Parents struggle finding care for kids
Niki Hope
Burnaby Now – Can West News
October 04, 2008

Finding affordable, quality daycare can be an overwhelming task for working families, as Kelly Savela knows.

"To be honest with you, of all the things I've dealt with my kids, daycare is the most stressful thing," says the mother of two. "I questioned myself about working. I contemplated quitting, even though I was only going two days a week, just because I had no set daycare."

After months of searching, her only option was to drive her kids to a woman who would look after them one day a week at her home in East Vancouver. There was one hitch - Savela works in Coquitlam.

On Fridays, Savela would drive the lengthy round trip from New West to Vancouver, then back to Coquitlam.

When her oldest daughter started kindergarten, Savela had to worry all over again about how to find half-day care, once a week. For more than a year, she searched for options.

She even contemplated taking her daughter out of kindergarten on Fridays so that she could keep her at the babysitter's in East Vancouver.

Eventually, she found a solution when a parent of her daughter's classmate offered to take her daughter after school.

The problem has been solved for her youngest son since Savela's mother-in-law retired in June and can help with babysitting.

But her plight has left Savela with a new perspective on the challenges of child care.

"You know, it's funny, my husband and I were talking about it. There was that referendum a couple of years back regarding universal child care and, you know, it's funny at the time we were like, 'Oh, it's not that big a deal for us. ... No, we shouldn't have universal child care.' It's funny over the time with my kids, I would absolutely say 'Yes.'"

Despite this revelation, Savela says she's voting for the ….this year, even though the party's platform doesn't include a move toward a national child-care plan.

But Stephen Harper did keep his promise to put a $100 each month into the pockets of parents with children under the age of six - and for Savela, that, combined with the party's economic policies, is enough to garner her vote.

….Burnaby-Douglas MP and NDP candidate Bill Siksay says they [Conservatives] have "failed miserably" when it comes to creating child-care spaces.

"The Conservatives said they were going to create 125,000 spaces, and they didn't create one," he says. "What the New Democrats have always committed to is making a national child-care program ... and enshrining it in law."

Liberal candidate Bill Cunningham, who's running in Burnaby-Douglas, says his party has long known that child care was a problem for Canadian families and had a national child care early learning plan up and running before they were defeated in 2005.

….The Conservatives will give tax breaks to employers that provide in-house child care, Leung says.

Local Green candidate Doug Perry, running in Burnaby-Douglas, also supports giving tax incentives to employers who provide in-house care.

"What we would like to do is have tax incentives to get businesses to include child care at the workplace so parents could spend more quality time with their child and, also, to develop a network of the existing child-care organizations across the country so that there's quality standards and procedures in place so that there is a good quality across the nation," he says.

Burnaby-New Westminster Green party candidate Carrie McLaren says the Greens also want to increase parental leave time from one to two years.

Peter Julian, the NDP incumbent in Burnaby-New Westminster, calls the child-care solution "simple."

"It's creating a child-care system and providing the funding for it because that hasn't happened," he says.

"We've had a lot of games and broken promises around child care, but what we need to do is put into place a public child-care system, and that means putting in place resources."

Gerry Lenoski, Liberal candidate in Burnaby-New Westminster, also says the number of child-care spaces have actually declined in British Columbia under the Conservatives.

"We will invest in more child-care spaces in B.C.," he says.

…. But the Tories' tax breaks and its $100-a-month child-care plan does little for parents who can't find a daycare space for their child, says Pat Frouws, executive director of the SFU Childcare Society, who calls out the Conservative plan because it doesn't offer a much-needed national child-care system.

The child-care situation in Canada is at a "crisis point," says Frouws.

The SFU Childcare Society runs a daycare centre, which is also struggling to keep staff because of the modest wages for early childhood educators. At the centre, the starting salary is $16.24 an hour and the centre's wages and benefits package is better than most daycare centres, but still it's difficult to keep staff.

"The universal child-care system has to be valued, so we can find quality people to pay and keep the ones that we have," says Frouws.

With three-quarters of the centre's funding coming from parents, most of those salaries are covered by fees.

Last year's salary increases forced the centre to raise its fees, and many parents felt the pinch.

"(We) have student parents say they can't afford us. We have single staff parents at SFU that say they can't afford us," Frouws says.

Prices for full-time care range, depending on the child's age, from $700 to $1,000 a month.

Despite the high fees, the centre has a two-year wait list.

"Everyone that's already on our list here needs to go on our wait list for the next program because we can't guarantee a spot," explains Frouws. "So once children are in a program here, the parents never relax because they never know if they'll get a spot in the next (age) group."

The centre has 234 spaces and about 260 families with children already attending daycare at SFU Children's Centre are on the waitlist.

There are roughly another 550 families on an external wait-list.

But the need isn't just for child care, according to Frouws. Early learning is another key component.

… Investing in early learning and care means every child has a chance to gain intellectual, social, emotional and physical development, Frouws says.

"What's affordable - the cost now or cost later?" Frouws asks, suggesting that investing in early learning would help with the push to cut crime.

"If you invest early, that should affect your crime rate in 15 or 20 years from now," she says….