When the Ontario government signed on to Canada’s national child-care agreement in 2022, you could practically hear the sighs of relief from parents across the province. Sure, the marquee $10-a-day rate wouldn’t average out until 2025, and demand for spots still far outstripped availability, but daycare costs were about to get much less expensive, very quickly.
While parents celebrated fees that didn’t amount to a second mortgage and scrambled to find new subsidized spots, there remained a couple of long-standing cracks in our child-care system that this new program wouldn’t fix — and could, in fact, deepen. We’ve already started to see the results.
Last month, a Toronto daycare pulled out of the $10-a-day program, citing mounting debt over increased operating costs that the provincially distributed funding doesn’t cover. Around the same time, the YMCA, one of the largest licensed child-care providers in the province, sounded the alarm that more child-care centres could follow suit if the province doesn’t change its reimbursement model. That model, which replaces revenue instead of total operational costs, is based on what daycare fees were like in March 2022. Inflation has since made the business of running a child-care centre more expensive, and participating centres aren’t allowed to increase fees to make up the difference.
Meanwhile, for at least the past year, child-care centres across the province have seen temporary or permanentclosures over staffing shortages. This shouldn’t come as a surprise: until recently, wages for early childhood educators in Ontario were among the lowest in the country. Before last October, about a third of ECEs were earning less than $20 an hour. Advocates say the Ministry of Education’s move to push this up to just shy of $24 still won’t be enough to attract the workers needed to cover the 86,000 spots the province has planned to create by 2026.
The conditions that led us here aren’t limited just to this province: Alberta and British Columbia are seeing similar issues in their rollout of the program, with daycare centres in the former even staging periodic closures in protest of reimbursement delays.
Simply put, child-care systems across Canada are reaching a breaking point. Instead of spending subsidy funds to independently audit child-care centres — as Ontario recently instructed city-run facilities to do over the next few months — governments and parents who stand to benefit from accessible care would do well to listen to what experts have been saying for some time. Without proactive policy that ensures adequately paid, stable workplaces for the people providing this care, even grand gestures such as a $10-a-day program aren’t going to do much for parents if daycares can’t afford to participate.
When Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland announced the federal government’s initial plans to make $10-a-day child care a reality, she stressed that the intention was to follow Quebec’s example. Until 1997, child care in Quebec was largely subsidized by a mix of tax credits available to parents and operational grants for which non-profit child-care providers could apply. When the province famously moved toward a directly funded model that year, the idea was to push for $5-a-day care for every child four and under, within three years. In other words, cheaper child care and in less time than Canada’s current plan.
While this transition kick-started a massive expansion in care operations of all kinds, the results weren’t quite as expected. The Parti Québécois’ original plan was to have non-profit, directly funded centres known as CPEs make up the bulk of the child-care system: CPEs feature higher employment qualifications and mandates that include making child care accessible to families otherwise less likely to receive it. When demand for CPE care far outstripped availability, the system couldn’t hire and train ECEs fast enough (sound familiar?). A new government was voted in a few years later, caps on new builds for for-profit centres were lifted, and tax credits for families not using subsidized care increased significantly. While this improved access, it resulted in a high reliance on for-profit services that don’toffer the samequality of care.
In 2018, University of Toronto economics professor and consultant Gordon Cleveland published a report on how a transition in Ontario might move with a more directed, albeit slower, approach to head off some of the issues we’re seeing now. He suggested prioritizing spaces for pre-school-aged children — where the staff ratios and existing spots are less likely to see acute shortages — and incentivizing people to take up child-care work via higher wages, apprenticeship programs, and other points of entry into the industry.
A recurring argument I see repeated on social media and in comment sections — places I need to learn to avoid — about child-care funding is the idea that one’s ability to pay for child care shouldn’t be a public concern. “Can’t afford child care? Don’t have kids!” seems to be the sentiment, which would be appropriate if we were talking about children as consumer products. The thing is, they’re not: they’re human beings, and anyone trying to convince you otherwise is trying either to sell you a $1,200 luxury stroller or to shirk our communal responsibility for their well-being.
Whether we’re talking about public or household budgets — or the full-time labour of a parent who might otherwise have chosen to participate in the wage-paid economy — the care of young children comes at a price. Expecting child-care workers to make up the difference just doesn’t add up.
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