Vancouver Living Wage Improves, but Child Care Still a Huge Strain

In North America's most unaffordable city, Vancouver teacher Sara Langlois now spends more on child care for her 15-month-old daughter than she and her architect partner do on rent.

"Day care is our biggest expense monthly," the 32-year-old says. "I think people would expect us to be able to afford life basics, but in Vancouver that's actually difficult."

The East Vancouver family spends $1,453 on day care a month, totalling more than $17,000 a year, so they can both work.

Mississippi Refuses To Use Money That Would Give Poor Families Child Care

Christi Foster grew up in Georgia. While the state doesn’t spend a lot on its safety net for the poor, she says that enrolling in benefits wasn’t too complicated. “You go and apply for something and you find out that day or within a week’s time,” she said.

But since the single mother of three children moved to Mississippi, things have been a whole lot different. “Everything down here is so hard,” she said. “Daycare assistance, with Mississippi, it’s hard to get in… it’s always a waiting list.”

Lawsuit calls for end to claw-back of child support

Ottawa father Anupam Kakkar says he is happy to pay child support for his two children, ages 12 and 10.

But because the children’s mother lives on social assistance, none of Kakkar’s $645 monthly payments go to the kids.

That is because under provincial legislation, child support payments to single parents on Ontario Works (OW) and the Ontario Disability Support Program (ODSP) are clawed back by the government to compensate taxpayers.

Harper wants your vote badly enough to bribe you for it – with your own money

The Universal Child Care Benefit (UCCB) couldn’t be a more blatantly political ploy if the Prime Minister was driving down Main Street tossing hundred-dollar bills out of the official government limousine.

(The heavily armoured Cadillac, by the way, was recently shipped to India for $1.3 million of taxpayers’ money because Stephen Harper refused to trust Indian security forces.)

With Pre-election Child Benefit Blitz, Harper Defies Own Thesis

In 1991, Stephen Harper wrote a graduate thesis for the University of Calgary detailing how the holders of government purse strings were liable to use their power to budget for their own interests, rather than those of the public, often as elections approached.

Harper's economics thesis addressed the political business cycle, a concept related to how governments spend money to boost their popularity.

Tory, Suburban Ridings To Gain Most From Enriched Child Benefits: CP Analysis

OTTAWA - Most of what is billed as the largest, one-time benefit payment in federal history is likely to hit suburban voters living in federal ridings where the Conservatives can be considered the party to beat, an analysis by The Canadian Press shows.

Number-crunching based on the last census shows that many of the ridings in line to get the biggest cheques from the newly increased Universal Child Care Benefit are in suburban Alberta and the all-important ridings that surround Toronto — and they usually have a history of tilting Tory.

Harper's Claim About NDP, Liberals Vowing To Scrap Child Care Benefit 'Full Of Baloney'

OTTAWA - "Friends, our opponents have been clear. They would take away the Universal Child Care Benefit. They've said so on many occasions." — Prime Minister Stephen Harper in a speech Sunday prior to the resumption of the House of Commons.

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With the House of Commons returning this week from a five-week break, Prime Minister Stephen Harper set the stage for the 2015 federal election year with a speech to hundreds of supporters Sunday at a suburban Ottawa high school.

Canadians deserve a universal early childhood education and childcare system

Last week hundreds of educators, academics and activists gathered in Winnipeg for the fourth national childcare conference. They are united by a vision of a universal early childhood education and childcare system in Canada. Here in Manitoba, we have made steady progress toward this goal. A strong federal partner at the table would take things to the next level.

Food Banks Canada Sides With NDP On Child Care Debate

OTTAWA - Canadian food banks are wading into the hot political debate over how best the federal government can help families with kids: give them tax breaks, as the Conservatives are doing, or invest in regulated child care, as the NDP proposes.

In its annual HungerCount report, Food Banks Canada comes down squarely on the side of the NDP.

It says the use of food banks remains 25 per cent higher than it was before the devastating global recession in 2008 and that 37 per cent of those helped are children.

Two child care plans — one for the rich, one for the rest

All of a sudden, it looks like the battle lines in the coming federal election may be less over whether to send our warplanes to Iraq and more over whether to send our children to day care.

With their announcement this week of plans for a national child care program, the NDP has not only proposed the beginnings of a solution to a gaping social need in Canada, it also has carved out territory where its contrast with the Harper Conservatives could not be starker.

