The Case for Affordable Child Care

The pandemic has underscored the need for a national child care program

- ANNE SHIBATA CASSELMAN

JENNY DAGGITT is a cardiac surgical ICU nurse, and her husband, Patrick, is a computer programmer. In 2017, when Jenny was three months pregnant, she put herself on thirty-three wait-lists of every and any type of child care, from community daycare programs to unlicensed outfits run out of people’s houses, within a thirty-minute walk from her home in East Vancouver. By the time her maternity leave ended, a year and a half later, she had heard of an opening at only one of the operations but deemed it sketchy. Hiring a nanny, which, in Vancouver, could cost more than $30,000 per year, was unaffordable. So Patrick took paternity leave and Jenny picked up overtime to make up for the lost income. Eventually, they figured out a way for Patrick to work part-time and for Jenny to work twelve-hour night shifts and weekends so they could pay their bills and care for their daughter and not completely stall Patrick’s career.

“I sleep when she’s napping and go to work as soon as he gets home,” Jenny explains. It’s not just that the Daggitts can’t afford to live off one income so the other parent can stay home with the baby. “We have two people working and we can’t afford the what-ifs that come up,” she says, breaking down their budget. Even if they had been offered a spot somewhere that felt safe, the fees would have been exorbitant. “It’s crazy that it costs more to put your kid through daycare than it costs to put them through university,” she says. With the median cost of infant daycare at $1,400 a month in Vancouver, the annual cost of child care for a one-year-old can be nearly 2.5 times that of undergraduate tuition.