Our front page headline on Wednesday was “Burnaby to get 171 new child-care spaces.” Our front page headline in today’s paper is, “Child-care promise a work in progress.”
There’s a good reason for that. We think child care is a huge issue in B.C.
Unless you live in some strange social isolation lab where you never encounter young people, their parents or their grandparents, we think you might agree. Or, at the very least, believe that a lot of people are spending a lot of time thinking about it.
We also think that using child care as a political promise is akin to promising a “chicken in every pot” during election campaigns.
There’s no doubt that parents, particularly parents who cannot afford deluxe private child-care centres, will be very tempted to vote for a politician who promises to help them with child care. We think it worked in Burnaby as well as B.C.
Last week NDP MLA Katrina Chen (a former Burnaby school trustee) said that the 171 new child-care spaces for Burnaby is just a first step in her government’s child-care plan.
The NDP government’s campaign platform promised a $10 a day child-care plan.
“We need to create a system.” Chen said last week.
And she’s absolutely correct. But NDP Premier John Horgan told the media in mid-November that the big NDP child-care plan is counting on a helping hand from the federal government.
And that would have to be a pretty big helping hand. The NDP’s plan is projected to cost as much as $1.5 billion a year.
And while the NDP rationalized that parents, if they could find reasonable child care, would boost the economy by being able to work and pay taxes, it’s still going to be a very costly item.
Child-care advocates were skeptical when the NDP said it was saving the child-care details for the full budget in February. Many saw that as a stalling tactic.
In fact, Chen’s rollout of child-care spaces last week could be seen as a way to mollify critics.
We hope Burnaby’s political leaders and the B.C. government don’t continue to dangle child-care carrots in front of voters.
It may work for one election, but it’s testing voters’ patience to try it for two elections.
