When my youngest son was only five months old, I started looking for a day-care spot for him in Winnipeg. I soon realized - after being told I was 50th, 60th or even 120th on various waiting lists - that I should have started the search long before little Tate was even born.

"You'd be surprised at how many people go on waiting lists when they're pregnant," says Karen Ohlson, director of K.I.D.S. Inc., a community-based non-profit child-care centre in Winnipeg's River Heights neighbourhood.

"Our waiting list is 500-plus names long and growing every day. We have families every day saying, 'You said it would be a year,' 'You said it would it be two years,' and now it looks like it will be three years and they're very frustrated and you really can't blame them."

Frustrations over Canada's day-care crunch peaked earlier this year when parents, angry about the long wait, started harassing staff members at Ohlson's centre.

Photo courtesy of L’Oréal Paris
Cosmetic company L'Oréal Paris has stepped up to the plate for its employees with an onsite day care at its plant near Montreal.

"People were being yelled at in front of the children and it was a really difficult situation," she says.

"As shocking as it was, though, it really illustrated how desperate parents are for day care."

While there are no national numbers on how many families are crying out for care, long waiting lists are a reality in cities all across Canada.

In B.C., which is one of the worst provinces for finding licensed day care, the province's capital city has only 404 spots for children under 30 months of age, according to a report last year by the Partnership in Learning and Advocacy for Young Children.

In total, the federally funded report found that there are only 5,377 regulated spots in Victoria at any given time for the 17,500 kids under five that, based on 2006 census numbers, live in the capital region.

"Parents are sleeping overnight in school gyms to line up for (after-school) spots and it's even worse for pre-school and infant spaces," says Victoria child-care advocate and mother of two Michelle Kirby.

"Society has changed. Moms don't stay home - 75 per cent of moms with kids under six now work - so there's a huge shortfall and it's only getting worse."

The child-care crunch hit home for Kirby a couple years ago when, as a stay-at-home mom, she received four calls in one month from friends desperate for day care.

"I had friends and even acquaintances asking me to look after their kids because they had to go back to work and they couldn't find care," Kirby explains.

"The shortage of care is a huge problem not just for parents, but for employers because people either have to quit their jobs - which some of my friends have done - or put their kids in places where I don't feel they're being adequately cared for. The parents sadly keep their kids in those situations because they don't have an alternative and then they worry all day at work and are distracted, so how much does that cost the economy if parents can't concentrate?" Whether it's more productive employees or for an edge in the increasingly competitive arena of staff recruitment, some forward-thinking organizations are finding that providing day care makes good business sense. More than just a perk, onsite child care can be a huge advantage in a tight labour market.

"If people are struggling to find day care, they have to make some tough decisions and if you want to keep them in the workplace they have to have care for their children, so it's a definite advantage, both from a recruitment perspective and a retention perspective, to provide care as an employer," says University of Calgary associate vice-president of human resources Sandy Repic.

"You have to take whatever advantage you can to attract more good people to your organization and, as a university, we have a keen interest in not only appropriate care, but also leading by example," Repic adds.

The U of C, which has had an onsite day care for several years, started offering a guaranteed day-care spot to all staff and students this year through Kids & Company, a Markham, Ont.-based service that provides child-care services for employers.

"We just built a new child-development centre that doubled our day-care capacity, but even with that the wait list was very long - so long that people actually stopped putting their names on it," explains Repic.

"Now everyone is guaranteed a placement. It's not guaranteed onsite or close to home, but they'll work with you to try and find that if they can."

With more parents of young children working than ever before - and still more skilled workers needed - business is booming for Kids & Company, whose client list also includes Royal Bank and Deloitte and Touche.

"We've really seen a huge take-up on our services because businesses are seeing that they need to step up to the plate and help their employees," says Kids & Company president and CEO Victoria Sopik, who has eight children of her own. "Without child care, we don't have a workforce."

With no national child-care plan - something all experts and advocates agree is long overdue - the day-care dilemma is falling to provincial governments. While some provinces are making progress, none compare to Quebec.

La belle province's heavily subsidized child care is not only accessible, but affordable at only $7 a day or about $140 per month. Compare that to the $600 to $1,600 per child, on average, that parents pay in the rest of Canada and it's easy to understand why the Quebec model is being held up as an example for the rest of the country.

"We definitely have a much more generous policy here in Quebec and we've decided to take advantage of that and work with the government," says Caroline Morin, director of compensation and benefits for L'Oréal Paris.

The cosmetics giant started onsite day care at its manufacturing and distribution centre near Montreal in 2002. Feedback has been extremely positive, but not just from parents.

"Of course we want to be an employer of choice - that's the reason L'Oréal wants to offer everything to employees that we can as benefits, and a place where employees can bring their children is very useful for people, but even people who don't have kids think it's great that L'Oréal is open-minded and supportive of employees having children."

Parents are also starting to see that kind of business and government support in booming Alberta, where child care is now a top priority - out of necessity if nothing else.

"The province is really doing a lot to deal with it and I think the culture of the business community in Calgary, where there is a big labour shortage, is very supportive of young families and the business community realizes it needs to do this to have enough competent workers," says Sopik.

With plans to open 10 more centres in the next 12 months, including ones in Vancouver and Edmonton, Kids & Company is hoping to at least lessen the day-care crunch. In B.C., the government is looking at full-day kindergarten for kids aged three to five and Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba are all increasing wages to help recruit and retain day-care workers.

While it's a start, insiders say it will take a lot more - and a lot more businesses stepping up - to address such a widespread care crisis.

"So much of this problem's invisible - some centres aren't even taking kids on their waiting lists anymore because they don't want to upset people; others have stopped waiting lists altogether," Ohlson says.

"There are also a lot of parents on waiting lists for a very long time who just give up and don't go back to work or school because they can't find day care."

As for Tate, he never did make it to the top of the waiting lists in Winnipeg. Fearing the worst when we moved to Victoria this summer, I started calling day-care providers months before the move and lucked out when Athene, who doesn't take a waiting list for her coveted home day-care spots, took pity on me trying to find care from three provinces away and made an exception.

Tate got in - and I could keep working.

(Tess van Straaten can be reached at tess@businessedge.ca)