The future of affordable child care in BC

0:00Good afternoon, and thank you for being with us on this Tuesday. Coming up on the show a little bit later on, we are going to be checking in with Larry Campbell. He's going to join us in the two o'clock hour, as you might have heard on the news. His contract in his role on the downtown east side has been extended. So we'll talk more about the work he's been doing and what he will be doing for the next six months as well. And also coming up in just a few moments, we are going to get a live report on what is happening at BC Ferries. Another fairy breakdown. This as we get closer to a very busy long weekend, and we're going to check in with Global News reporter Jordan Armstrong. We are starting though, taking a look at some new numbers that are really raising concerns about the future of $10 a day child care in this province. This means families have more options in their own communities and will spend less time communing, stressing about finding care. It means stronger healthier communities throughout our province. That was the minister of education and childcare, speaking back in October of 2025, talking about some good news with new spaces.

1:06However, this new information shows that with the pausing of the $10 a day child care program, that was announced in the last budget. This might never happen throughout the province. Rob Shaw, who has been writing about this, wrote a very interesting piece about this report. And we are joined now by Eric Swanson, principal at third space planning, also consultant to the coalition of child care advocates of BC. Eric, thank you for taking some time today. Good afternoon, Jill. Happy to be here. Well, good afternoon to you. What specifically does this report look at as far as the child care rollout in BC? And just how far away the province is from that $10 a day goal? Well, two things there, how far are we from the goal? And how are we trying to get there? And so I'll start with how we're trying to get there, which is what this paper focuses on. And it advances a longstanding, you know, circa 2011 recommendation for school districts to be made responsible for planning and managing all child care expansion in BC,

2:10though not necessarily operating all programs with this district led model replacing what we've ended up with, which is an unplanned, grand-based and more market-driven child care expansion, where it's up to hundreds of individual organizations to raise their hand, try to apply for provincial money and do all the work of expansion themselves. And so again, this paper is proposing to move from this kind of unplanned model to something more like what we're familiar with with K-12 or health care, where somebody has formally given the job of expanding the system. And this paper, although it builds on this longstanding recommendation, has some new technical details and also gets a little bit more into the problems of where we've ended up, which kind of gets to your first point of how far are we away from the goal of universal access. So, you know, one of the reasons, you know, we're eight years into BC's 10 year child care BC plan to deliver universal child care. And while we certainly have created a bunch of new spaces, the government reports 44,000 since 2018,

3:15this unplanned expansion we've had has contributed to a situation where, depending on the school district you're in, maybe 15% of children have access to care and some up to close to half and others. And so there's this highly unequal access in child care right now. There are a number of other problems with the current unplanned approach that I could get into, but that's the short story to kick us off. All right. So with that transition then talking about making it part of the school system or delivering it to rethinking how it's delivered, how key is that? That that's what is needed to make it. So you pointed out those inequities that those are dealt with. It's fundamental. Somebody needs to be given the job of planning expansion. Right now it's again, wherever anybody, wherever anybody can raise their hand and make a project work. Get provincial money or find their own money. That's where expansion happens. If we truly want something like K-12 or health care, where we can all depend on universal access,

4:17somebody within government or delegated by government needs to be given that job. And the obvious candidate is school districts. We now have an integrated ministry of education and child care. Kind of the vision for the system for a while now has been integrating the two. So child care plus K-12 education. And so this would just be a continuation of school districts evolving role. They're already providing more child care than we've seen in the past. This, you know, with this recommendation, school districts would be given the formal job of planning all child care expansion and making sure it happens under ministry oversight. And so in the report where it talks about the role then of school districts, would that mean using the existing infrastructure and then child care spaces would move greatly from, like you said, kind of this patchwork or different operators, different models? Would the bulk of them move into the existing infrastructure into the districts and those buildings themselves? We'd end up with a mix, which is kind of a continuation of the mix that we already have.

5:20You know, most child care NBC is currently provided by private, by which I mean non-profit or for-profit operators. And this new model, they'd be simply managed and contracted by the school district. However, we would also seek an increasing proportion of school district run care kind of on school sites. And so it would be a continuation of the mixed model that we currently have kind of like BC's health authorities, you know, health authorities manage both their own direct public operations as well as the network of private providers. You know, school districts would become a little bit more like that. It comes down to the money, doesn't it? And the whole point in the budget where we found out that this $10 a day program has been paused as the government said is because they don't have the money to continue rolling this out to make it throughout the province. So does this change that? Well, Joe, this is the central point, really. I mean, right now we're talking about the expansion model. Other key building blocks include fair compensation, wages and benefits for educators. What, you know, expanding $10 a day fees to everyone.

6:23The reason we're not making a ton of progress on any of these things is it seems that the provincial government is stuck in kind of a cost frame for childcare. We all know that we've got a large deficit in BC and we should be concerned about that and attentive to it. But childcare has the superpower and the superpower is that when you provide childcare, you free up parents, particularly mothers to enter the workforce or increase their hours. And study after study shows that you get an immediate return on investment of cash to the government coffers and that benefit continues through the long term. And so what we're not seeing and what I'm not seeing evidence of is the government, you know, really baking like this well-known, well-studied economic return into their budgeting. And so rather than pausing investment, there is a strong economic case to increase investment, to enable the kind of expansion model we're talking about here to ensure that educators get fair compensation so that we can actually staff these new spaces with qualified people, etc.

7:27And one other one final question when you talk about that. So the government again going in the different direction rather than funding it, pausing it. Are districts do you think on board or would they be on board becoming the ones that are in charge of this? I suspect it will vary from trustee to trustee and from board to board. Their level of interest and their level of interest will be colored by the current challenges all districts are facing delivering K-12 education. You know, we're all very familiar with the challenges in that system. And so I think it's natural there's going to be hesitancy or concern to take on new scope. But speaking of this recommendation coming back from 2011, at that time that's also when BC implemented universal full-day kindergarten. And there were concerns at that time about the ability of school districts to absorb this expanded scope. And now, 15 years later, we don't really think of it twice. And so similarly, there is room to give school districts the job. We're not saying this happens tomorrow.

8:28Give them the time and the resources to undertake this new responsibility. And then the goal is we look back and it'll all feel natural. You know, a natural part of an integrated child care and education system. Eric Swanson, thank you for joining us and going through this report and the new information. Appreciate you making the time. You're very welcome. Hello there. Thursday's on global. I'm Madeline Matlock. She's the lawyer with a legendary name. Don't underestimate this Matlock. This one is a shark. You know it, baby. The one you can trust, even if she has to bend the rules. Things aren't always as black and white as they seem. Took cracker case. This is how I get things done. Any winning actress Kathy Bates is... Matlock. All new Thursday's at 9 Eastern on global. Stream on Stack TV.