Thank you, Mr. Chair. Currently if a child is missing for five days from a child care facility, the facility gets docked the subsidy for that child. If several children are away — for example, if a flu bug were to hit the community or a number of families travelled to some special occasion — this loss of subsidy can be significant, and it leads to pretty wild swings from month to month.
As far as I know we’re the only jurisdiction that does it this way. Most jurisdictions base the subsidy on a previous year’s record of attendance, and I know that’s much favoured by our facility operators. The difficulty is that the costs that these facilities have are fixed costs. They don’t fluctuate month by month, if a couple of children are not there — things
like staff and rent and fuel bills. This has been brought up repeatedly by these folks that are struggling to keep these operations going.
It hasn’t been addressed yet, so this motion is really an attempt. Again, I think it can be broadly supported, even by the Cabinet. It’s a fairly common sense sort of thing, not a large cost to it, but it would smooth things out and support our workers in these community facilities. So I’m strongly in support of this motion. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.