Children too low on government priority list
Vancouver Courier
By: Tom Sandborn
August 07, 2009

Maybe Leonard Cohen got it right when he sang "we don't like children anyhow." When you start looking into the state of daycare in Vancouver, his dour line begins to sound like our city anthem.

Recently I spoke with Julie Hunter, a West Side mother concerned about what is happening at the Trafalgar Out-of-School Day-Care, where her child is enrolled. The after school daycare, which had operated successfully at Trafalgar elementary for 27 years, was evicted in 2008 to accommodate Trafalgar's seismic upgrading. It made do last year by busing kids to off-site rental locations (one upstairs from a Legion pub) and has now gone into debt to finance a new building….

Across town at the Phil Bouvier daycare in Strathcona, the crisis takes another form. There, the provincial government has decided, now the election is safely past, not to renew short-term "enrichment" funding that had allowed the daycare to hire three extra workers needed to meet the challenges of a centre in which 34 of 49 kids have special needs. The June 30th cut means that unless the funding is renewed, some of those highly vulnerable children will have to leave the daycare.

This is happening in a neighbourhood that recent UBC research has revealed to have the highest level of vulnerable children in the city. No neighbourhood in the province has enough affordable daycare (with regulated spaces available for only 12 per cent of kids who could use them), but inner city neighbourhoods like Strathcona face special problems and should clearly be receiving higher daycare funding.

At a press conference last week outside the Ray-Cam Co-operative Centre on East Hastings, which has put up emergency money from its own modest budget to keep the extra workers on the job at Phil Bouvier until September, Melanie Le Coy, a young aboriginal mother, was feeling desperate.

"I don't know what I'd do without these people and their support," she told me. "I want my kids to have a fighting chance."

Angie Halford, another of the mothers at the press conference, said that without the extra workers at Phil Bouvier, she will have to quit her job to take care of her highly vulnerable step-son….

The beleaguered parents and kids at Trafalgar and Phil Bouvier deserve better than they have received from any level of government so far. It's time for us to implement the comprehensive, publicly funded daycare program for all who need it nationwide that has been so long discussed and deferred. Politicians at all levels of government have dithered too long and put children far too low on their priority lists. We must demand immediate action to end this scandalous child abuse through public neglect.