Jessica Velicogna and her husband had hoped to find licensed child care for their 11-month-old son when Jessica returned to work. A place within walking distance of their family home in the Civic Hospital or Hintonburg neighbourhoods would have been ideal. But they soon learned there was only one licensed centre nearby that accepted children that young and, not surprisingly, it was full.

“Once we realized how little there was in Hintonburg—in Civic Hospital, there 's nothing at all—we started looking at Centretown, Westboro, Experimental Farm and Ottawa South. And there wasn't much there either,” Velicogna says. “Most of them don't take kids until they are 18-months, and the ones that do charge a lot. So daycares were basically out for us.”

The Velicogna family is hardly alone.

The child care advocacy group Code Blue for Child Care notes that while 70 percent of mothers across Canada are in the workforce, only 20 percent have access to regulated child care. Care for children younger than 18 months is particularly difficult to find and access to all kinds of licensed care varies greatly between neighbourhoods.

OpenFile asked federal candidates in Ottawa Centre how they would, if elected, make more child care options available to families like the Velicogna family.

“What I'm hearing at the door is that there is a real appreciation for what the federal government has done in terms of introducing the [Universal Child Care Benefit], the $1,200 that provides them choice in how they want to care for their kids. I think there's a lot of appreciation for solutions in that area,” says Damian Konstantinakos, the riding's Conservative candidate.

Konstantinakos says that money provides choices both to parents who stay home with their children and those looking for daycare in their neighbourhood. He says he hasn't been asked about access to licensed child care during his campaigning so far.

“I'll keep it in mind,” he adds.

The Conservative platform also highlights government tax benefits aimed at parents, as well as a plan to eventually allow incoming splitting of up to $50,000 for parents with dependent children.

NDP incumbent Paul Dewar doesn't think those kind of tax benefits can produce real local child care options for parents.

“You can't provide child care spaces by giving people—as [the Conservatives] do—a cheque in the mail. There's no space with that. They have failed completely in creating any new child care spaces,” Dewar says.

His own party's platform promises to establish and fund a national childcare program that would create 25,000 spaces per year for the next four years.

Dewar says since his election in 2006, he's fought to expand child care services where possible. He points to the Children's Centre, which is run out of Hilson Public School in Westboro and would like to expand.

“If they just had some money—and I've been trying to get some money through the infrastructure dollars—to expand, they could provide more spaces,” he says.

Liberal candidate Scott Bradley also points to the potential for new child care spaces at Hilson Public School, but sees it as a missed opportunity.

“They've had a request on the books for the last five years to build a second level to their facility, and all this local action plan money was spent locally in the riding and they didn't get funding,” Bradley says. “If that was a priority, why didn't it get done?”

He says he would take advantage of those kinds of opportunities if he were the local MP.

The executive director of the Children's Centre did not respond to questions regarding the potential expansion of the child care centre at Hilson.

Nationally, the Liberal Party platform promises a $500-million-dollar child care fund that would grow to an annual commitment of $1 billion. That fund would help finance new child care spaces and early learning centres.

Green Party candidate Jen Hunter supports a national child care program and daycare that is co-located with work—both planks in her party's platform.

As a mother with an infant, Hunter says she's also personally intrigued by the way some parents have adapted to the lack of adequate care in the riding.

“There are a number of pretty innovative approaches in Ottawa Centre, and they include things like a care cooperative, where you actually have the parents involved, the house is bought, the food is organic and you hire someone who is an early childhood educator to work with you,” Hunter says.

Hunter adds that, if elected, she'd strike a community committee that would examine some of those alternatives and best practices both locally and internationally.