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When my youngest son was only five months old, I started looking for a day-care spot for him in Winnipeg. I soon realized - after being told I was 50th, 60th or even 120th on various waiting lists - that I should have started the search long before little Tate was even born.
"You'd be surprised at how many people go on waiting lists when they're pregnant," says Karen Ohlson, director of K.I.D.S. Inc., a community-based non-profit child-care centre in Winnipeg's River Heights neighbourhood.
"Our waiting list is 500-plus names long and growing every day. We have families every day saying, 'You said it would be a year,' 'You said it would it be two years,' and now it looks like it will be three years and they're very frustrated and you really can't blame them."
Frustrations over Canada's day-care crunch peaked earlier this year when parents, angry about the long wait, started harassing staff members at Ohlson's centre.
"People were being yelled at in front of the children and it was a really difficult situation," she says.
"As shocking as it was, though, it really illustrated how desperate parents are for day care."
While there are no national numbers on how many families are crying out for care, long waiting lists are a reality in cities all across Canada.
In B.C., which is one of the worst provinces for finding licensed day care, the province's capital city has only 404 spots for children under 30 months of age, according to a report last year by the Partnership in Learning and Advocacy for Young Children.
In total, the federally funded report found that there are only 5,377 regulated spots in Victoria at any given time for the 17,500 kids under five that, based on 2006 census numbers, live in the capital region.
"Parents are sleeping overnight in school gyms to line up for (after-school) spots and it's even worse for pre-school and infant spaces," says Victoria child-care advocate and mother of two Michelle Kirby.
"Society has changed. Moms don't stay home - 75 per cent of moms with kids under six now work - so there's a huge shortfall and it's only getting worse."
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With no national child-care plan - something all experts and advocates agree is long overdue - the day-care dilemma is falling to provincial governments. While some provinces are making progress, none compare to Quebec.
La belle province's heavily subsidized child care is not only accessible, but affordable at only $7 a day or about $140 per month. Compare that to the $600 to $1,600 per child, on average, that parents pay in the rest of Canada and it's easy to understand why the Quebec model is being held up as an example for the rest of the country.
"We definitely have a much more generous policy here in Quebec and we've decided to take advantage of that and work with the government," says Caroline Morin, director of compensation and benefits for L'Oréal Paris.
The cosmetics giant started onsite day care at its manufacturing and distribution centre near Montreal in 2002. Feedback has been extremely positive, but not just from parents.
"Of course we want to be an employer of choice - that's the reason L'Oréal wants to offer everything to employees that we can as benefits, and a place where employees can bring their children is very useful for people, but even people who don't have kids think it's great that L'Oréal is open-minded and supportive of employees having children."
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As for Tate, he never did make it to the top of the waiting lists in Winnipeg. Fearing the worst when we moved to Victoria this summer, I started calling day-care providers months before the move and lucked out when Athene, who doesn't take a waiting list for her coveted home day-care spots, took pity on me trying to find care from three provinces away and made an exception.
Tate got in - and I could keep working.
- reprinted from Business Edge News Magazine