Here’s What Happened The One Time When The U.S. Had Universal Childcare

Nothing before or since has been like the Lanham Act, though you probably haven’t heard of it. It wasn’t even legislation that was supposed to have anything to do with child care. It was a bill to fund infrastructure projects that were needed for the war effort in 1940. But without so much as a Congressional debate or vote, the language was reinterpreted so that funding for child care centers could be funneled through it. And thus between 1943 and 1946, the country had its first, and only, universal child care program.

In BC, a Hellish Hunt for Childcare

"Sorry, we don't have any available spaces for your son."

It was a message Kristina Kernohan and Alexis Morgan heard over and over. They knew it wouldn't be easy to find childcare for their son, Bevyn, but they hadn't imagined what a nightmare it would turn out to be.

When Kernohan started searching in November 2012, Bevyn was five months old and she had 10 months left before she had to return to her job as an on-call teacher. School holidays meant three months extra maternity leave for Kernohan.

Look in the mirror: Just substitute 'Canadian' for 'American child-care hell'

An article in the April 29 issue of The New Republic has generated considerable interest in U.S. child care as its content and perspective have been picked up and extended in social media, other magazines, U.S. TV, radio and daily newspapers and even in offshore news media. The hell of American daycare: the barely regulated, unsafe business of looking after our children describes a case of a fire in a family child-care home caring for seven very young children. The case -- prominent in the media for some time -- involved an untrained 23-year-old caregiver/owner who had left the kids alone to go shop at Target, a practice that --  testimony at the trial asserted -- was not new. An oil-filled pot left cooking on the stove caught fire and four children died. Eventually the caregiver who -- it became clear -- had a criminal record -- was sentenced to 80 years in prison.

Think child care is no longer a women's issue?

On this International Women's Day, think again...

Here are ten indications that Canada's lack of action on universal child care continues to have a profound impact on women in all regions of Canada -- across the life span, across diverse groups and across the economic spectrum:

1. If "child care is the ramp that provides equal access to the workforce for mothers"*, Canadian women are on a slippery slope. Although the majority of women with children are in the paid labour force in Canada (about 75 per cent of mothers of three year olds), access to child care is limited and more-or-less static. There are child care spaces to cover less than 20 per cent of 0-12 year olds and for families with infants, toddlers, children with disabilities, in rural and Aboriginal communities, it is even less available.

Why universal childcare is essential for a more equal Canada

If anything positive has emerged from Canada's growing inequality, it is that a conversation about "the Canada we want" has begun, as pundits and ordinary Canadians have begun to make the connections between health and wealth, public services and social justice, economics and democracy, taxes, inequality and social programs. Over the past year, public forums, blogs, conferences, and the media have explored these issues that came to full public attention when the Occupy Movement shone a spotlight on inequality. As this debate has gained strength, the idea that a national childcare program is a key piece of a more equal Canada has become part of the discourse.

Canada lags on fighting child poverty, report finds

Canada falls below most of its international peers when it comes to fighting child poverty, says a new report by the United Nations Children’s Fund being released Tuesday.

With a child poverty rate of 13.3 per cent, Canada ranks 24th out of 35 industrialized nations, behind the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand and most of northern Europe, says the UNICEF report.

Overall, the Netherlands and Nordic countries have the lowest rates of child poverty, hovering at about 7 per cent, almost half Canada’s rate. Meantime, the United States and some of the southern European countries have the highest. (Iceland has the lowest child poverty rate at 4.7 per cent and Romania has the highest at 25.5 per cent. The U.S. rate is 23 per cent.)

When it comes to the size of the gap between child poverty and a nation’s overall poverty rate, Canada fares somewhat better at 18 out of 35, the report notes.

Child Care Program Cuts Leave Working Poor Parents Struggling

SANTA ROSA, Calif. -- Every time she pulls away from her parent's house, leaving behind her 3-year-old daughter, Angelina, as she heads to work at a local hospital, Jenny Abundis wonders what will happen while she is gone.

She worries things will not go well.

Her father has cancer, which saps his energy and requires a regimen of shots that puts him in ill temper. Her stepmother suffers debilitating liver problems. Often depressed and ceaselessly overwhelmed, they must divide their attentions between Abundis' daughter and her sister's two little children, whose volatile natures reflect early years in a home beset by drugs and violence.

But even as nervousness gnaws at her, and even as she notices disturbing changes in her daughter -- curse words emerging in her limited vocabulary, a clinginess that was not there before -- Abundis says she has no choice but to leave Angelina in this arrangement.

