Alex Prichard and her 20-month-old daughter Yvonne live in the small town of Parry Sound, Ont., where it’s becoming increasingly difficult to find affordable childcare.Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail
Alex Prichard is sitting outside her house in Parry Sound, Ont., looking at the vacant building across the street.
It used to be a child-care centre. Peer inside the windows and you can see toys that were left behind when it closed.
The empty building is a frustrating sight for Ms. Prichard, who says the shortage of available child care in communities such as hers has reached alarming levels, jeopardizing parents’ careers – usually mothers’ – and threatening families’ financial stability, all while denying children quality care.
“The lack of child care isn’t just an inconvenience, it’s fuelling a crisis,” Ms. Prichard says.
The social worker and mother of two has been pleading with district officials to do more to help parents like her – writing letters to her MPP and MP, as well as speaking to her town council and starting petitions – for months now.
Ms. Prichard’s plight – looking for child care while facing impossibly long waitlists as she juggles work and looking after her kids – is a familiar one to many parents across Canada. But it’s an especially frustrating problem for those living in child-care deserts, where the availability of care is far below the need, a reality of many smaller communities, such as Parry Sound.
A spike in the demand for child care, after the 2021 Canada-Wide Early Learning and Child Care (CWELCC) agreement promised to reduce fees to an average of $10 a day and add 250,000 spaces by 2026, has exacerbated the situation. And now, the shortcomings of the federal deal are coming into focus, as the creation of new daycare spaces lags, especially in small communities, child-care advocates say. The shortage of child care in such communities means that women there are more likely to lose or reduce their livelihood compared to those in big cities.
“Everyone’s waiting for everyone else to try to create these centres,” says David Macdonald, senior economist with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, a Toronto-based think tank. While there are incentives to encourage opening new centres, “there is no mandate being provided to anyone that this has to be done,” he says.
The goals of the program were to increase women’s employment, boost the economy and enrich the lives of children. So far, fees have been cut by at least 50 per cent across the country, meaning that parents who do have a spot for their children under the CWELCC agreement are enjoying significant savings. Yet while fees have come down quickly, the creation of new spaces under the agreement has been much slower.
A report published in August by the non-profit Childcare Resource and Research Unit in Toronto, found that there are now licensed child-care spaces for 31 per cent of kids zero to five-years-old in Canada, up from 28 per cent in 2021 (those numbers do not include part-time spaces, before- and after-school care and in-home child care). The discrepancy between how quickly fees have come down and how slowly new spaces are being created has left parents increasingly at their wits’ end.
Proportion of children in child care deserts
By province and community size
100%
Rural
Under 30K people
80
30K-100K people
Over 100K people
60
40
20
0
Sask.
N.L.
Man.
B.C.
Alta.
Ont.
N.S.
N.B.
Que.
Note: PEI and the territories are not included due to insufficient information.
the globe and mail, source: Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives
Proportion of children in child care deserts
By province and community size
100%
Rural
Under 30K people
80
30K-100K people
Over 100K people
60
40
20
0
Sask.
N.L.
Man.
B.C.
Alta.
Ont.
N.S.
N.B.
Que.
Note: PEI and the territories are not included due to insufficient information.
the globe and mail, source: Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives
Proportion of children in child care deserts
By province and community size
100%
Rural
Under 30K people
80
30K-100K people
Over 100K people
60
40
20
0
Sask.
N.L.
Man.
B.C.
Alta.
Ont.
N.S.
N.B.
Que.
Note: PEI and the territories are not included due to insufficient information.
the globe and mail, source: Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives
“Finding a child-care spot in Parry Sound proper is like winning the lottery,” says Jasmine Van Allen, a 33-year-old kindergarten teacher and mother of a 20-month-old daughter.
Ms. Van Allen could initially only find room in an unlicensed home daycare that cost $45 a day and was a 30-minute drive from her home. She recently switched to another unlicensed home daycare that costs slightly more – $50 a day – but is a shorter drive and has better hours, closing an hour later.
Not being able to find a space in the $10-a-day program has affected her and her husband’s family planning. “I’ve calculated how old my daughter would have to be to conceive our second, because we can’t afford to pay $90 a day,” she says.
Having a child in an unlicensed home daycare isn’t only more costly than a licensed spot in a CWELCC program would be, it is often more precarious, as Lena Sider recently learned. She moved to Parry Sound in the summer of 2022. At the time, the new mother had five months left on her maternity leave from her job doing compensation and payroll work for the Department of National Defence. “I called every centre in town to get her on a wait-list, and I was told you’re lucky if you get a call by the time she’s 3,” Ms. Sider says.
She did find a place in an unlicensed home daycare – at $45 a day. Ms. Sider “adores” the daycare, but the woman who runs it recently broke her foot and had to shut down for two weeks.
