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Gov't chiselling spurs daycare crisis

By JANICE HARRIS

In the sprawling, densely-pop-
ulated Hastings Sunrise area of
Vancouver, where the thousands of
working families that service the in-
dustries concentrated along their
waterfront doorstep live, there are
three daycare centres.

Combined, the Renfrew, Broad-
way and Hastings Townsite day-
cares provide child care for 75
children three years of age and
over. Adding up the other varieties
of child care in the community, in-
cluding licensed and unlicensed
home or family care, and nursery
schools, there are only a mere 345
spaces for the more than 1,500
children between birth and four
years that live in the area.

Hasting Sunrise’s ‘“‘dearth of
group daycare centres, long wait-
ing lists and absence of facilities for
children under three years,’’ ac-
cording to Marion Malcolmson,

- c¢o-ordinator of the Skeena Terrace

family unit, typifies the situation in
every community in Canada’s large
metropolitan cities.

A study done in Toronto by the

Children’s Day Care Coalition and

the Toronto Social Planning
Council shows that ‘“‘between 50
and 75 percent of all parents with
preschool children in large cities are
in need of some form of child

“It’s absurd to think of access of
working people, especially women,
into the job market, with this situa-
tion,’ Malcolmson declared.

The most recent overall picture
of the status of daycare in B.C.,
prepared by Joseph Cartier in De-
cember, 1979 for the Social Plan-
ning and Review Council

C), is agrim one.

— ss Be fears about
chronic funding problems, inade-
quate and too few facilities, over-
worked and underpaid staff, and
staggering waiting lists, have been
substantiated by Cartier, based on
his analysis of the responses to a
questionnaire he sent to every day-
care centre in the province. (137
responded of 307.)

The availability of daycare was
measured by the vacancy rate and
the hours of operation of each cen-

Error nearly
started war

“We were a hair’s breadth away
from an ‘accidental’ nuclear war,”’
Rosaleen Ross, secretary of the
B.C. Peace Council warned federal
secretary of state Mark McGuigan
in a letter about recent media
reports of a computer error in the
U.S. missile early-warning system.

Last November, a similar com-
puter error at Norad headquarters
in Colorado Springs resulted in
planes actually taking off from the
Comox Base on Vancouver Island.

“Our entanglements with
NATO and Norad, far from pro-
tecting us, only make us a target in
any war involving the U.S.”’ she
declared.

Ross reiterated the B.C. Peace
Council’s long-standing demand
that Canada remove nuclear
capability at Comox and cancel the
joint U.S. control of the base, as ‘‘a
significant first step towards an in-
dependent. foreign and defence
policy for Canada.”

The Pentagon admitted on
Tuesday that the false alert which

Saw crews running to B-52 and
FB-111 bomber planes and starting
up the engines, was caused by a
failure in an inexpensive coin-sized
circuit.

tre. With 73 percent of the centres
registering zero vacancy rates, sub-
stantial waiting lists and limited op-
erating hours (93 percent were open
between 7 a.m. and 5 p.m.), it
didn’t take more than a cursory
scan for Cartier to conclude that
“for parents who work shifts, the
average daycare can’t accommo-
date their children.”’

Coupled with “’significantly low
vacancy rates and significantly high
waiting lists, the data revealed a
large gap between existing daycare
facilities and the obvious need for
more.”

He went on to note that the
“grossly inadequate salaries” of
qualified daycare workers, their ex-
tra duties as cooks and janitors and
the general frustration caused by a
‘continuous lack of funds’’ for
everything from hot meals to spe-
cial activities, was driving daycare
workers away.

“Sixty-one percent of the fully

qualified personnel had been in the
centre’s employ for less than three
years, and of these, 40 percent had
been working for less than one
year.”
The single largest problem ident-
ified in the SPARC report was the
lack of funding, the direct result of
the lack of government commit-
ment to daycare in principle, ‘‘that
in turn adversely affects every
aspect of child care in B.C.,”’ Car-
tier said.

‘*How utterly criminal that such
a development as B.C. Place could
be conceived while thousands of
women continue to need daycare
services,” Marion Malcolmson
and Jessie MacGregor, recreation
co-ordinator for the Thunderbird
Neighborhood Centre in Hastings
Sunrise said in their ‘‘community
response’’ to the United Way’s cur-
rent study of daycare facilities in
the Lower Mainland. s

‘Clearly businessmen’s conven-
tion centres continue to receive
preferential treatment while social
services and social service workers
continue to be understaffed and
underpaid.”

Malcolmson and MacGregor,
along with community groups such
as the Grandview Area Council
and the Coalition for Improved
Daycare Services (CIDS), are cur-
rently fighting for the inclusion of
daycare facilities at the relocated
King Edward campus in China
Creek in Grandview Woodlands.
At its current location on Oak St.
the King Edward campus daycare
has a waiting list of over 60
children.