Though Abundis' income qualifies her for subsidized child care, Angelina is among roughly 200,000 eligible California children who are stuck on a waitlist. For many families in the queue, the wait is effectively interminable, a veritable purgatory without end, the result of the aggressive state budget cutting that has defined the aftermath of the Great Recession.

Paperless Child Support Payments May Cost Poor Fathers Only Source Of Income

WASHINGTON -- Old child support debts could cost thousands of poor men their only income next year because of a policy aimed at reducing the cost to the government of mailing paper checks to pay federal benefits.

The Treasury Department will start paying benefits electronically next March. It will stop issuing the paper checks that many people rely on to safeguard a portion of their benefits from states trying to collect back child support.

States can freeze the bank accounts of people who owe child support. A separate Treasury Department rule, in place since last May in a preliminary form, guarantees them the power to freeze Social Security, disability and veterans' benefits that have been deposited into those accounts.

Once paper checks are eliminated, about 275,000 people could lose access to all of their income, advocates say.

"It's kind of Orwellian, what's being set up here for a segment of the population," says Johnson Tyler, an attorney who represents poor and disabled people collecting federal benefits. "It's going to be a nightmare in about a year unless something changes."

In many cases, the bills are decades old and the children long grown. Much of the money owed is interest and fees that add up when men are unable to pay because they are disabled, institutionalized or imprisoned.

Most of the money will go to governments, not to the children of the men with child support debts, independent analyses show. States are allowed to keep child support money as repayment for welfare previously provided for those children.

In some instances, the grown children are supporting their fathers.

The rule change illustrates how a politically desirable goal like cracking down on so-called deadbeat dads can have complicated, even counterproductive, effects in practice.

"The rule doesn't look at the fact that the money is mostly interest, the money is going to the state, the kids are usually adults, and it's leaving the payer with nothing," says Ashlee Highland, a legal aid attorney who works with the poor of Chicago.

Highland says her office has clients in eviction, in foreclosure and unable to pay their bills because of states' aggressive efforts to collect back child support.

Marcial Herrera, 44, has had his bank account frozen repeatedly since 2009, blocking his access to $800 a month in government benefits. Unable to work because of a severe back injury he suffered in 2000, Herrera fell behind on child support. He owes more than $7,000 – not to his 22-year-old son, but to the state of New York, because his son received welfare years earlier.

Herrera sought help in court and had his son speak on his behalf, but the judge could not erase the thousands he already owed.

"I'm just waiting for them to lock me up," he says. "I don't see no other way of me repaying that debt."

A legal aid attorney suggested Herrera collect his benefits by paper check. It costs him $15 to cash the check each month, but at least he can be sure that he will have money to pay his bills.

States have had the ability to freeze accounts for years. That's why people like Herrera rely on paper checks to safeguard part of their income.

Starting next March, that option will disappear. The Treasury Department will deposit federal benefits directly into bank accounts or load them onto prepaid debit cards. Either way, state child support agencies will be able to seize all of it.

Electronic payments are expected to save the government $1 billion over the next 10 years, the Treasury Department says. It costs the government about $1 to mail a check, compared with about 10 cents for an electronic transfer.

The Treasury Department understands that forcing people into direct deposit could deprive them of all of their income, say officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the rule-writing process.

States can garnish only 65 percent of benefits before the federal government sends them out. But the limit does not apply once the money is in an account and states ask banks to freeze it, according to a Treasury Department memo obtained by The Associated Press.

A Treasury spokesman declined to discuss the policy. The officials who spoke on condition of anonymity say they believe the policy is legally unavoidable. They described a dilemma: Restrain states trying to collect child-support debts or risk depriving thousands of people of their only income.

Treasury's legal justification assumes that receiving a paper check is still an option, says Tyler, the Brooklyn attorney.

Letting state agencies seize the money contradicts the public stance of the Department of Health and Human Services, the federal agency in charge of child support collections. The department does not want states to collect child support so aggressively that poor people lose their only income, spokesman Ken Wolfe says.

"Child support enforcement – getting that money and passing it on to parents and children – is a measure to fight poverty, and it doesn't make sense to accomplish that by impoverishing somebody else," he says.

Wolfe said HHS is developing guidelines for states to "make sure we're not putting someone into deep poverty as a result of an automatic collection." He declined to provide details of those plans.

Lawyers from HHS agreed with Treasury's decision to let states seize benefits, according to the Treasury memo.

