Editor:
Re: No easy solution for child-care conundrum, March 7.
We recognize the challenges faced by parents struggling to balance raising a family with pursuing work and training opportunities.
Our BC Early Years Strategy is designed to support choice and help those parents by improving the quality and availability of early years programs and services.
Under this strategy, we will create up to 13,000 new child-care spaces over the next eight years. Our focus is on child care in underserved areas and on school grounds, where children can smoothly transition from early years programs to the classroom to after-school care.
Starting in 2015, a BC Early Childhood Tax Benefit will help make child care more affordable. The benefit will provide $146 million annually – up to $660 a year per child – to 180,000 families with young children.
A new Provincial Office for Early Years will will work with communities to give families support and services.
We will also develop a child-care registry to make better information about child-care spaces available.
These measures build on the $1 billion per year government now invests in child care, early learning and development programs, and on our $327-million annual investment in full-day kindergarten for five-year-olds.
We agree with columnist Melissa Smalley that there is no quick fix. That’s why we invest in a range of meaningful, evidence-based early childhood supports. Families Minister Stephanie Cadieux, Surrey
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There was a time, not that long ago, when children were raised by the people who created them – their parents – instead of some paid strangers.
Parents are now protesting that they can’t afford day care, and are calling on the government – read, you and I – to provide day care for $10 a day. Many are demanding $7-a-day day care as is delivered in Quebec, and some are even insisting on free child care.
Instead of commanding the government to pay for it, they should coerce the people who forced them to have children that they couldn’t afford to pay for it.
Jerry Steinberg, Surrey
