Support Burnaby Infant/Toddler Care

For reasons outlined below, we the undersigned call on the City of Burnaby to follow the lead of major Canadian cities such as Vancouver and strengthen our community by establishing a child care endowment fund to support the operating costs of quality non-profit child care facilities serving children under age 36 months.

Licensed infant/toddler care is expensive to run, largely due to the cost of maintaining high staff-to-child ratios. As a result, few care givers can afford to provide such service at rates parents can afford to pay. This situation leads to very low availability of infant/toddler care, high prices and long waiting lists for working families. At the current drastically reduced levels of federal and provincial government support, child care centres for these age groups in our community are no longer able to cover their costs and are struggling to survive, further eroding access. In fact, since January 2006, the YMCA Child Care Resource and Referral service alone has received more than 1000 requests for the fewer than 500 licensed infant/toddler spaces in Burnaby. The end result is that Burnaby's working families are being shut out of access to quality, affordable care for their young children.

Among BC women aged 25-44 years, the most frequent reason cited for working part-time is lack of child care. The economic benefits of increased public investment in child care include removing a major barrier to employment for these women, especially those in low-income and single-parent families, and increasing the city's ability to cope with labour shortages as the population ages. In its recent Child Care Resolution, the BC Chamber of Commerce has recognized these new economic realities by citing child care as one of the key factors in addressing BC's labour shortage. In support of this conclusion, studies show that $1 of public spending on child care delivers $2 or more of future economic benefits. For all these reasons, it makes economic sense for the City to step in and fill the funding void in infant/toddler care left by the federal and provincial governments. Affordable, accessible, quality child care is everyone's responsibility.