In a recent informal survey in a Facebook group for local parents, 61 per cent of the 74 respondents reported they were unable to return to work—full-time or at all—after welcoming a child, due to a lack of childcare in Whistler.
Only eight per cent of respondents said they managed to secure a daycare spot, enabling them to return to work, while roughly a third of respondents said they were able to return to some form of work after privately hiring a nanny.
Alistair and Natalie Cray shared that statistic in a letter they wrote to Whistler’s mayor and council, received at a council meeting on Tuesday, Sept. 26, urging officials to continue advocating for solutions to the resort’s debilitating daycare shortage at the Union of British Columbia Municipalities (UBCM) conference in Vancouver last month. It was one of four pieces of correspondence expressing frustration with the lack of childcare options and yearslong waitlists in Whistler.
Officials have acknowledged ongoing challenges associated with Whistler’s well-documented childcare shortage for years. Councillor Jessie Morden wants struggling families to know they aren’t forgotten, even if progress is slow.
At the Sept. 26 meeting, Morden detailed her meetings with a provincial parliamentary secretary tasked with the childcare file, and with B.C.’s director of childcare development at the UBCM conference.
“We spoke about the Early Childhood Educator certificate and what can be done about addressing the issue of credentials from outside B.C. not being recognized here. We talked about wages and bringing it up to a livable wage. We talked about housing and making it more available for essential workers. We talked about long waitlists and how we were losing doctors and nurses and managers—and I could go on—in our workforce, not to mention the mental toll and loss of belonging the lack of daycare is taking on parents of this community,” Morden said.
“My takeaway from these meetings was not that it’s going to be solved overnight. We all know that, but I’m optimistic that we can make a change in this regard, and the letters of support that we saw from the community helped and will continue to ring in their ears when they think about Whistler,” Morden continued, becoming emotional.
“Obviously, this is important to me. Your help has been critical to the progression of this and I appreciate and I hear all your voices.”
Council heard from four families illustrating the substantial impacts of Whistler’s childcare shortage they’re experiencing, including limits on household income and career growth opportunities for at least one parent.
Council also heard from one letter writer who still hasn’t been able to secure steady care for her two-and-a-half-year-old. “As I approach the end of my second maternity leave with my youngest, I do not want to be put in a position where I am having to consider resigning from my career,” she wrote. “I would be forced to resign if I either haven’t received the placement call from a daycare or it doesn’t end up making economic sense to give a large portion of my pay check to a cash-pay nanny. It would hurt me and my employer (a wonderful Whistler business) deeply if I was no longer able to work.”
Even parents able to hire in-home care compared the high costs of a private nanny—in one letter-writer’s case, $30 per hour—to the subsidized, $30-per-day rate at Creekside Kids Daycare.
“From an availability and continuity of care perspective, we don’t know how long we will have this nanny as her housing lease expires in December and the housing supply in Whistler is its own challenge,” that letter added. “We are also left to find other care whenever she is sick or chooses to go on vacation.”
Whistler Mayor Jack Crompton acknowledged that, while there’s a long way to go before childcare availability in Whistler is where it needs to be, “we’re seeing movement.”
In particular, “I’m really enthusiastic about the roll-out of $10-a-day daycare,” he said following the Sept. 26 council meeting. “It’s evidence that our advocacy delivers results.”
In 2018, the provincial government rolled out more than 2,500 spaces for children under the $10-a-day model, at 50 centres approved for operation through the Canada-British Columbia Early Learning and Child Care Agreement. According to the province, an expansion of that program will see B.C.’s total number of affordable daycare spaces exceed 15,000 by the end of the year.
Crompton pointed to the incorporation of childcare into B.C.’s Ministry of Education as another cause for optimism that wages for childcare providers could soon start to rise. “Our big challenge here is finding workers that want to work in the sector,” he added. “A lot of those people can’t get credentials, or can’t find housing, and so those are issues we still need to spend a lot of time and energy on.”
