Child care shortage puts parents on edge
Families relieved Junction-area daycare to delay closing down for another year
Frantic parents who feared their westend Toronto daycare would be closing Aug. 31 are breathing easier this weekend after the owner agreed to stay open for another year.
“Everybody is feeling quite happy and relieved,” area mother Alex Harris said. “But it really shows how vulnerable families are when it comes to child care in this city.”
Harris waited a year-and-a-half to get an infant spot for her son Jack at Humberside Daycare in January. The Junction-area centre is licensed to serve 116 children under age 6 and is the only daycare within walking distance of Harris’s home near Annette St. and Runnymede Rd.
She and more than 70 other parents were shocked when they received a letter this week informing them the centre would be closing. Many worried they would have to quit work or delay returning to their jobs due to the lack of licensed options in their community. Parents’ panic was heightened by a new report this week that shows 44 per cent of non-school-age children in Canada live in so-called “child care deserts,” where licensed spaces are scarce.
Humberside is in a neighbourhood where there are licensed spots for just 39 per cent of children under age 3.
Advocates say the scramble is also an example of why the market approach to child care doesn’t work.
“This is why we need a publicly-delivered child care system,” said Toronto Councillor Janet Davis, a longtime child-care champion on city council.
“We don’t expect parents to rely on private schools for an education … it should be the same for child care,” she said. “Parents shouldn’t have to rely on the business acumen, or interest of private entrepreneurs to be able to access a basic public service like child care.”
Daycare owner Felix Bednarski, who also runs the nearby Humberside Montessori School with his wife Molly Galle, said they are now in their 70s and want to focus on the school.
But the outcry from parents convinced them to keep the daycare open until June 28, 2019, Bednarski said.
“We considered the parents’ and children’s needs regarding the limited child care spaces available in our community,” he said in an email Friday.
“Our family’s mission in the last 31 years has always been to nurture, support, and foster the development of children in our community. We hope that this decision will bring peace to the families in our care and our community.”
While Harris and other parents have won a 12-month re- prieve, they are still worried about the future.
“Before this, I know many of us didn’t realize just how precarious the situation is,” she said.
“It has really been a wake-up call.”
But Carolyn Ferns of the Ontario Coalition for Better Child Care, says daycares close in Toronto and across Ontario “all the time.”
“These parents were lucky to get 60 days’ notice,” she said.
“I’ve heard cases where parents in a for-profit centre arrive Monday morning to find the doors locked. It’s way too common and it shouldn’t happen this way.”
This week’s “child care desert” report which for the first time maps the number of licensed child care centres in Canada by postal code, shows how desperate the situation is for many parents, Ferns said.
“It’s experienced as a private crisis, family by family, individual by individual,” she said.
“The truth is, it’s not just one family, or somebody making a bad choice by not getting on the list early enough,” Ferns added.
“This is widespread. It is nationwide. We need to acknowledge it as the public crisis that it is. And we need to fix it.”