New focus on daycare welcomed by Ontario parents

Experts feel that the investment, listed as a top priority, meant about forty per cent of children from birth to age four would have access to licensed care, up from just twenty per cent as of present.

Between forty-five and fifty per cent of families with young children are looking for licensed daycare, estimated the Ministry of Education.

Although parents in Ontario  have welcomed the Government’s plans, child-care watchers are worried, media reported.

This is due to the absence of any plan to restructure current patch work system with a price tag of between $1 billion and $3 billion in new capital spending and $600 million to $750 million in annual operating costs by 2021, sources confirmed.

Carolyn Ferns of the Ontario Coalition for Better Child Care felt that this was a big commitment and difficult to get close to forty percent coverage.

Moreover, she believed that the issue of affordability should not be compromised with the number of spaces and dollars being allotted.

Media reports claim that problems of low wages and uneven program quality in the system have been overlooked.

Toronto parent Nadine Blum is also concerned about the high cost of care.

Increasing the supply “is certainly a positive step,” said Blum, whose petition last spring to end daycare wait list fees of between $20 and $200 led the province to ban the practice starting this month.

But she has not heard specific commitments to address the issue of daycare fees.

Gustafson, a community centre worker in Riverdale was also concerned about Ontario’s negligence of a systematic plan to address the needs of the childcare.

Currently only forty per cent of the kids were considered to be served, sources said.

Glenn Gustafson and Sarah Ehrhardt were working in Sweden when their son Clarence was born 15 months ago.

Compared to Sweden’s universally available, high quality child care at little or no cost to parents, lack of licensed spaces combined with high fees in Toronto was shocking, experts commented.

Indira Naidoo-Harris, recently appointed associate education minister, had a broader provincial child-care plan to address the issue of quality, affordability, accessibility, parent choice and flexibility.

Sources mentioned that national child-care expert Martha Friendly, who heads the Toronto-based Childcare Resource and Resource Unit, praised the province’s financial vision to move forward to improve the child care plan, keeping in mind the complications in Ontario.

Toronto had received one-quarter to one-third of the new provincial funding, meaning the city could get up to 30,000 new child care spaces in the next five years, experts said.

According to media reports, Toronto Councillor Janet Davis had been instrumental in pursuing the province to build more affordable child care.

Although Davis was optimistic of the trend of the child care measures, he said that only the next five years will indicate how much funds will go towards the expansion of high-quality, not for profit licensed child care options. 

(Reporting by Asha Bajaj,Image courtesy: Elizabeth Dowdeswell Twitter page)