An early version of the Treasury department rule protected people from having their federal benefits frozen by debt collectors – including private collection agencies and states seeking back child support.

State child support agencies replied in public comments on the proposed rule that blocking their access to people's benefits would cause great harm to parents and children receiving child support.

HHS research suggests the policy could deepen the hardship for people who collect benefits as well.

People who owe large amounts of child support are almost universally poor. Among those owing $30,000 or more, three-fourths had no reported income or income of less than $10,000, HHS says. Many had their earnings interrupted by disability or jail time and are unlikely to repay the child support debt, the government-sponsored research says.

The usual methods of collecting back child support often don't work with the poor. States typically start by garnishing wages. If that doesn't work, they can suspend driver's licenses, revoke passports and take away professional credentials.

Those measures have little effect on poor people without jobs who rely on federal benefits. They have no wages to garnish and no passports. Many can't afford a car and do not need a driver's license.

State child support agencies echo the HHS view that child support enforcement should not be so draconian that people end up with nothing.

"You don't want the noncustodial parent to go out and be living on the streets. You're not going to collect anything at that point," says Tom Shanahan, spokesman for the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare.

The Idaho department requires people who owe child support to show good faith by paying a minimum amount and seeking jobs when they are out of work, Shanahan says.

The White House is reviewing the final version of the rule. Its impact so far has been limited, legal-aid lawyers say, because people can still use paper checks. A White House spokeswoman did not respond a request for comment.

In a letter sent last week, the National Consumer Law Center and dozens of other groups called on the head of the Social Security Administration to withdraw his support for the rule.

"While both current and past due child support orders should be paid," the letter said, it should not result "in the complete impoverishment of recipients" of federal benefits.

The issue has failed to raise alarm in part because most people feel little in common with men labeled deadbeat dads, says John Vail, an attorney with the Center for Constitutional Litigation who provided legal services for the poor for decades.

"There's not a lot of sympathy for deadbeat dads, and justly so," Vail says. "But everybody's got limits, and I think people who have never walked a mile in some of those old, worn-out shoes are a little quick to rush to judgment about what that life might be like."

Original Article
Source: Huff
Author: DANIEL WAGNER 

Ontario’s focus on all-day kindergarten ignores looming child-care crisis

The only program the McGuinty government ruled out cutting among the dozens targeted in last week’s Drummond report was full-day kindergarten.

Since he made it a cornerstone of his 2007 re-election campaign, Premier Dalton McGuinty has trumpeted the $1.5 billion initiative as the most important development in public education in a generation.

But as school boards across the province begin kindergarten registration for next fall — when half of Ontario’s 4- and 5-year-olds will be offered the full-day program — many parents and child development experts are begging the question:

What about the 0- to 3-year-olds?

Once touted as the most important developmental years in a child’s life, Queen’s Park seems to have completely forgotten them.

There has been virtually no provincial money to ease the mass exodus of kindergarteners from Ontario’s chronically underfunded daycare system. And now many centres are teetering on the edge of collapse.

What’s worse, the education ministry, which was handed the daycare file in 2010, has no long-term vision or plan for early childhood education and care in Ontario.

Government faces Aboriginal challenge

Sweet-smelling smoke from a smudging ceremony filled an Ottawa courtroom Monday as a controversial case began that could open the door for First Nations residents to argue they are being discriminated against en masse by the federal government.

With the ceremony aside, the legal wrangling began.

Facts that could prove the federal government is discriminating against aboriginal children by underfunding child-welfare services on reserves need to be heard in court, said lawyers for the Canadian Human Rights Commission.

The commission is one of several groups appealing a 2011 ruling by the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal - which the commission oversees. In that ruling, the tribunal dismissed a discrimination case brought by the Assembly of First Nations and the First Nations Child and Family Caring Society of Canada.

The complaint argued the underfunding of child-welfare services on reserves leads to poverty, poor housing, substance abuse and a vast overrepresentation of aboriginal children in state care.

However, the federal government argues that because it sends funds to band managers - who administer the services - the government cannot be held responsible for the services delivered.

The government also says the question is invalid because it funds services on reserves, while provincial governments are responsible for services to the rest of Canadians, and that comparing two governments is both "unreasonable" and nonsensical.

The "comparator" argument was used in the Human Rights Tribunal's initial decision to dismiss the case in 2011 before any of the main evidence had been heard.

But First Nations Child and Family Caring Society lawyer Nicholas McHaffie told the court that comparing services to another group is only one "evidentiary tool."