By Laura Cummings
A Centretown day-care centre has put plans to open a new kindergarten on hold as a result of the federal government’s decision to scrap the national child-care plan next spring.
The Dalhousie Parents’ Day Care Centre is a private, non-profit facility on Booth Street that looks after 57 children, aged two months to five years. The centre hoped to open the kindergarten in two years’ time.
“For us, as child-care advocates, of course we’re disappointed and we’re going to carry on with the struggle,” says administrative co-ordinator Cindy Magloughlan. “But it’s the children and families of Canada that are really going to suffer this backward step.”
Magloughlan says she was pleased with the national childcare plan proposed by the Liberal government last year.
“We were just ecstatic, because we’d been working towards this for thirty years,” she says.
The taxable $1,200 yearly is simply not enough to put a child in day care, Magloughlan says. At her facility, infant and toddler spaces cost $1,500 a month — a difference of $16,800.
Late last month, Harper notified the premiers the Liberal’s plan would be discontinued by the end of March 2007.
The minority Liberal government implemented the program last year, which set aside $5 billion to be allocated to the provinces for child care over five years.
In July, Harper will replace the plan with a subsidies program for Canadian families — $1,200 a year, for every child under six. A quarter billion administered by tax cuts is also being allotted to employers and non-profit groups to create new child-care spaces. Late last week opponents of Harper’s plan rallied in response to the decision.
Monica Lysack, executive director of the Child Care Advocacy Association of Canada, says the $1,200 a year could be spent on food or housing, rather than child care.
“I think it’s outrageous that (Harper)’s getting away with calling it child care,” she says. “It’s income support . . . We recognize that families need (it), but it has nothing to do with child care.”
The association is currently running the Code Blue campaign, a nationwide bid to see the federal government honour existing child-care agreements with the provinces.
As part of the Code Blue project, the association and other child-care advocacy groups held a press conference and rally on Parliament Hill last week, on International Women’s Day.
Irene Labelle was at the rally with her daughter Zoe, who attends Andrew Fleck Child Care Services in Lowertown.
Labelle says a federally funded child-care system is important because it gives parents the choice to work if they choose, which is vital for a single-parent family or any family with multiple children.
The proposed $1,200 a year isn’t enough to replace the national child-care plan, she adds.
“Some families don’t necessarily need it, and those who do, $1,200 a year isn’t enough.”
If the plan is cancelled next spring, Labelle says Zoe’s daycare will no longer be fully subsidized. That means Labelle may have to stop working to stay home and care for her daughter.
“It would affect drastically me and my family, because we wouldn’t have the lifestyle we have now,” she says.
“It would affect Zoe’s routine also, because [day care] is a place she loves going, and where she has friends she’s adapted to.”
Social Development Minister Diane Finley says the Conservatives’ plan offers“choice in child care,” and doesn’t prevent the provinces from building their own programs.
“We’re honouring the
financial commitments that were made to three provinces, and we’re extending those benefits to the other seven provinces even though they didn’t have funding arrangements,’’ she said in an interview late last month. “And we’re doing that for the whole 2006/2007 budget year. So that will give the provinces time to transition.”
Finley said the decision is a response to needs identified by Canadians. Day care facilities are often unavailable in rural areas, she said, or don’t offer night or part-time care.
As well, “there have been many studies that show that the best people to raise children are the parents,” she added.
But Magloughlan says decades of research in the economic, social and cognitive development fields has shown that early learning programs can have lifelong positive effects.
Children who attend these programs have better high school retention rates, lower incarceration rates and less cases of teen pregnancy, she says.
Federal child-care funding in Ontario is delivered through the Best Start program, a long-term provincial initiative to make more high-quality spaces. In the past year, Magloughlan says,
Seven hundred new spaces were created in Ontario through the funding.