The critical need to succeed

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This article was published 19/07/2024 (764 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Saying the right thing at the right time can create, for those doing the listening, a sense of comfort and confidence. It can quiet doubts, allay fears and instill a belief that those encouraging words will soon be followed by meaningful actions.

But in politics, as in life, there often exists a seemingly unbridgeable gap between words and deeds.

On the subject of Manitoba’s child-care sector, NDP Minister of Early Childhood Learning Nello Altomare is certainly saying the right things: waiting lists are too long and facilities are too few, daycare centres are understaffed, workers in the field are underpaid and the province must take decisive action to address the shortfalls and improve the system.

In a recent interview in response to a six-part Free Press investigative series that appeared last month, Altomare conceded child care in Manitoba is not meeting the public’s considerable needs. But he expressed belief the still-new NDP government understands what needs to be done and is committed to taking steps — both immediate and longer-term — to make it easier for families to access care that has, for too long, remained difficult to secure.

“We’ve got work to do,” the minister said, “so let’s get to work. That’s why we were elected.”

To say the task at hand is daunting — a term Altomare himself employed during the Free Press interview — is an understatement of epic proportions. More than a dozen daycare directors were interviewed for the series; all reported waiting lists for infant and preschool care spaces that exceed 100 families. Most reported lists longer than 300, and some said as many as 700 families are in the queue to claim a space when (and if) one becomes available while their youngsters are of daycare-attendance age.

The province has pledged to create 23,000 new spaces by the spring of 2026 — a promise made by the previous Progressive Conservative government and subsequently adopted by the NDP when it was elected last October — but as of March had added just 2,700 new spaces for children under six years of age.

Altomare offered an ambitious commitment that the government will have created more than 10,000 additional spaces by next spring — 5,800 for the 0-6 age bracket and 4,400 for school-aged children — but even if that lofty goal were to be met, the attained number would fall far short of the 23,000-space pledge.

A major contributor to the paucity of spaces, of course, is the shortage of trained workers to staff the facilities saddled with the aforementioned waiting lists. According to the Free Press series, at the current pace of graduating 140 new trained early-childhood educators annually, it would take 18 years for Manitoba to produce enough new workers to fill the projected need.

Altomare’s message to those in the child-care sector waiting for long-overdue solutions — ones which, by the way, have been serially promised by previous governments but never effectively realized — is that with him in the ministerial chair, “you now have a partner. … I have extensive experience working with child-care centres. I also think I’m pretty good at the cabinet table, at really advocating for the sector.”

While the minister’s confidence is encouraging, his comments echo the pledges of his predecessors, who despite their best intentions were unsuccessful at traversing the chasm between words and deeds.

Families confounded by the futile pursuit of child care might share the view of wartime British prime minister Winston Churchill, whose towering oratory uplifted a nation: “It is no use saying, ‘We are doing our best.’ You have got to succeed in doing what is necessary.”