Excerpt
With many families waitlisted for child care, the City of Toronto is urging the province's education minister not to cancel funding that would create thousands of child-care spaces in schools. But the province says it's simply moving funding elsewhere so projects can be built sooner.
Last week, city staff told councillors the province was cancelling funding for 48 previously approved child-care capital projects planned in Toronto's public and Catholic schools. Those would have provided over 3,000 new child-care spaces.
On July 24, council voted to request the province reverse the cancelled funding. If the education minister declines, council is asking the province to let the school boards or the city have the money as "pooled funding" so they can build as many projects as possible.
Many of those projects were planned for areas with the highest demand for subsidized care, according to a January TDSB report, like Scarborough and northwestern parts of the city. At the time, the report found a lack of funding from the province was holding up ready-to-go projects.
"While these projects remain on paper, thousands of families with young children struggle to find access to quality child care in their communities," the report said.
Tho Nguyen is experiencing it first-hand.
An expecting mother who's due in January, she has already signed up to several waitlists for child care in Scarborough, but is worried she'll now have fewer options.
"It's devastating," Nguyen said. "Even when I'm on 10 child-care waitlists, there's no guarantee that I will get a spot when I need it. So these additional options would have been amazing."
...