Because of the blurring of finan-
cial responsibility for daycare at the
government. level between three
ministries: health, education and
human resources, the ministry of
education informed the communi-
ty it would “‘permit”’ the use of col-
lege land for a daycare centre, but
would not fund its construction,
equipping or operating expenses.

“That is more properly the re-
sponsibility of the ministry of hu-
man resources,’’ Brian Smith, min-
ister of education told the Grand-
view-Woodland Neighborhood
Improvement Project committee in

response to their request for the

funding of a China Creek daycare
facility.
However, the ministry of human
resources funds daycare centres
through a backhanded fashion,

‘providing marginal subsidies for

children in care. Even its past policy
of setting aside a maximum of
$20,000 for capital costs to build
daycare centres for parent and
community groups to match —
posing in itself, enormous fund

®

RAYCAM daycare in Strathcona . . . one of only 66 group daycare

centres in Vancouver, and the number is declining.

raising problems — is currently un-
der review.

MHR’s subsidy program creates
a “‘Catch-22”’ situation for parents

and daycare workers. Parents are

charged a fee per month per child.
Fees account for the bulk of the
centres’ operating funds. With an
average of 22 children licensed for
each centre, the average centre’s
monthly income is $3,595, accord-

ing to Cartier’s findings. About -

half of the children’s fees are paid
by MHR, up to a maximum of
$173 a month, after parents have
met a “‘humiliating needs test.”

Out of that $3,595 total income
come wages, rent, utilities, and
costs for special activities, food and
equipment. Needless to say, itis not
enough, as a high percentage of op-
erating costs are allocated to salar-
ies, which, as Cartier notes, are
“grossly inadequate” ranging be-
tween $650 and $900 a month for
fully qualified daycare workers.

Malcolmson declared in her

“community response,’’ that
workers wages, as a result, are kept
down by a “‘system of insufficient
subsidies.
“Yet, as workers elsewhere, day-
care workers are beginning to un-
ionize (85 percent in Cartier’s study
had no union affiliation), and are
balking at their second rate wage
status and often poor working con-
ditions,”’ she said.

Parents find themselves pitched
against workers demanding well-
deserved wage increases, because
“they, likewise, have a legitimate
claim that they simply cannot af-
ford to pay any more for daycare.’
Fees range anywhere from $160 to
$200 a month in the three Hastings
Sunrise daycare centres.

Women’s rights activist and
singleparent, Susan Radosevic, cur-
rently sitting on the parent coop-
erative board of her daughter’s
daycare, told the Tribune that “‘the
ministry of education should pro-
vide block funding to daycare”’ and
“‘stabilize the current nerve wrack-
ing situation of funding on a per
child basis.

“At my board meeting last
night, instead of talking about pro-
gramming for the children in sum-
mer, we talked fortwo hours.about
our debt and how to make up that
money through raffles and dinner
and dance socials,”’ she said.

“The negotiating contract for
the staff is up and it puts me in the
position of being the employer, sit-
ting on the other side of the table
from my daughter’s teacher.

“Daycare workers need to in-
crease their wages at least 10 per-
cent to keep up with inflation, but

they can only get that through in-
creased parental contribution and
that means parents will have to pay
more. And frankly, I can’t afford
it, and certainly parents receiving
subsidies from MHR, can’t.”

More and more parent groups,
community workers, unions,
women’s organizations and politi-
cal parties, including the Commun-
ist Party, support the concept of
block funding for daycare, to be
the sole administrative and finan-
cial responsibility of the ministry of
education.

The Coalition for Improved
Daycare Services (CIDS), recently
founded- by concerned parents,
many of them single parents, pre-

' pared a brief to the provincial child
care facilities regulations in May
1979 recommending that ‘“‘all as-
pects of daycare be amalgamated
under the ministry of education,”
adding that improvements in the
quality of daycare, such as the ex-
tension of operating hours to in-
clude daycare for shift workers,
‘tare not possible under the present
funding structure.”

Malcolmson and MacGregor
state in their report that because of
the ‘‘incompatibility of the present

z

& daycare subsidy system with the
“Eo

<

goal of financial accessibility, the
(subsidy system) should be replac-
ed with a system of block funding.
“Centres should be funded on
4 the basis of the number of children
@ the centre can successfully accom-
= modate and the estimated operat-
ing costs arising from such project-
ed enrolment.”’

At the recent convention of the
Communist Party in B.C., a reso-
lution on daycare calling for “the
jurisdiction of daycare administra-
tion to fall under the sole jurisdic-
tion of the ministry of education”’
because of the absence of a single
regulatory and funding agency for
daycare centres, was unanimously
endorsed.

More and more people are de-
manding adequate, affordable,
readily-available and quality child-
care facilities as an essential right of
all working parents and their
children.

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