[URBAN NOTE] "Push to stop Toronto operation of daycares criticized"

[rfmcdonald]

Toronto city councillor Giorgio Mammoliti, at this point probably Rob Ford's most important ally and having gone on the record as wanting to create a red-light district on the Toronto Islands, trying to defund Pride Toronto for allowing the presence of even the individual members of Queers Against Israeli Apartheid (not the group itself), warning of an extensive Communist presence on Toronto City Council, and favouring the creation of casinos in the city of Toronto so as to give single mothers employment (and childcare opportunities?), has just proposed transferring the few city-run daycares over to the province. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the people who served with him on the relevant city government committee disagree with him on grounds both practical and ideological.

Councillors who sit on a committee that governs daycare are criticizing Coun. Giorgio Mammoliti's recommendation to pull the City of Toronto out of the business of running child-care centres altogether.

Mammoliti, who was appointed by the mayor to chair a special task force on child care in the city, recommended Thursday that the city ask the provincial ministry of education to take over the operation of the 53 Toronto-run child care centres.

"In turn, operations and system management will be operated by the school board system in partnership with all current operators, both not-for-profit and commercial," he said at a news conference on Thursday.

There are more than 920 child-care centres that the school board would have to manage under Mammoliti's recommendation.

[. . .]

Coun. Kristyn Wong-Tam, who who also sits on the committee, does not agree with Mammoliti's recommendation.

"We know that our daycare programs are oversubscribed. Everybody wants to get into a city funded, city-run daycare program," said Wong-Tam.

"And I think it will be very, very difficult for the province to deliver daycare services to all the individual municipalities and townships. It's just not possible."

[Coun. Janet] Davis was similarly dismissive.

"First of all, it won't fly," she said. "Secondly, the City of Toronto has a great child-care system. We are highly respected across the country. It is one of the best run, cost-effective systems that we have."

She believes the city should retain control of its child-care centres, but agrees funding from senior governments is inadequate.

"What we need are more resources from the provincial government to solve what is an ongoing and chronic underfunding of child care in Toronto."