State of the City: Child Care Challenges

The challenge towards recruitment and retaining workers and bringing new residents to the community was part of the Mayor's notes on the Child Care situation in the region.

The larger financial limitations that the City faces for all of its infrastructure was reviewed as part of our Overview of the mayor's presentation.

Mayor Brain's notes on Child Care provided a look into feedback that the city has received on the topic and how they are looking for solutions to the issue.

"So  Child care and Housing and retention and recruitment are all one package I would say.

We have lost Doctors to child care, we have lost Nurses because of child care, we have lost Teachers because of child care. 

There is no more child care in the community. 

People are not taking the jobs here because they have no child care and then when they come here they are having a hard time finding a place to live on top of it, so it's a double whammy.

Because if you can't take care of someone's kids who are infants and you can't find them a place to live, well then they're just not going to take the job.

So this is jut another challenge for the community, it's not necessarily the city's challenge but it's the community's challenge."

Mr. Brain then observed as to how the city can assist towards the creation of more Child Care space in the community.

"We did a needs assessment, we need a minimum of fifty spaces to open up and we're actually working with the North Coast Community Services Society on  a licence of occupation for a site across from Roosevelt  and we're going to give it to them for one dollar for twenty years.

And they're actually going to move ahead and trying to build a child care and child development centre on that site.

So we're working with community partners, the School District's also doing a lot of action on child care, so we're working  all together to try to really solve this problem, coupled with the Housing problem so that we can start to recruit and retain people into the community"    

The Conversation on the Child Care portion of the presentation can be viewed from the City's Video replay of the Sate of the City Presentation.

The review of the state of Child care in the community starts at the  46 minute mark

Some of our past items of note to the theme have been included as part of our overview of Council Discussion topics.

Our Full overview of the State of the City Presentation can be reviewed here.

We also have created an archive of the elements from it, that compilation is available here.

( some of the above images come from screenshots of the video presentation)