Wanted: Families needing daycare cash
York and Peel say they have no one on their wait lists for child-care subsidies, and a recent boost in millions of dollars in provincial and federal funding means they actually have more money than there seems to be an immediate need for.

TheStar.com
Sept. 21, 2017
Noor Javed

Two GTA municipalities have a child-care problem on their hands, but not the one that normally comes to mind in the world of daycare woes.

The region’s of York and Peel say they have no one on their wait lists for child-care subsidies, and a recent boost in millions of dollars in provincial and federal funding means they actually have more money than there seems to be an immediate need for.

York Region received $14 millon in additional funds in 2017 to spend on its child-care program. Peel says it received a $21 million cash injection in additional federal-provincial funding to put towards making child care more accessible this year.

Now they just need to find families who need the help.

That’s why both municipalities are planning to launch campaigns to try to get the word out — specifically aimed at those middle-income earners who may not even know that they qualify for help with daycare costs.

“I think there are a number of people who automatically disqualify themselves because they don’t know what the income levels might be. They think it’s for people who are very poor or very low-income, and that’s not the case,” said Cordelia Abankwa, the General Manager of Social Services for York Region.

“There are people who are working on very moderate salaries, who would be able to benefit and who need it,” Abankwa said.

“People think that if they own their home they might not be eligible, but that’s not always the case,” she said.

For years, much of the child-care discussion has focused on Toronto, where notoriously high child-care fees, and lower-incomes households have kept the city’s wait list hovering around 15,000 children. Durham Region says they have 2,586 children on their wait list, although a number of kids can’t receive subsidies, as their parents are not working or in school — a necessary criteria for a family to receive support. But both York and Peel say their immediate wait lists were reduced, due to a combination of provincial funding and strategies to target the wait list — including getting out of directly delivering child care.

In 2016, 14,726 children in Peel received subsidies. In Toronto, the number is 28,975, according to the city’s website. In York Region today, currently 8,300 children receive child-care subsidies.

Abankwa believes the low demand is not about a lack of need but is simply a lack of awareness.

“I think the surplus comes down to a lack of knowledge,” she said. “This region has seen a lot of growth and a lot of change. And people don’t necessarily know automatically about our fee subsidy…and for a long time, we did have a wait list,” she said. “People often hear about wait lists in other areas, and I think people tend to assume that in every single area it’s the same. These ideas die hard,” she said.

Currently, in Peel, only 21 per cent of children use licensed child care, according to Suzanne Finn, the director of Early Years & Child Care Services for Peel. “Some people might have grandparents or a spouse at home…we know licensed child care is not for everybody, but we want to make sure that anyone who wants it, can afford it,” she said.

Both municipalities say their campaign includes advertising, putting up posters in child-care centres, and engaging directly with child-care providers.

The province sets out who is eligible for a subsidy using a sliding income scale which is loosely calculated by looking at both household income and the cost of care. For example, a family whose income is around $70,000, could be offered a subsidy to reduce child-care costs to $42 a day per child. Infant care in York Region averages around $1,400 a month, which amounts to $63 a day.

The province announced a major child-care expansion plan in September 2016 to create licensed child care for 100,000 more children under age 4 over the next five years. Then this spring, municipalities received additional federal money under the Canada-Ontario Early Learning and Child Care (ELCC) agreement, a multi-year initiative aimed at helping families access child care and invest in “local priorities.”

The province also gave municipalities a hard deadline of spending or allocating most of the money by the end of this year — or risk losing it.

In one York Region report to be discussed by local politicians on Thursday, staff say while money is good to have, it’s been difficult to deal with the influx so quickly.

“The capacity of the many municipalities, including York Region, to absorb this amount of funding in a limited amount of time will be challenging for several reasons,” says the report. “It takes time to create new child spaces particularly if it involves a capital retrofit or capital expansion, as each space needs to undergo licensing inspection. It also takes time to reach new families who may be eligible for fee assistance through a media campaign and then place them into suitable and accessible child care,” the report says, suggesting the region request the province extend the deadline for expenditure from December 31, 2017 to December 31, 2018 to more effectively use the new funding.

Heather Irwin, a spokeswoman with the Ministry of Education says “the ministry has been and continues to work very closing with all service system managers including Peel and York to support the planning and implementation of ELCC investments. The province is also monitoring expenditures and how funding is allocated as part of our expansion plan and ELCC to determine how to best target funding in the future,” she said in an email.

But the timelines are still in place, said Irwin.

Abankwa says she hopes the campaign encourages residents to reach out to their municipalities — even if they aren’t sure they can get help.

“We are also hoping that people will take a chance to reach out to us,” she said. “This is an opportunity, where we have the ability to help our residents…and we want families to take advantage of it.”