Re: Secrecy and uncertainty surround unlicensed home daycare, Feb. 5

Secrecy and uncertainty surround unlicensed home daycare, Feb. 5

Kudos to the Toronto Star, Laurie Monsebraaten and all the brave parents who spoke out about their experience with Ontario’s child-care crisis. It is shameful that we leave parents to solve an impossible puzzle of finding and paying for quality care, when not enough is available and so little of it is affordable. This crisis is not inevitable. Rather, this is political choice and Ontario can choose to do better.

A 2012 international review of child care found there was no “persistent and substantial use of unregulated care” in countries that had invested in real child-care systems. Ontario’s promise of 100,000 new licensed child-care spaces must not just replicate our current patchwork on a larger scale. It must move us to what one of the mothers featured in the article so clearly demands: “a public system with a licensed spot available for every child that needs care at a price parents can afford.”

Carolyn Ferns, Ontario Coalition for Better Child Care, Toronto

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