Description:
The city forgets that in the year that the Bellevue Child Care Centre closed as many as 18,500 children waited for subsidized daycare spots. The Bellevue Child Care Centre was a municipally run daycare that closed on July 19th, 2013. Municipally run daycares typically pay higher wages than other childcare centres and many of the staff at Bellevue had worked there for years. While all the staff and children at Bellevue were relocated, the centre's closure meant that staff with less seniority at other municipally run centres lost their jobs and children waiting for daycare spots were bumped further down the waiting list.
On October 9th 2014 the Department unveiled a commemorative sign to celebrate and remember over seventy years of publicly funded childcare at this site.
If wishes were horses then beggars would ride.
They'd bundle us up and take us outside.
And back in again for cod liver oil
playtime and naptime and blankets of flannel.
Then stories and songs and fun finger games.
We went out in the cold but never the rain.
Towels on racks, face cloths on the rail.
Mothers went marching through brimstone and hail.
From the plant, from the lab, they go to petition
for government funds for our safe supervision.
To Queen's Park, to Council, straight on to the Feds.
Then home again quickly to put us to bed.