Child-care services are chronically underfunded as thousands of subsidized daycare spaces in Ontario are being threatened by the elimination of $63.5 million in federal funding, local advocates say.
In Ottawa, city staff have been studying daycare subsidies for the past year and is scheduled to deliver a report on March 5 to the council committee that deals with child care.
“It’s all a matter of funding and over the years it hasn’t been sufficient,” said the city’s children services manager Francine Riopelle.
Child-care centres that expanded under the provincial Best Start Initiative are expected to be directly affected by the cuts. Since 2005, nearly 800 new licensed child care spaces have been created in Ottawa under Best Start, according to the city’s child-care services report from last year.
The province intended to fully subsidize half of these spaces. In reality, funding has fallen short every year by $3,000 per space with the average true cost of care being $10,500 per space, the report says.
At the Wellington Ward Child Care Centre in Centretown, coordinator Jo-Ann Hightower says she is concerned that the city’s plan may involve a re-distribution of child care subsidies to centres throughout the city.
“I am somewhat suspicious that our city may try to equalize the hurt around everyone,” she says. Although the Wellington centre did not expand under Best Start, Hightower says it could be asked to give a number of subsidies out to the spaces in the suburbs.
In response, Riopelle said the city will look at areas in need after March’s report.
But Hightower says the expansion of child care services across the city means that more children are staying in their own neighbourhoods, hence need for care has increased in the suburbs.
Shellie Bird, a union representative for daycare workers in Ottawa, says there is pressure to shift subsidies from downtown to suburban centres.
“There’s a huge need out in the suburbs because there’s no growth of non-profit out there,” she says.
But Hightower says there is little room for compromise at the Wellington centre because none of their clients have paid full fees for three years. “Those of us in the downtown core tend to be serving a less fortunate clientele,” she says.
Until she sees the city’s plan, Kim Hiscott, executive director of Andrew Fleck Child Care Services, says she won’t be able to make a comment about it.
She also says it’s important for the city to be looking at how effectively these public dollars are being used.
“It’s really not appropriate to be sitting on dollars that could be used by a family in a different neighbourhood,” she says.
But Hightower says she does not want to be in a position where child care centres in Ottawa would be competing with each other.
“We don’t want to be in a position where we’re fighting, we want to be supportive,” she says.
Last February, the community and protective services committee requested that staff present a new subsidy payment plan.
Riopelle says city staff are currently making sure that the rates paid for child care spaces in Ottawa reflect the true cost of providing care.