“You try to find a home daycare or make some kind of ad hoc arrangement with other people, and that’s kind of like a decent Band-Aid solution, but then things like this happen.”
A report from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA) published last year found 48 per cent of children not yet in kindergarten live in a child-care desert, an area without adequate access to care.
Saskatchewan had the highest proportion of children living in a child-care desert, at 92 per cent. Quebec and PEI had the lowest, at 11 per cent and 4 per cent, respectively. In Ontario, it was 53 per cent.
Families who live in cities are much more likely to find child-care spaces for children than those who do not, says Mr. Macdonald, co-author of the report.
“There’s a pretty clear relationship between community size and coverage rates,” he says.
That means that smaller communities such as Parry Sound, with a population of approximately 7,000 people in town and just under 50,000 in the entire district, are among the least likely to have child-care spaces for families who many need them.
The CCPA report on child-care deserts found Parry Sound has only enough licensed spaces for 27 per cent of children below kindergarten age.
When it comes to creating new child-care spaces in smaller communities, a big part of the problem is the way in which expansion has typically worked, Mr. Macdonald says.
Besides centres run by the town council, families must rely on for-profit operators to create centres, or hope that a group of parents band together to form a non-profit organization. But smaller communities often aren’t very attractive to for-profit operators. “They’re not going to expand in areas where the centre is going to be too small. It doesn’t hit their profit break-even point, so they’re not interested,” Mr. Macdonald says.
Parents raising young children often do not have the time to do the work it takes to create a child-care centre, as desperate as they may be for them. “There are plenty of non-profits that are run by parents, but it’s time-consuming. It’s tough to organize from scratch if you’re a young parent,” he says.
The District of Parry Sound Social Service Administration Board, or DSSAB, which oversees licensed child care in the area, operates four early-learning and child-care centres and a home child-care program that includes 19 CWELCC-approved homes. It has also given the green light to 46 new spaces by the end of this year (including 26 spaces at a new child care centre in the building across the street from Ms. Prichard’s home that is awaiting licensing), and another 16 have been committed for an expansion project next year. All told, the DSSAB says it has currently reached 76 per cent of its provincially approved allocation targets of CWELCC spaces, and is on track to achieve 100 per cent by 2026.
When it comes to creating new spaces, staffing is the biggest challenge, a spokesperson for the DSSAB said. The organization has launched a recruitment campaign to attract would-be registered early childhood educators to the field.
But child-care advocates say Ontario’s expansion plans need to be much more aggressive.
“The plans for child-care expansion just aren’t ambitious enough,” says Carolyn Ferns, policy co-ordinator for the Ontario Coalition for Better Childcare. “We’re seeing other provinces come up with creative solutions to try to make child-care expansion happen, and in Ontario we’re just not there yet.”
For example, in Manitoba, there is an initiative to build modular child-care centres in rural, remote and northern communities, known as the “daycare in a box” program. It is a much faster process than designing and building new centres from scratch. By the end of this year, the program will have completed 22 centres in just 18 months.
“We’ve provided over 1,700 daycare spots in Manitoba by working through this model,” says Colleen Sklar, chief executive of JohnQ, the organization that runs the program.
Lorraine McLeod, director of expansion and support at Building Blocks for Child Care, a non-profit group that works to maintain and support public, non-profit child care, says that municipalities need more money to build new centres.
“They’re meeting their targets of expanding. Is it enough to meet demand? Absolutely not. But they don’t have the funding to do that,” she says.
When Ontario signed the CWELCC agreement in March, 2022, it secured a six-year, $13.2-billion commitment from the federal government.
It has repeatedly called on the federal government to provide more funding to make it sustainable for families. Although it has created 53,000 new child-care spaces for children ages zero to 5 so far, it must create approximately another 58,000 by 2026 to meet its commitment under the federal deal.
But even if it manages to achieve that target, demand will still vastly outweigh supply.
Ontario’s financial accountability office has estimated that the families of 227,146 children under age 6 – a full quarter of the projected number of children in Ontario in that age group by 2026 – would be left wanting but unable to access $10-a-day child care.
In the meantime, Ms. Prichard plans to continue her campaign to district officials. Inside her house, her mother is taking care of her oldest daughter, who is sick. Ms. Prichard has cancelled her afternoon appointments to look after her younger daughter, who up until recently was in a home daycare, which suddenly closed.
“I’m trying to be diplomatic as much as possible, but I just think nobody’s trying hard enough.”
Editor’s note: This article has been updated to clarify the District of Parry Sound’s Social Services Administration Board has earmarked the currently empty former daycare building across the street from Ms. Prichard’s house for development into a new child-care facility.