Election campaign underway?

Rent control for all. Pharmacare for people under 25. A high-speed train from here to Toronto. Relief on your hydro bill. A $15 hourly minimum wage. A huge investment in child care.

The promises are coming so fast from Premier Kathleen Wynne and her Ontario Liberal Big Government that they make your head spin.

And election day is still a whole year away.

The latest pledge is to make child care more plentiful, diverse and affordable.

“Our plan is transformative and bold,” said Indira Naidoo-Harris, the minister responsible for early years and child care, in a media teleconference Tuesday.

Under the Liberal plan there will be $1.6 billion invested over five years to build 45,000 new licensed child-care spaces, increase the number of subsidies available to help families afford the high cost, and support early childhood educators with professional development and other measures.

By 2022, there should be 100,000 additional licensed spaces for children under age four.

“We’re accepting applications (for new centres) starting right now,” Naidoo-Harris said.

Naidoo-Harris said there have been consultations across the province. Families want good child care available on weekends and overnight, not just during the traditional workday.

There are also calls for services for children with special needs, such as those with autism or mental health issues.

She couldn’t say on Tuesday how many additional spaces or subsidies would come to Waterloo Region, but it is certainly a place where the need is growing.

Today there are 390 local families on a waiting list for subsidies that help pay for child care, said Barbara Cardow, director of children’s service for the Region of Waterloo.

A waiting list has been in place since last November, which “is the longest we’ve had a wait” for subsidies, she said.

But there is more pressure on child-care spaces than before. The number of children under age 12 in Waterloo Region has grown to 83,060 last year, up from 81,740 in 2014. But the number of licensed child-care spaces in the region fell slightly, to 4,837 in 2016 from 4,889 in 2014.

Meanwhile, costs are ballooning. You can pay up to $81 a day for a space for an infant in a licensed centre. Over a year, you could pay up to $19,750. That’s a big chunk of your pay cheque.

The rising cost of child care outpaces most salary increases. And the pressure to keep costs as low as possible for parents means that early childhood educators, who

provide the care, are paid so poorly, the government subsidizes their wages by $2 an hour.

As a project, the daycare plan sounds ambitious, multi-faceted, and socially progressive. You can’t really have a strong economy without reliable, highquality child care.

On the other hand, this strategy also seems a little bit rocky from a financial point of view, when you line it up with all the other expensive projects promised by Queen’s Park.

I asked Naidoo-Harris why the government didn’t start this plan earlier.

“There was a lot of hard work put into doing away with the provincial deficit,” she said. “By doing that, we created opportunities and the ability to move forward with investments.”

She likened the situation to a family that’s trying to get a big bill paid off before it can move on to other projects.

Exactly. Most of us know that too many other projects, however worthy, will inevitably create another big bill.

If we aren’t disciplined, we’ll be back where we started, spending more than we earn.