By Cheryl Jahn

Council wants to balance daycare taxes

Feb 29, 2024 | 2:59 PM

PRINCE GEORGE – Chronically, there is a shortage of daycare seats, and the Province recently made changes to make the transition easier.

“In the last couple of years, childcare has moved from under the mandate of the Ministry of Children, Family Development to the Ministry of Education and now the Ministry of Education and Childcare,” explains Councillor Tim Bennett, a former School District trustee. “And with part of that, there’s a real push to create kind of wraparound supports for families and moving to a seamless day model where more and more childcare centers are moving into school district facilities.”

So a daycare like the one attached to Lac de Bois School is tax-exempt. However, a standalone daycare is not.

“But we have this process called grant in lieu, which is the provincial government transfers the City almost equivalent to what the property tax on provincial buildings, such as schools were going to be,” says Bennett. “So the motion to the [North Central Local Government Association] is essentially to ask the provincial government to increase grants in lieu to cover what would be the property tax portion of childcare centers operating in schools.”

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Last year, the City exempted just over $2 million in taxes to various organizations such as churches and nonprofits, while adding daycares to that list impact the revenue coming into the City?

“The more child care centers that would move from kind of whether it’s community centers or other facilities in the city into schools that would impact the tax dollars in revenue that the that the city does collect.” On the flip side, he says if municipalities could collect taxes in lieu of that loss of revenue, the move to school-based child care would not impact the tax base.