Families seeking daycare relief may be watching their children graduate from high school before seeing any meaningful changes in B.C.
This wouldn’t be a big deal if young families weren’t already tapped out paying for mortgages, but a second mortgage in the form of child care fees is making life even less affordable.
What’s more, there is a daycare shortage in Burnaby, with many working families struggling just to find a spot.
The truth is Canadians aren’t big on paying for other kids’ daycare and that’s why we have the patchwork system we have now. Even the federal government’s much vaunted daycare plan is targeted mostly to low-income and marginal communities. While that’s good and needed, your average family is not likely to see much benefit.
There is great ambivalence towards universal child-care supports in this country, unlike in some European countries, where it’s seen as an important pillar of society. Here, child care is seen as an individual responsibility.
Thus, tax credits are typically used to transfer money to families instead of a break on daycare fees. Subsidies are only for those in the lowest income brackets while efforts are made to boost the number of daycare spaces through grants to operators, but those amounts rise and fall depending on the economy, government commitment, election cycle, etc.
In B.C., the $10-a-day plan proposed by the New Democrats is in jeopardy because of what is likely to be a short-lived NDP-Green partnership. Even if that plan were to succeed, it would take years to fully roll out, while a switch back to a B.C. Liberal government or any downturn in the economy would kill it.
In Quebec, where a $7-a-day plan gets the most attention, the realities of such a scheme have not lived up to the promise. Public daycare spots are limited, just as they are here, because governments are only willing to put so much money into daycare; thus, only about a third of families get access to them, creating long waiting lists and concerns about substandard care.
So for B.C. to get a long-term, universal daycare plan, such as the NDP has pledged, is a tricky proposal at best and, sadly for thousands of families, may even be a non-starter.
