All jurisdictions except Manitoba are on track to reduce fees by 50 per cent by Jan. 1.Melissa Tait/The Globe and Mail
When the federal government announced plans in April, 2021, to create a $30-billion national child-care program over five years, parents were cautiously optimistic. After all, such a system had been dreamed of for decades, and every previous attempt to realize one had failed.
Now, with every province and territory having signed the Canada-wide Early Learning and Child Care Deal as of this past March, industry advocates say progress has been significant, with all jurisdictions except Manitoba on track to reduce fees by 50 per cent by Jan. 1.
“The federal program is a huge success for parents who have access to licensed child care,” says Morna Ballantyne, executive director of Child Care Now, a national advocacy organization.
The problem is that a huge number of parents still don’t.
“Bringing the parent fees down,” she adds, “is in some ways the easiest step.”
Centre-based care only has room for approximately one-third of the children aged zero to five in Canada, Ms. Ballantyne says. That leaves out a huge number of families, and so the top priority for governments for the year ahead will be meeting the plan’s ambitious expansion targets and addressing industry issues such as pay and career development for child-care workers, a crucial piece of the puzzle.
“If you don’t have a workforce, you won’t have a system,” says Marni Flaherty, interim chief executive officer of the Canadian Child Care Federation.
A Statistics Canada study published last year found that the number of people employed as child-care workers had dropped 21 per cent in February, 2021, compared with February, 2020.
Regulated child-care centres need to have early childhood educators, and so boosting their numbers is essential to expanding the system. Better pay, and a clear career path, are needed to stop the attrition and attract more people into the sector, Ms. Ballantyne says.
In Ontario, Child Care Now is calling for a wage floor of $30 an hour for early childhood educators with a post-secondary degree. Currently, early childhood educators in the province make a minimum of $18 an hour, with that wage set to go up by $1 an hour annually during the five-year national deal. That will not be enough to attract sufficient levels of educators to meet the province’s target of creating 53,000 spaces by 2026, Ms. Ballantyne says.
Nationally, the plan calls for creating 250,000 spaces across the country by 2026.
Karina Gould, the federal Minister of Families, Children and Social Development, says there is “significant work being done on workforce supports” across the country, including in B.C., where there has been a $4-an-hour increase for child-care sector workers, and the Yukon, where early childhood educators make $30 an hour.
While workforce supports will be essential to building a national child-care system, expansion is set to be the focus for the national deal this coming year, Ms. Gould says. “The number one challenge is making sure that we continue to create spaces.”
Saskatchewan created more than 2,000 spaces in 2022. In July, Alberta announced $50-million in funding for non-profit groups to create spaces in the year ahead, particularly in communities with little or no licensed care.
Another important factor when it comes to expansion is where new spaces will open.
A study published by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives in 2018 found that an estimated 776,000 children (approximately 44 per cent of all non-school-aged kids) live in so-called child-care deserts – areas without adequate access regardless of fees.
Many of these deserts exist in urban low-income neighbourhoods and in rural communities, says Martha Friendly, executive director of the Childcare Resource and Research Unit, a Toronto-based think tank.
“One of the pillars we have in our agreements is inclusion and accessibility,” Ms. Gould says. “And so what provinces and territories are working on is really kind of doing that mapping of where are their child-care centres and where can there be more.”
A four-year, $625-million federal infrastructure grant to be made available to jurisdictions in the coming year will help provinces and territories fill in those deserts, she says.
Some provinces area already taking action.
In November, Manitoba announced plans to create more than 1,200 non-profit child-care spaces with a focus on rural and First Nations communities. And earlier this month, Ontario announced it is launching a $213-million grant program for new and existing operators to create spaces, prioritizing regions with historically low rates of space availability.
“We really have to lean in to space growth in the areas needed. Rural communities have disproportionately underrepresented numbers of spaces for their populations, children from racialized communities, likewise Indigenous communities,” Ontario Education Minister Stephen Lecce said at a press conference announcing the funding.
Such targeted action by governments will be required to ensure child-care deserts are served, Ms. Friendly says.
”If you want to develop a child-care system, in addition to having the workforce to work in it, you need to have publicly shaped plans to expand it,” she says.