National daycare would be welcome as part of next week’s federal economic update by the Liberal government.
“This would be a game-changer for Barrie,” Mayor Jeff Lehman tweeted Wednesday morning. “We have a higher percentage of our population under 15 than any other major Canadian city. Cost and availability of child care is a huge problem for families. It would be a great move to make this part of Canada’s COVID recovery."
In a followup interview with BarrieToday, Lehman went more in-depth about what this could mean to this city.
“It would be a game-changer particularly for lower-income workers who struggle with the high cost of child care, and for women, who disproportionately end up with child-care responsibilities in these situations,” Lehman said. “It would be great for Barrie families. Imagine if good, widespread daycare was available for $10 a day like it is in Quebec, instead of $50 or more as many people pay today in Barrie!”
Sources have told The Canadian Press that the federal economic update will contain funding for a child-care secretariat. A spokeswoman for Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland said her office won’t comment on what will or won’t be in the fiscal update.
There are also expectations the government will add emergency money through ‘safe restart’ deals with provinces to help child-care centres that are struggling financially amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
“The need is real — there's a wait-list for subsidized spaces and I continue to hear from parents who say the lack of spaces or the costs makes it impossible for both of them to work,” Lehman said. “I am actually thinking about after the pandemic as we recover next year. I believe the federal and provincial governments will want to do everything possible to support the economy coming back strong and this would be a great way.”
The Liberals have promised to make a long-term commitment to create a national child-care system, seeing it as a key way to help women whose working lives have suffered during the pandemic. A report released Wednesday estimated that hundreds of thousands of women could get back into the labour force if the Liberals follow through on that pledge.
It estimated that between 363,000 and 726,000 women, aged 25 to 50, could join the labour force during a 10-year period as a national child-care program is developed. This would include as many as 250,000 women moving into full-time jobs.
The report says the lack of accessible and affordable daycare is a key reason why fewer women in their 30s and 40s are in the workforce than men the same age.
A recent RBC report calculates that 20,600 women left the labour force between February and October, even as 68,000 more men joined it. One reason cited for the sharper drop was the pandemic-caused closure of child-care centres. They couldn't keep up with costs during spring shutdowns and shed about 35,000 jobs between February and July. Some centres closed for good.
Statistics Canada’s latest numbers on daycare are from 2011.
In the previous year, almost half (46 per cent) of parents reported using some type of child care for their children aged 14 years and younger. Child care was more often used for children aged four and younger (54 per cent) than for children above the age of four (39 per cent).
Rates of child care were highest in Quebec (58 per cent) and lowest in Manitoba (34 per cent), Alberta (40 per cent) and Ontario (43 per cent). The majority of parents (86 per cent) had used child-care arrangements on a regular basis, particularly for young children. Parents primarily relied upon three types of child-care arrangements for their children age four and less: daycare centres (33 per cent), home daycares (31 per cent), and private arrangements (28 per cent).
— With files by The Canadian Press
