VANMAG.COM MAY 2017 83in Vancouver. “I went to visit my first home daycare
when I was 18 weeks pregnant,” says Reid, a 37-year-old
registered veterinary technician. “I pretty much Googled
any daycare that was close to me and added my name
to their list.”
That’s one of the tricks of expectant parents in
the know—there are some wait-lists you can get on
from the moment you have a doctor’s note confirming
the pregnancy. If you wait until you have your infant
physically in your arms before you start filling out forms,
like we did, you’re too late.
Early registry gives you only a slight edge, though. A
year and a half later, Reid has yet to get a single callback
from any of the wait-lists. “My daughter is almost 14
months old and to date I have heard nothing from any of
the daycares I contacted. Not even an email.”
But as much as finding a daycare spot in Vancouver
can feel like a Sisyphean task, paying for it is another
problem altogether.
A lot of the time, it’s mathematically impossible.
In addition to Vancouver’s dubious distinction as one
of the most expensive places to live in the country, it also
boasts some of the lowest salaries of any major Canadian
city. The disparity between what you earn and what child
care costs can be insurmountable. Statistics Canada
data from 2014 show the median family income in
Vancouver was $76,000—several thousand below much
of the rest of the country—while the Childcare Resource
and Research Unit found the median yearly cost of child
care for preschool-aged kids is $13,320. Compare that to
Edmonton, where the family income is $25,430 higher
and daycare costs are $4,368 lower, or Montreal, where
the median income of $75,000 easily covers subsidized
daycare fees of only $1,824 a year. That means Vancouver
families spend nearly 20 percent of their income on
child care, compared to eight per cent in Edmonton and
roughly two percent in Montreal.
And for a lot of families, even 20 percent is optimistic.
Those who can’t wait two or three years for a daycare spot
often pay double the going rate. Not surprisingly, the
shortest wait-lists are often found at the most expensive
centres, with some charging more than $2,000 a
month—with two months due up front.
A Gendered Problem
Ultimately, the lack of child care spaces in Vancouver
has a disproportionate effect on women. While we never
set out to be one of those families where, by default, the
woman ended up at home, economic circumstances led
us to fall back on this tired cliché. Our daughter was born
while my wife was in the middle of her grad project at
Emily Carr. Even though she’d been working multiple
jobs while a full-time student (and managed to win an
international design award on the side), she hadn’t
clocked enough hours to qualify for any sort of leave.
I took my paternity leave—nine months in total. We
thought that would be plenty of time to figure out the
next stage of life. But nine months and over 50 daycare
waitlists later, we weren’t any closer to finding child care
and my wife’s job prospects weren’t looking promising,
even with a shelf of awards.
When my paternity leave ran out, one of us had to
be earning money. I returned to my salaried job as a
technical director in the visual effects industry, while my
wife stayed home. When we finally got a call back from
a private daycare with fees that amounted to double our
rent, we started another countdown. This time, my wife
had to find a job that could cover the cost of daycare before
we ran out of money and had to pull our daughter out.
Three months later, there was no job and no more
money. We packed up for the Island.
Given this reality, it’s easy to see how so many women
end up at home. Even if you do have a job, your maternity
leave will probably run out before you find child care.
Years can pass before the stars align and you can return
to work. In the meantime, educated women are either
sidelined from the workforce or forced to get extremely
creative—and, either way, women are almost always the
ones tasked with figuring out the family balancing act.
For Diane Espiritu, keeping her career momentum
going in the face of motherhood requires her to coordinate
many moving parts.
Working out of her Chinatown studio, Espiritu has
made a name for herself as a ceramics designer and
consultant. When her daughter was born, she knew she’d
have to work with her infant literally by her side, and
that’s exactly what she did.
Espiritu baby-proofed her studio, devoting a corner
to a crib, change table and play area. When things got
too busy for her to keep one eye on her daughter, she
hired a friend to come help. Once, when working on a
particularly large contract, she flew in a cousin for aA lot of people were shocked last summer when a
City of Vancouver staff report found that more
than half of Vancouver’s families were thinking of
leaving the city in the next two years. Not us—we read
the news from our new home on Vancouver Island.