Yellowknife (July 14/06) - Yellowknife has been left out of a national day care report.

Only 11 cities in Canada are giving the vital information for the structure of child care - and the reason is that it would be too much information to add.

"To not include us is like a slap in the face," Linda Benedict, director of Yellowknife Daycare Centre says.

"It shows that they think that we are not even worth a mention - I mean even a one-liner would be better than nothing."

The report was a study on Canadian cities, and their history, experiences and ability in providing child care.

Even though Yellowknife is a smaller mirror of situations that occur down south, she says that the situation here is so bad that it would tilt the results in an unfavourable way.

"Obviously child care is going to be better in bigger cities," Benedict says.

"But the situation in Yellowknife is so bad that it would completely skew the results."

Child care in Yellowknife is currently underfunded, understaffed and has huge waiting lists.

Recently, many parents and day cares have been crying for changes to save the services that are stretched to the maximum.

Rianne Mahon, one of the authors of the report, and who is also the director of the Institute of Political Economy and a member of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Carleton University in Ottawa, says that the reason why the NWT and Nunavut were left out of the report, was simply because there was too much information to compile.

"If you look at the report, even Nova Scotia and PEI were completely left out," says Mahon.

"This is because it costs way more than what we'd intended and there was too much information."

The report, entitled "Learning from each other: Early learning and child care experiences in Canadian cities," explores child care that is provided through planning at the municipal level, and the relationship between various day cares.

Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver were the cities used as the model in the report for child care in all Canadian cities. Mahon focused on these three cities because she said she wanted to gather the most diverse information possible.

Benedict says that she is sick and tired of reports that don't go anywhere.

She says that they ought to stop wasting time on reports that detail what they already know, and put the money towards the children instead.

"If you don't count the good and the bad in the reports, there's no point," Benedict says.

"I am tired of the reports - we just need something done about the situation and no one ever follows up on the report's suggestions."

She says that a national study on child care in Canadian cities isn't a national study because not every capital city was included. Her advice to the those conducting the reports would be to either get everything or none at all.