Eby Criticized for Taking a Spot in Limited $10-a-Day Childcare

The British Columbia government has stalled on a promise to provide licensed child care for $10 a day, but one family that did secure a space at that low rate was Premier David Eby’s.

Eby was asked if his family’s child care was covered by the program by a Global TV reporter at a town hall event about health care Monday in Delta.

Eby said the centre they use “is one of our partners in $10-a-day.”

The BC NDP campaigned in past elections on providing high-quality child care for $10 a day, but has created a limited number of spaces at that rate.

According to the $10aDay Child Care campaign, only about 10 per cent of licensed spaces in the province are available for that rate.

The campaign credits the government with creating 60,000 new spaces and reducing fees by 50 per cent on average, but notes that B.C. still has the highest child-care fees in Canada because it has failed to implement a provincewide system of low capped fees.

The B.C. Conservatives jumped on Eby’s admission, putting out a press release noting that Eby earns over $227,000 a year as premier and his wife is a doctor who would also make a good salary.

“It’s shocking to learn that while hundreds of thousands of British Columbians are struggling with the most expensive child care in the country, David Eby’s family landed a plum $10-a-day child care spot,” the release quoted the party’s candidate in Vancouver-Yaletown, Margareta Dovgal.

“Nobody begrudges David Eby and his wife for their success,” she said. “What families will not accept is a premier who promised them $10-a-day child care, failed to deliver it, and then took one of the scarce spots for himself while a single mom working two jobs sits on a waitlist.”

Access to the program is not income tested and is based on each location’s licensed capacity and waitlist.

Asked about the optics of his family using a program that few families can access and his government has stopped expanding, Eby said “I think it’s absolutely crucial that every British Columbian get access to affordable child care and we are committed to expanding child care.”

The NDP government is moving towards using schools to deliver care affordably, he said before suggesting a Conservative government would decimate child care.

Speaking to reporters today, Eby said that when the child care provider his family is using became a $10-a-day facility, he and his spouse decided to make a donation to it.

“We decided to donate the difference to our child-care provider so that other families could benefit,” Eby said. “We made that decision because we didn’t feel we needed that benefit. We wanted other families to benefit.”

He did not specify the amount of the donation and failed to respond directly to questions about whether the donation was a tax deduction.

Eby said he recognized that it’s unfair that some families get child care for free while others pay full price for private care and said it’s a priority to make sure every British Columbian has access to affordable child care. The federal government has committed to working with the province to provide it, he said.

Sharon Gregson, the spokesperson for the Coalition of Child Care Advocates, said in an interview on CKNW radio that fees for child care should not depend on a family’s income and that it should be available to everyone who needs it and funded through the tax system.

“I want Premier Eby’s family to benefit from $10-a-day,” Gregson said. “But I expect that at the same time, he will be advocating for all families, the other 90 per cent of child-care spaces, to also be $10-a-day. Not saying that the program is on pause and just the lucky lottery winners get $10-a-day while everybody pays up to $100-a-day. That’s simply not good enough.”

The B.C. Conservatives have yet to release a child care platform, though leader Lorne Doerkson has been quoted saying the party would build on the existing system and that “I’m certainly in favour of helping support our British Columbians.”

The BC Green Party has promised to lift the freeze on $10-a-day child-care spaces and provide universal free child care by 2031.