Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I do know that, within the Government of the Northwest Territories, we do try not to disturb market communities where there is a viable opportunity to make money. Why would the government be doing that when private individuals could be making that? I adhere to that policy. I agree with it. However, when it comes to daycares, daycares are very expensive. It is difficult to operate them. My own experience operating a daycare for many years previously, we just scraped by. So I think that the government does have a responsibility at this point, and we are trying to help. When daycares start up, there is $25,000 for a start-up fee that they can get. They can get $10,000 for health and safety monies. If they are looking at expanding their daycares, they can get money for that. We subsidize a daily rate for every daycare; every licensed daycare provider gets daily rates ranging between per part-time/full-time $19.81 a day to up to $49.56 per day per child in communities. So we are subsidizing the daycares directly. We are subsidizing the licensed daycare staff. There is a subsidy that we give, a staff grant, on a quarterly basis to every employee that is in a licensed daycare. So, although it is not everything and we are not providing a hundred percent, we are trying our best to actually support daycares, as well, through our programs.
Caroline Cochrane on Question 698-18(3): Day Care Infrastructure Investments
In the Legislative Assembly on March 14th, 2019. See this statement in context.
See context to find out what was said next.