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The provincial government’s deadline for achieving universal $10-a-day child care in British Columbia is just three years away.
But the province is not going to reach this goal by 2028, according to advocates and the former minister of state responsible for child care. It won’t even be close.
“I think we’re delayed two, three years minimum,” Katrina Chen, who was B.C.’s minister of state for child care from 2017 to 2022, told The Tyee.
Meeting the 2028 deadline is not the government’s current focus, Education and Child Care Minister Lisa Beare told The Tyee.
“What we’ve been focused on, as a government, and what we’ve always been focused on, is the key pillars of our ChildCareBC plan,” she said.
“That’s affordability, access, inclusion, and quality child care, and we want to make sure that we do that.”
The $10-a-day spaces are just one “tool in the tool box” to achieve these pillars, Beare told The Tyee, alongside the Child Care Fee Reduction Initiative, paid to providers to reduce their monthly fees; the Affordable Child Care Benefit, a monthly payment directly to low-income families that can bring fees down to $0 a day; and the Aboriginal Head Start program, run in conjunction with the First Nations Health Authority and the Aboriginal Head Start Association of BC to provide no-fee, culturally relevant child-care programs for Indigenous kids.
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According to Sharon Gregson, spokesperson for the Coalition of Child Care Advocates of BC, which collaborated with the Early Childhood Educators of BC on the $10aDay campaign, there are more than 600,000 kids in B.C. aged 0 to 12.
Not all of those kids will need child care, and the type of child care kids might need is different — school-aged children don’t need full-day care during the school year, but they may need care before or after school hours.
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The agreement called on the province to create 12,500 $10-a-day spaces and reduce average fees for child-care spaces for kids five and younger to $21 a day by the end of 2022. They also had to open 40,000 new regulated child-care spaces for kids six and under by 2027-28.
A new report from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives casts doubt on B.C. reaching another federal goal, however, of an average $10-a-day child-care fee for children under six by April 2026. The report singles out Richmond, in particular, as currently having an average $46-a-day fee for infant child care and a median of $39 a day for preschool-aged care.
The provincial subsidies for child care outside of the $10-a-day program don’t change with inflation or as providers’ fees increase, Gregson said, with fee increases capped at three per cent annually.
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Straker doesn’t understand why B.C. went with a pilot $10-a-day program versus a subsidized flat fee for all child-care spaces, like Quebec has with its $7-a-day program and Alberta has with its $15-a-day program.
Especially when the B.C. government’s own 2020 audit revealed some parents with $10-a-day spots reserved more child-care hours than they needed so they had flexibility in case of emergencies.
This effectively shut out other families who could have used those unused $10-a-day child-care hours.
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Winning the $10-a-day lottery
The odds of getting a $10-a-day spot in B.C. depend on where you live.
According to an online tool created by the Coalition of Child Care Advocates of BC, Metro Vancouver residents have a one-in-10 chance of scoring a $10-a-day child-care spot.
The odds are better in Kootenay Boundary and northern B.C., where it increases to one in six, but much worse in the Fraser Valley, where the odds are one in 31.
There’s very little data on how many Indigenous people have access to the program, said Karen Isaac, executive director of the BC Aboriginal Child Care Society.
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