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Daycare's closure a sign of the times

The closure of the Kaatza Child Care and Early Learning Centre is one of many symptoms of our diseased provincial system.

The closure of the Kaatza Child Care and Early Learning Centre is one of many symptoms of our diseased provincial system.

Having its citizens employed isn’t terribly important to the provincial government. How else could one explain the altering of the income threshold for those eligible for child care subsidies, bumping it down from $33,300 to $21,480. The government must know how much child care programs cost parents, and that by bumping the threshold down they’d insure that many single parents will be unable to afford child care, and will therefore have to leave their jobs.

Those that have jobs, that is.

This area is well set in its path to becoming a retirement community, as well as a community of seasonal residents. These residents bump up housing prices to the point where single family houses are unaffordable to the few of us able to find employment in the area, which is mainly low-paying.

Not that owning a single family house is a basic human right or anything, but if someone’s determined that a house is what they want, they’ll move elsewhere to find one. This means goodbye to the coveted young families.

Back in the Cowichan Lake area’s forestry heyday, jobs were readily available and houses were affordable.

This could happen again, but thus far, the government’s twiddled its thumbs and repeated answered with a “no.”

Stand on South Shore Road or the Youbou Highway and watch as truck load after truck load of raw logs are shipped outside of the community. Government regulations could keep the logs here, where they would provide high-paying jobs and help set our community right back on track to where it was headed before the final big mill closed in the area, but the government continues to repeatedly say “no.”

A government for the people? It doesn’t seem that way.