Families Minister Jenna Sudds says provinces and territories signed $10-a-day child care agreements with the federal government with their ‘eyes wide open,’ and Ottawa now expects them to make the program work.
“You can’t even buy coffee and a muffin for $10 a day,” said Churcher.
Interesting article. We have a daughter in central Ontario, and have been signing her up for daycare. The article is focused mostly on Alberta complaints, but here prices are still ~20-40$/day, which is allegedly half from their original costs (which terrifies me).
Another way to look at it - $5k to $10k per year.
I can’t speak to the daycare side of things, but from our side, my spouse and I each make good money, and can make it work relatively easily. Anyone making less than us would likely not have a partner return to the workforce, especially if you have multiple children. At the old prices, even just back 5 years ago, a family of two or three would be looking at 40-50k a year in daycare costs, which very easily justifies a partner not working, especially if you can fold into that reduced car wear and tear, not rushing back to pick them up/drop them off, etc.
When I worked in retail, there was a woman who would lose, at minimum, 24 hours of work each week to childcare.
Because this was retail they had basically all of us on part-time hours, because it’s what’s best for the employer.See if your region or municipality offers subsidies. In Durham Region, there’s no waiting list, and I believe they’ll cover up to half the cost of daycare as a subsidy.
Also, look at local YMCAs, which seem to have low(ish) rates already.
My wife turned into a stay at home mom when we started having kids. Her salary wouldnt cover the costs of both childcare necessary for her to return to work.
Tell me again how I’m supposed to be making my country and society better? How about acknowledging that all levels of government are letting the critical care of the next generation flounder and fail.
I worry about what kind of society will be there to support me when I can’t work anymore. I worry about the world my children seem to be inheriting.
Its a mess, for sure. This is a good first step, but in general children are wildly expensive, and the current model of raising children has increased the expectations for what is required of parents, while not actually changing (and in many cases reducing or removing) the resources they have at their disposal to do that.
The only thing you can really do is wait out the first few years until the kids are in school, and hope one or both of you haven’t fallen too far behind in experience to make up for it. It’s one of the reasons multi-generational houses have, historically, been a thing. In the last 50-100 years we’ve entered an age where it’s become normalized to live alone, but I think as pressures increase and little is done to improve them, these kinds of concessions will be ones people will have to be making more often. I’m not suggesting you do that - I know nothing about your situation. I’m agreeing that the life that many people had when they were children is not likely to be the life that many of their children will get to experience.
My daycare here in Alberta is joining the protest and will be closed tomorrow. Found out today at noon. I fully support pressuring the government if the deal is bad, but I’d like more notice ahead of time.
While I understand the individual desire for advance notice to make alternate arrangements; from a protest prospective it’s much more effective if daycare is closed AND a whole bunch of business lose workforce for the days due to an inability to make alternate plans.
Just here to remind you that this is exactly what the Liberals and their provinical toadies have in mind for dental and pharmacare: implement some half-assed, market-based solution with precarious funding, watch it fail and then shrug about how “welp, socialism doesn’t work!”
I’m not saying the Conservatives would be better: they’re idea of social programs is “Fuck you, I got mine”.
The Liberals under Martin had negotiated universal child care with all the provinces before Harper won government and scrapped it. People voted in Harper on a mandate of ‘parents choice’ and as a result we got child tax credits instead. Tax credits, of course, gave lots of money to the already wealthy and almost nothing to lower and middle income Canadians.
It was Trudeau and the Liberals who replaced the child tax credits with the Canada Child benefit, a tax free, monthly, progressive benefit that goes up as your income goes down. On top of that, they negotiated with the provinces again to fund ten dollar a day childcare on a cost split arrangement. Feds/Prov/parents. The feds and the parents are keeping their part of the deal, but provinces like Alberta are not. Here in PEI the program is working (I have first hand knowledge of this from inside a not-for-profit childcare ) because the provincial government is doing its part and making its contribution.
This failing in Conservative provinces is the fault of, surprise surprise, Conservative government.
The idea that Liberals want social programs to fail is laughable, honestly, not an argument one can make in good faith.
Remember, this ALREADY works in Québec.
It can be done, they just don’t want to do the work.
