Lyndsay MacKay knew it would be hard to find a child care space in Toronto. The east-end mom and professor of early childhood education started researching programs in her neighbourhood as soon as she found out she was expecting.
“At five months pregnant I had our name on 15 waitlists — but almost a year later, we have no idea if we will get a spot before my maternity leave is up,” she says.
“It’s very stressful not knowing if I’ll have affordable, quality care for my baby. There are a lot of families in my neighbourhood and very few infant spaces.”
The Canada-Wide Early Learning and Child Care plan (CWELCC) is bringing $10-a-day child care to families all across the country. But if you are a family in Ontario, you could be forgiven for wondering when $10-a-day will get here — and when will it start increasing your chance of finding a child care space before your kiddo starts school. As headlines warn of growing waitlists, it’s understandable to worry that we are heading in the wrong direction.
The truth is that the new system is already making a huge difference for a lot of families, but the Ontario government could be doing much more to make it a reality for all. Currently over 92 per cent of Ontario’s child care programs are part of the CWELCC system, meaning that more than 400,000 families have seen their child-care fees more than cut in half over the past two years.
According to the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives’ annual report on child-care fees, in Toronto the median infant child-care fee has dropped from $1,866 a month to $903 a month, and median preschool fees are down from $1260 to $637 a month. Both will continue to decrease until we reach an average of $10 a day, or a bit over $200 per month.
Families who have seen fee reductions from the program share how life-changing more affordable child care is, especially during this time of high inflation.
But the number of families who are waiting for a child-care space has gone up. As researchers and advocates warned years before fee reductions began, as the price of child care goes down, the number of families trying to access a space will rise. It’s soaring now. As the Canadian Press reported, in regions with centralized waitlists those lists have more than doubled and some are thousands of children long.
This demand boom must be met by an ambitious plan to expand programs and to recruit and retain more staff. And this is where Ontario is falling down.
We are still playing catch-up to the rest of the country. Ontario was the last province to sign a child-care agreement with the federal government, and the Ontario government still hasn’t delivered a long-promised funding formula nearly two years after joining the program. That means funding has stayed nearly stagnant for centres whose budgets operate on a knife’s edge.
Most troubling of all, while Ontario has been happy to accept billions in federal funding to lower child care fees, it hasn’t upped its own provincial funding — critical operating grants that help child care programs pay the bills. In fact, during years of high inflation, provincial child care allocations under the Ford government are lower today than when Ford was first elected in 2018. This is what is making child care programs so financially precarious.
We also need programs to be expanding. But the Ontario government’s “start-up grants” for new child-care centres cover less than one-third of the cost of starting a program. And provincial underfunding has left new child-care spaces in schools waiting years to be built.
An even bigger challenge in expanding spaces is recruiting and retaining educators to staff the programs. The low wages deter educators from making licensed child care their career. In 2022, 78 per cent of Registered Early Childhood Educators (RECEs) earned less than $25 per hour. And while Ontario has pledged to raise the wage floor to $23.86, experts say this is far from what is needed to solve the workforce crisis. The Association of Early Childhood Educators Ontario calls for a wage grid starting at $30 to $40 per hour for RECEs and $25 for non-RECE staff.
By contrast to the troubles in Ontario, other provinces are surging ahead. Half of provinces and territories have already reached an average of $10-a-day fees. P.E.I. has a funding formula and wage grid to provide stable funding to child care programs. Nova Scotia recently committed to a defined benefit pension plan for ECEs to help with retention.
Getting to $10-a-day for all is a big goal, but it’s doable.
So what is the hold up in Ontario? We need our provincial government to start behaving like an equal partner. Ontario must develop a comprehensive childcare strategy, with more provincial child care funding, a fair funding formula, and a wage grid to retain and recruit more ECEs.
Says MacKay, “Before $10-a-day child care was announced we weren’t sure if or how we would afford to have children. If we don’t find a space in time, we aren’t sure what we’re going to do. We want our child to be cared for by RECEs, in a quality program where they can learn, grow, and play with their peers. It’s important to us.”
It should be important to the Ontario government too. By investing in child care as a public good, Ontario can ensure that all families have access to the quality care and education our children deserve.
Carolyn Ferns is Public Policy Coordinator at the Ontario Coalition for Better Child Care and a board member of Child Care Now and the Childcare Resource and Research Unit.
This article appeared in the 2024 May/June issue.
