federal government's decision to end contributions to provincial daycare programs has had a major impact on the budget for the Prince George Child Care Resource and Referral office.

The office has been allocated $276,000 by the provincial government for the 2007-08 fiscal year, well down from the $342,000 it received for 2006-07 before the Conservative government pulled funding in favour of a $100 per month universal child care benefit.

CCRR manager Kathy Basaraba said it's meant reducing staffing by one full-time position and the outreach program, which serviced rural communities such as Burns Lake, Valemount and Mackenzie, has been reduced to three trips per year.

The $276,000 is about $5,000 more than the province gave the Prince George CCRR in 2005-06, but Basaraba said costs have gone up because the Ministry of Children and Family Development told offices to move to storefront locations in anticipation that federal funding would continue.

As a result, the CCRR will be moving into the Family Y once a 6,000-square-foot expansion of its child care services is completed in June. "We relocated, we expanded, we now have fixed overhead costs that we can't get out of such as a new building to be built," Basaraba said.

"There are so many factors to look at, it's not just so easy to say we're getting the same amount of money as 05-06. We have to manage it differently."

Children and Family Development Minister Linda Reid said the idea is to "co-locate and integrate" services.

"We want early-years hubs so families can go to one place and get an array of different services and that is in fact a cost-savings," she said. "A cost savings in overhead, administration costs, heat, light utilities. We will have the ability to do some things around costs as we go forward."

Reid has also been criticized for cutting $800,000 from the Westcoast CCRR in Vancouver. That money was used to provide professional development and support services for daycares across the province.

In response, Reid said it made no sense to have all the professional development money based in Vancouver and require child care workers to travel south for training. Instead, a professional development co-ordinator has been assigned to each of the five regions to provide the services on a more local basis....