Ford ally speaks against child-care cuts
Mayor urges MPPs to stand up for city, oppose ‘dramatic’ downloading
A right-leaning member of Toronto city council is urging the Ford government to reconsider “unacceptable” cuts that threaten to wipe out more than 6,000 child-care subsidies for struggling parents.
“It is our belief — my belief — that governments must work together,” Councillor Michael Thompson told a city hall news conference Friday.
“We want an opportunity to meet at the table, to talk … and recognize the impact of the decisions that are being made today by the province,” he said. Thompson, who had a good working relationship with Doug Ford when the two were city councillors during Rob Ford’s mayoralty, said he had called the premier to intervene personally.
“I have a good hope that in speaking with the premier we can get to the bottom of this,” he added. “The premier and I work well together.”
Mayor John Tory, who is urging Ford’s 10 Toronto MPPs to join him in defending the city, was not so diplomatic.
In an interview on CBC Radio’s Metro Morning earlier in the day, the mayor scoffed at the province’s claim that the city can offset the cuts — estimated by Toronto’s city manager to total $84.8 million this year — through administrative efficiencies.
“That’s an absolute fabrication,” Tory said, adding Toronto’s child-care administration is well within provincial guidelines and includes inspections of licensed daycares to ensure children aren’t in peril.
“They are being very disingenuous when they say it’s just about administration. It’s about deep cuts to the actual provision of child care to families in the city of Toronto.”
Tory expressed frustration at being repeatedly blindsided with a growing list of “dramatic cutbacks,” including funding for public health and transit, with Toronto sometimes being hit harder than other Ontario cities.
“They have decided, basically, that they are going to download in a massive sort of way on elements that are important to the success of this city and to making sure that people who might be struggling with affordability, they’re going to download that onto us” to balance the provincial books, he said.
“I don’t think there’s a single Progressive Conservative MPP in Toronto who got elected on the notion that they would acquiesce to cutbacks in child care, in public health, in gasoline taxes, which is used to keep transit going,” Tory said. “So we are going to go and ask them that question — are they going to stand up on this and say inside their own government (that they) need to take a hard second look at these things?”
Torontonians elected 11 MPPs, including Ford. If pressure doesn’t work, Tory said there is a “Plan B” but declined to give details.
As the Star revealed Thursday, city manager Chris Murray had his staff crunch numbers for the child-care cut and policy changes after the Ford government failed to fully outline the impacts. Murray warned Ford’s elimination of a $50-million fund will hit low-income Toronto parents very hard. The fund was introduced by Ford’s Liberal predecessor, Kathleen Wynne, to help licensed childcare centres cover increasing labour costs and to shield parents from big fee hikes.
Ford’s $390-million childcare tax credit, unveiled in the April budget, will not offset cuts for most parents, Murray wrote. “In general, the CARE tax credit is of less benefit to families when compared to a child-care fee subsidy, and middle- and lower-income families are most affected by the change in different approaches.”
At Friday’s news conference, Thompson said the cuts are a direct attack on thousands of Toronto children and families struggling to make ends meet. The loss of more than 6,000 subsidies will force them to “make impossible choices about keeping their jobs, feeding their families, paying their rent or putting their child in a safe, licensed child-care facility.
“This is not acceptable,” he said. “They should not be put in this hopeless situation.”
Toronto parent Sinéad Rafferty, who brought her 18-monthold son, Oisin, to the news conference, said she has been waiting almost two years for a spot in a licensed child-care centre. She is worried the cuts will force daycares to raise already high fees for parents like her who don’t qualify for subsidies.
“I have never felt so powerless without an income, and my partner and I are running out of our savings trying to make things meet on one income,” Rafferty said. “I don’t know how we could even afford an additional $2,000 a month in child-care fees.”
Toronto parents pay the highest child-care fees in the country, with infant fees topping $22,000 a year. In an email, a spokesperson for Education Minister Lisa Thompson said the provincial cuts amount to just over $27 million and that the city’s figures “are completely inaccurate and only create unnecessary fear and anxiety for parents.”
At Queen’s Park, Progressive Conservative MPP Stan Cho (Willowdale) said he’s “hoping … city council will not close 6,000 spots because the province … is still investing $433 million into child-care services for the city of Toronto.”
“That’s in addition to the $2 billion our government is investing to open 30,000 new child-care spots as well as investing in a child-care tax credit to provide relief directly to parents,” Cho told reporters.
“We’ve even got a wage-enhancement grant that’s going to top up to $2 (an hour) on childcare workers’ wages so that child-care service providers can bring down that cost for parents,” he said. Cho said the city should be able to find efficiencies in administrative spending. He referred to recent reports by Toronto’s auditor general who — like her provincial counterpart — periodically highlights wasteful spending.
“The city is sending out workers in their cars, contributing to gridlock and to pollution, to go to child-care service centres and see if there’s greenery on the trees during the winter months or to see if decorations are season-appropriate,” Cho said. “That’s why we’re asking the city to come to the table to help us find those types of efficiencies.”
Martha Friendly of the Child Care Resource and Research Unit said the cuts are part of the Ford government’s broader plan to destabilize high-quality, licensed child care in favour of “cheap, unregulated care.”
“They are shoving more kids into home child care to make it a better business, opening (centre-based care) to the for-profit sector and offering a tax rebate that isn’t enough to pay for licensed care,” she said. “It really smacks of privatization through unregulated child care and through cheaper, for-profit child care. That’s where we’re going.”