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Ask any working parent across the country what their most significant source of stress is, and most will say the same thing—affordable childcare. The fed and provinces have agreed to a $30 billion, five-year deal to provide $10 per day childcare, but there's one problem: There doesn’t seem to be enough people to look after the youngsters. 

Driving the news: Childcare advocates say the industry is plagued by staffing shortages, driven by poor wages and benefits that make it challenging to attract and retain qualified early childhood educators (ECE), leading to longer waitlists for parents. 

• A BC study found that 45% of daycare providers are at a staffing deficit, losing employees faster than they can hire. 
  
  
• The Toronto branch of the YMCA can accommodate 35,000 kids if fully staffed but can only offer 16,000 spots filled right now. 

Why it's happening: ECEs are undervalued in the licensed childcare space—they start work early, finish late, and are responsible for enriching the lives of tiny humans while dodging projectile vomit and trying to avoid stepping on Lego. 

• It takes two years to obtain the credential, and the payscale lags behind other careers that require a college diploma. 
  
  
• Advocates say $30 an hour is in line with the compensation ECEs should be earning, but the feds left comp to the provinces to decide—so far, only Yukon has hit the $30 mark.
  
  
• In Ontario, many ECEs leave the childcare sector after three years, often moving into the public school system where they find better wages and benefits, like paid sick days and a pension.

Why it matters: $10 a day childcare would save Canadian parents thousands of dollars on childcare costs a year, but if the centres can't find staff to supervise the kids, affordable childcare will be more a dream than reality. 

This week's biggest story continues to be the failure of Silicon Valley Bank and its fallout. But bank runs aren’t anything new. (Fans of “It’s A Wonderful Life” will remember one being a key plot point in that holiday classic.)

Bank runs happen when clients lose confidence in a financial institution and withdraw their money. As the bank starts to bleed deposits, it loses liquidity, and its default risk increases, leading more clients to panic and pull their deposits as a safety measure before the bank runs out of cash. 

• Washington Mutual is the largest bank failure in American history. The bank was tied up in bad mortgages and had taken loans from near-insolvent institutions. 
  
  
• Clients got nervous and pulled $16.9 billion of deposits over nine days in 2008, right in the middle of the global financial crisis.  

Yes, but: Bank runs can be a self-fulfilling prophecy. A bank may be perfectly healthy—until everyone decides they want their cash right now, leaving banks no time to sell off assets at a profit. 

Will we see a bank run in Canada? Probably not. The Canadian banking system is tightly regulated and dominated by a few large, national banks that are highly diversified. If any of the Big Five Canadian banks went under, you know things are really bad.

And it's important to remember that the Canadian Deposit Insurance Corporation (CDIC) covers deposits up to $100,000, so the money in your account is guaranteed up to that level.

Anyone with less-than-perfect vision understands that 20/20 sight has a rather hefty price tag. Glasses and contact lenses are all an expense those with perfect eyeballs will never understand.

So when I, a nearsighted Nelly, learned about implantable collamer lenses (ICL) and read that Joe Jonas had undergone the procedure, I wondered if switching from regular contact lenses to implantable ones was worth it. 

What is ICL: You know how a contact lens sits on top of your eye? An ICL is a contact lens that gets implanted in the space behind the iris (the colourful part of the eye) but in front of the crystalline lens. It’s become preferred among eye surgeons since it doesn’t deteriorate the cornea like laser eye surgery. 

• It’s permanent but can be reversed.
  
  
• The quick, non-invasive procedure takes about 20 minutes.
  
  
• Most patients experience same day vision restoration with some discomfort for two to three days after. The entire healing process lasts about four weeks.
  
  
• ICL is considered an elective and cosmetic surgery, so general insurance plans probably won’t cover it.

The cost: An ICL procedure starts at $3,050 per eye, so if you’re not a cyclops, it’s a starting price tag of $6,100. 

• It’s a big price difference from the $207 I paid for a year’s worth of bi-weekly contact lenses from my optician. It costs me about 56 cents a day to be able to see using contacts.

If I underwent an ICL procedure this year, it would take 29 years to cover the annual expense of my contact lenses.

So, is it worth it? This is a tough call—the freedom to see without fumbling around blindly looking for your glasses or contact case is priceless. But if you have a thing about other people touching your eye and decent health insurance, you might be better off sticking with contacts.