Mandryk: Sask. government hurting kids by balking at $10 a child care

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Eleven-month-old Hadley Arnold was oblivious to the very grown-up political arguments over adequate child care swirling around her as she happily crawled around the carpeted floor of a room in the Saskatchewan legislature.

Whether she ever gets to one day hear or understand those arguments herself may depend on the child-care support she gets right now.

Hadley was born deaf. On Dec. 10, 2024 she had a cochlear implant operation at just eight months old.

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“Cochlear implants really do work, but it’s not (just) a matter of putting a device on her head,” her mother, Breanne Arnold, said in an interview Monday. “It’s 10 per cent that. It’s 90 per cent of the work you put in after.”

So Arnold has taken extended maternity leave from her teaching job to help give Hadley a better start in life. Their routine each day begins with waking up to do an hour of speech before playtime and nap and two or three hours of speech in the afternoon. It’s still not enough.

“It’s really important we have a quality child-care facility that’s going to work with us on this,” Arnold explained. “Prairie Lily (Early Learning Centre) is amazing for us. They’re learning sign language for us. Our speech therapist has been there and has taught them how to work with (Hadley). They’re really on board in her continued development …

“If we lose $10-a-day child care, I don’t know if we can afford Prairie Lily.”

It’s about here where the grown-up politicians running the building — seemingly, now caught up in their childish political games of whether or not to sign on to a 2031 extension of the learning and child-care agreement that will be a campaign centrepiece for the Liberals in the upcoming election — themselves seem oblivious to the real-life harm these political games cause.

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The costs of raising a special-needs child are onerous.

While the health system pays for an added once-a-month speech therapy session, “ideally, you’re supposed to go once a week,” Arnold said. Further, the Arnold family must go to Saskatoon every two weeks for audiology and speech, which means an overnight stay.

Also, while Saskatchewan Health Authority pays for the first cochlear device, it doesn’t pay the $30 or $40 caps attached to the baby’s head that have to be replaced every couple of months or the batteries or the $10 pouch that has to be placed over the device every time Hadley goes swimming.

Arnold was one of several parents and child-care workers who spoke at the NDP-organized event Monday, all offering compelling reasons why the provincial government needs to sign on.

“In a world that was already so expensive, we were really crunching the numbers as to how we were going to afford child care as well as everything else,” she told reporters. “Bills were already adding up. At the time, almost all of my disposable income would have went to child-care costs, leaving us with no financial wiggle room. This was scary, to say the least.”

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Saskatchewan and Alberta are the only provinces not to agree to sign on to the extension, noted NDP MLA Joan Pratchler.

“There’s so much at stake right now if we don’t get it signed,” Pratchler said, noting the potential effect on the economy when parents working on farms or in potash mines or hospitals can’t go to work. “Centres like Prairie Lily and others will have to close … This is a provincial powder keg and I hear it ticking.”

It certainly isn’t just parents of a special-needs child like Breanne Arnold now being affected by the province’s ongoing unwillingness to work co-operatively with the Liberal government on this program. (In 2023, the Sask. Party government demonstrated a similar unwillingness to sign on, before pressure from child-care groups forced them to do so.)

And now, in a time of massive uncertainty, the government is giving parents even more reason for angst.

Instead, they need to be thinking about the children they may be hurting. Children like Hadley.

Mandryk is the political columnist for the Regina Leader-Post and the Saskatoon StarPhoenix.

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