Minister apologizes for NWT childcare provider funding delay

An NWT minister issued a public apology on Friday after the territory’s licensed childcare providers were left waiting for promised funding to appear in their bank accounts.

Funds set to be transferred at the start of the fiscal year, April 1, didn’t reach some providers until April 3 or later, an industry representative said this week.

Patricia Davison, of the NWT Early Childhood Association, said the territorial government’s failure to accurately communicate when the money would arrive had jeopardized some providers’ financial stability and damaged relations.

Cabin Talks podcast: Why NWT childcare providers are anxious

“The department’s trying really hard, but the way it’s being communicated is causing people to not trust them and creating anxiety,” Davison said.

Operators depend on prompt arrival of funds to pay bills and buy supplies for their programs, she added, “so even a couple of days” can cause significant cashflow problems.

Education minister Caitlin Cleveland issued an apology to providers, telling Cabin Radio: “I’m very sorry for how the week went.”

“The buck stops with me. I want to start off by offering a very heartfelt apology to providers, because in the territory we are very reliant on them,” the minister said.

Monday, April 1 was not a business day as it formed part of the Easter holiday. As a result, Cleveland said, payments went out on April 2, but some transfers were delayed as they passed through banking systems before reaching providers.

“It’s incredibly frustrating that that’s how it went down,” she said, promising she would work to ensure no such delay occurs in future.

“People are waiting on paycheques to pay mortgages, to pay insurance, to pay for vehicle payments that they use to take care of our children and to take care of their own families,” the minister said.

“They rely on the certainty of getting paid when they expect to get paid, because they set up their whole lives around that to make sure they’re paying people on time as well.

“I’m working with the department to make sure this doesn’t happen again.”

‘They didn’t have to rush it’

Childcare providers in the NWT are operating on shifting ground.

Year after year, the bones of the industry are changing to keep pace with a federally mandated push toward $10-a-day childcare.

That effort to drive down fees is welcomed by many families who struggle to meet the northern cost of living, but it comes with significant changes under the hood that providers must understand and accommodate.

For example, charging lower fees to families means an increased reliance on millions of dollars in government subsidies to make those fees economically viable for providers. When government payments don’t arrive on time, the system can break down.

Meanwhile, other changes like wage grids are being introduced to try to ensure people are fairly and consistently paid across the industry, even as fees come down. Operators will soon have to fill out reports that document how their staff fit within the new wage grids, but Davison told Cabin Radio nobody has yet seen any of the relevant forms to know how that will work.

She says that’s one example of an upheaval that’s happening too quickly and is all too easily derailed.

“They didn’t have to rush it,” Davison said.

“The GNWT is trying to create something the federal government has promised, and I don’t think they have enough tools and resources to do that in a timely, non-anxiety-creating manner.”

“The speed at which we’re going? It absolutely is part of the problem,” Cleveland acknowledged.

“We’re making huge, drastic changes to an entire sector in a very short time period, right off the bat. If you look at lessons learned from other parts of the country, one of the things that is often said is: ‘Work on your capacity first, work on paying people, work on increasing spaces first.’ And that wasn’t an option.”

Referring to the federal agreement – originally worth $51 million to the NWT between 2021 and 2026 – Cleveland said: “The direction right off the bat, as part of the agreement, was getting dollars into families’ pockets. And so it’s this balance of making sure we’re making childcare affordable, but that we’re supporting the sector as we’re doing it.

“It is a tall order in the Northwest Territories to try to do everything at the same time … and so there are certainly growing pains.”

Cleveland said she will focus on “keeping lines of communication open” with providers, thanking them for feedback received about the past week’s funding delay.

At the same time, having watched her department become the subject of memes about the delay, Cleveland defended the departmental coordinators implementing the changes.

“They themselves are parents and want to see this sector flourish,” she said.

“We live in a unique part of the world where we all see one another at the grocery store, we all see one another on street corners. It’s important that we can work together to make this work, especially if we’re going to create a sustainable sector and grow these spaces together.”