SASKATOON – The letters are piling up in the farmhouse in Conquest, Sask. where Barb Gibson operates the remnants of the National Rural Child Care Coalition.
Funding for the two-year-old group was axed from the federal government’s budget in March after a switch in human resource department ministers.
Gibson, who was president of the coalition, said the new era means no core funding to sustain the Winnipeg office, employee or regular operation of the coalition. The group spent an estimated $75,000 of the last grant it got from the department from spring 1995 to spring 1996. It can now only apply for grants for short-term projects.
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“We’re not finished, we’re on hold,” said Gibson. Her board had farm women representatives from most of the provinces lobbying for and exchanging information about rural child care. Although no meetings are being held, Gibson operates as a contact person and clearinghouse for the work that remains.
“Things float through here. … I’ve got a pile that is awaiting after harvest,” said Gibson, who now does things “on my own dime.”
The coalition has been approaching agricultural businesses to see if they will pick up some of the funding but Gibson said “it’s hard going,” and nothing has come in yet.
Keep the issue alive
The needs still exist, she said. Her former board is active on different committees in various provinces, slipping in the need for rural child care among discussion of farm safety or agricultural training courses.
It has been a bad year for child-care advocates, but it didn’t start that way. Last December, the federal human resources department under Lloyd Axworthy offered up to $630 million in matching funds if the provinces would put money into child-care spaces and research. He promised provinces could have flexibility to design programs that would suit local needs. The provinces were lukewarm, pleading poverty. Under the new federal minister, Doug Young, the promise tightened up to offer money for new day-care spaces only.
Gibson said that didn’t suit a rural community that needs seasonal, after-hours and portable child care, different than the urban model. Not surprisingly, the offer was withdrawn with no takers.
The coalition argued farm child care would reduce the number of accidental deaths of children. One in every six deaths on Manitoba farms is a child. And that doesn’t include injured children requiring hospitalization, estimated at 20 to 30 a year in Manitoba, said the provincial safety council.
But a child recently died in a fire at a Pine Falls, Man. day care so while the province is revisiting its regulations for existing child care, “they might not be so lenient as to try” expanding into a rural service, said Gibson.
Tough times are also happening in other provinces. British Columbia, the coalition’s representative sits on a day-care committee that hasn’t met and a project has been stopped that was to assist immigrant workers who take their young children into the fields when they work.
Shortage of help
Gibson was phoned by a rural day care near Calgary that couldn’t find workers. In Saskatchewan this spring, a youth summer employment program called Partnerships noted there would be no subsidies for jobs covering babysitting for farmers.
Gibson sees one positive development: The pilot project in Outlook, Sask. that matches rural families with caregivers for their children.
She said the group has developed an excellent needs assessment.
“They’ve done information that would save other communities hours and hours of work.”
