Free child care doesn’t guarantee quality

Re Duelling daycare plans pit Liberals against NDP in battle for parent votes, April 22 I am so happy to hear that the Liberals are finally considering relieving young families of outrageous childcare fees. This is long overdue.

However, I do have many concerns about how this will be implemented. The big red flag that disturbs me about this plan is that there is a key wording missing from Premier Kathleen Wynne’s proposal: quality! For all the young families in Ontario who are getting extremely excited about free daycare, please remember that it is still very much your responsibility to ask all of the right questions. To run a high-quality centre is unbelievably expensive, rent and salaries being the main costs. It is the duty of each and every parent to know the centre’s child-to-teacher ratios. They need to ask how many children are accepted per square foot to prevent overcrowding. Parents need to ask if there will be three fully qualified early childhood educators in each room or just one qualified teacher with two assistants. Parents should insist on hearing about the centre’s sanitary and hygiene practices, from hand washing to cleaning washrooms and sanitizing toys. Will children be given hot lunches or will parents have to pay extra for food? Will parents have to supply their young children with their own food? Will these child-care centres provide a rich, stimulating program?

We are seeing very poor and disturbing results with our nursing homes due to lack of proper funding and poor staffing. Parents have to make sure that this will not be the situation with their child’s care. Sadly, the Liberal child-care platform sounds too good to be true. M. Kohek, Whitby