VANCOUVER—The B.C. government is preparing to launch the second phase of its affordable child care initiative, and longtime child care advocates are thrilled.

A revamp of the province’s child care subsidy, the Affordable Child Care Benefit, which starts on Sept. 1, is the second part of a comprehensive overhaul of the province’s child care system. The income-based benefit will provide support to families who earn up to $111,000 per year and comes in addition to the child-care fee reduction program that the province launched in April, which is provided regardless of income.

“I think there’s going to be a lot of very happy families in B.C.,” said Sharon Gregson, spokesperson for the Coalition of Child Care Advocates of BC.

A mother of four, Gregson first got involved in the fight for affordable child care in 1987 when her children were young.

“My kids are grown now, but I realized it’s an issue linked to women’s equality and healthy economies and healthy communities,” she said. “The policies we’ve advocated for and developed and pushed government to implement really are making a concrete difference for families now,” she said.

Vancouver currently has some of the most expensive daycare costs in Canada, with parents paying an average of $1,292 a month for a spot for toddler-aged children, according to a 2017 study by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.

When combining the two new programs, a family earning $45,000 per year with an infant or toddler attending a licensed daycare, could receive up to $1,600 per month to pay for child care (but if the daycare fees are lower than that, then they’ll receive a lower amount).

“It’s geared toward targeting more support, more affordability to families with the lowest incomes,” Gregson explained. Plus, research has shown that affordable child care “allows parents to enter or re-enter the workforce, but also allows parents who have not been able to participate in the workforce to actually get a job,” she said.

The ministry hopes to make the benefit easy to access through an online estimator and application process.

“It’s a fairly straight forward process, and it has really changed from the previous subsidy process because that was paper-based and by fax,” said Katrina Chen, the provincial Minister of State for Child Care.

The benefit can also be used to help pay for after-school care for school-aged kids, and all subsidies will be paid directly to the child care centres, Chen said.

And there are protections in place to make sure child care providers don’t unreasonably raise their rates once the money from the government comes in.

“We have an accountability mechanism,” Chen said. “When providers apply they will have to show us their historical fee changes, we want to make sure that they continue to run their business as usual,” she said, explaining that providers will still be permitted to raise their fees yearly as long as it’s in line with previous raises.

Four months in, the ministry is satisfied with results of its first move, the fee reduction program. According to its reports, nearly 3,000 child care providers have applied for the fee reduction, and 87 per cent of the applications have now been approved. As a result more than 50,000 licensed child care spaces are receiving the additional funding, which, depending on their age, ranges from $100 to $350 per kid.

A third initiative as part of the program will launch in September, Chen said, which may address wage issues for early childhood educators as well as training costs.

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

“There’s more to come, because we do need to build a system, we want to move away from a patchwork,” she added.

With files from Jen St. Denis

Read more about: