Child care a societal need not a luxury

In good economic times or bad, basically at any time other than election time, child care seems not to be a government priority. And true to form last week we saw the BC Liberal government again knocked child care to the bottom of the list with their withdrawal of Minor Capital Grants to child care centres.

These small grants are used by centres for basic safety and quality repairs and without them, the Coalition of Child Care Advocates of BC warns, centres will be forced to raise parents’ fees – again – just to meet provincial licensing standards.

Despite the government’s using the spectre of recession to scare British Columbians into spending cuts, CCCABC spokesperson Crystal Janes warns that continued government neglect of the child care system will actually be detrimental to the economy and children’s well-being.

“We know that child care fees are already the 2nd biggest family expense after housing. Women contribute a significant amount of tax revenue to the government. We need to be able to go to work,” Janes says. In 2008 a Metro Vancouver family with a 4-year-old in fulltime care and a 7-year-old in after-school care paid over $12,000 a year for child care. With costs prohibitive for many parents, Janes asks, “Where are these children going if not to regulated care? That’s the really scary question for a lot of people.”

On top of burgeoning waitlists, lack of spaces, and already astronomical fees, these cuts to grants are only putting more pressure on working parents, especially mothers.

NDP MLA Mable Elmore says she's meeting many families in her constituency of Vancouver-Kensington who are having trouble finding and keeping affordable child care. “The Campbell government had promised investments in childcare funding; instead we are seeing the opposite. The B.C. Liberals are ignoring the lack of affordable childcare spaces, and by not funding programs like the Minor Capital Grants, threatening the quality of our daycare systems,” says Elmore.

Vancouver East NDP MP Libby Davies confirms, “delivery of a provincial child care program is not only economically sound in that it creates good jobs, but is a good employment and labour strategy to getting women in the workforce.”

Davies has sat in Parliament and seen the last 12 years of broken federal promises on child care. When I asked her why she thinks childcare keeps getting bumped off the agenda at all levels of government, Davies replied, “Each level of government is mostly led by men, who don’t see it as an economic priority...so what takes precedence are things like tax cuts...It’s a political agenda that emanates from a male view of the world.”

Relegating child care spending isn’t just an economic response, it’s ideological. Davies points out that the federal Liberals had 13 surplus budgets where they could’ve allocated funds for childcare, but didn’t. From what she’s seen, many male politicians treat child care “as an expendable luxury, not a core societal need.”

The United Nations argues that world parliaments need 30% women policymakers to make a “critical mass” that would help develop better policy to advance women’s equality. But it’s not entirely about what the gender of the politician. Libby Davies takes it a step further, contending we need 30% progressive, feminist women, because “there are conservative women parliamentarians who aren’t pushing this [childcare].”

So while we’re struggling now to get and keep child care on the agenda, it’s also worth preparing for the next federal election and even four years down the road to the next provincial, not just voting on empty promises, looking to make change, and keeping our eye on the prize.