Daycare spaces likely to remain tight; Economic crisis has no impact on services
Harbour City Star
December 23, 2008
By: Darrell Bellaart

Parents strapped for daycare ought not to hold their breath waiting for more spaces to open up in a cooling economy.

Current indications suggest Nanaimo daycares remain as tight for spaces as they were before the U.S. meltdown triggered a global economic crisis.

Care centres haven't noticed any change in the demand for spaces around the city, and nor has PacificCare, Nanaimo's recognized child care resource and referral service provider.

They say the same factors continue to limit child care availability: A small pool of trained workers, compounded by low pay that is bringing too few new workers into the field.

It could be too early to see day care spaces opening up, but so far the wait for care remains a long one for parents….

For Angie Reardon, a single mother of two girls, aged four and five, finding adequate day care took six months after moving here from the Lower Mainland in the spring. As a shift worker, she found it particularly difficult.

"It's not easy," Reardon said. "I phoned from Duncan to Ladysmith."

She eventually found an unqualified caregiver but wanted her children in a facility with trained staff.

"It's like, 'quit my job? Go on welfare?' What are you going to do?"

In September Reardon finally found…, one of the few daycare providers in Nanaimo who takes children after hours and on weekends.

Plenty of parents are spending considerable time looking for care for their children, said Carmen Barclay, co-ordinator of programs and services for PacificCare, North Island-Powell River region.

"When they start looking for care, they want to start six months to a year in advance, then when they find a place it's not their choice. But there's not much out there and they have to take what they can get," Barclay said.

"What we're hearing, if there are government grants to create more spaces, there isn't staff to make more spaces.

"There is this Catch-22 to creating spaces; the first thing needs to be addressed is the recruitment and retention of qualified workers."

That's difficult in an industry that typically pays $12 to $14 an hour….

"The bottom line is we're not going to create more spaces unless we get more (early childhood education) people. In order to get more we need to recruit them," she said. People are leaving the field for better pay or the same pay with less responsibilities, because let's face it, child care has a lot of responsibilities."…..