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Legislation Would Stop 123 Busy Beavers!
Next year will be an important year for child care in Ontario. Two pieces of legislation, one in Ottawa and one at Queen's Park, are aimed at preventing the expansion of for-profit child care in Ontario. Both pieces of legislation will be debated this Spring.
Olivia Chow's Bill C303 has been working it way through the Federal Parliament in Ottawa.
I'm thrilled to report that Andrea Horwath, NDP Critic for Children and Youth in Ontario also sponsored legislation that would re-define an operator as a not-for-profit corporation.
Have a great holiday and rest up because we have a very exciting year ahead of us!
Andrea Calver
for all of us at the Ontario Coalition for Better Child Care
From Hansard - the official transcript of Queen's Park -
Ms. Andrea Horwath: This act is quite self-explanatory. The purpose of it is to restrict the expansion of child care in this province to the not-for-profit sector, as was advised to this government during the entire process of their consultations with child care providers and the Ontario Coalition for Better Child Care particularly, because it’s well documented that the not-for-profit sector provides a higher quality of child care at a lower rate. What we really want to see is good-quality child care being the priority of providers and not the shareholders of massive corporations.
Andrea Horwath's Press Release
LAW WOULD PREVENT BIG BOX, FOR-PROFIT DAY CARE FUNDING
Queen’s Park – NDP MPP Andrea Horwath is hoping to stop public funding from going to big box day care corporations and other new for-profit providers of child care in Ontario.
“To preserve the preferred model of accessible, affordable, regulated and universal quality child care for working families, we need to ensure that not-for-profit child care centres aren’t competing with profit-making operators for public subsidies,” Horwath said.
The Hamilton Centre MPP introduced a private members bill today which would disallow new big box and for-profit child care operations from qualifying for government funding.
The bill proposes to amend the Day Nurseries Act, effective January 1, 2008, to ensure that the only new child care centres eligible for public dollars are in the not-for-profit sector. Existing for-profit centres would not be affected by the change. But new private centres and big boxers like 123 Busy Beaver Learning Centres, an international conglomerate that recently registered as an Ontario business, “would never receive a cent of public money,” Horwath said.
“We know from all the credible studies that not-for-profit child care offers the highest quality and the best value. Naturally that’s where government investments should go, not to the profits of large commercial concerns. It’s well known that for-profit child care removes badly needed resources from the public, not-for-profit system.”
Horwath criticized the McGuinty Liberals for failing to do anything over the past four years to stop the rapid expansion of the for-profit centres.
“For-profit child care robs the not-for-profit cradle and that’s not the direction Ontario should be going,” Horwath said.