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Is Minister Jones Going To Take Away Your Affordable Child Care?

It’s Family Day in Alberta today (February 17th).  And Matt Jones, Minister responsible for child care in Alberta,  apparently wants to celebrate by making plans to leave the child care agreement  that will bring $15 a day child care to the province on April 1st.  And he wants to blame the federal government while he does it.  But the truth is, most decisions about child care in Alberta are entirely in the hands of the provincial government. Take the cancellation January 30th of Alberta’s child care subsidy program that helps low-income families.  Matt Jones cancelled it, as part of the …

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A NEW STATISTICS CANADA REPORT ON CANADA’S CHILD CARE WORKFORCE

One of the main barriers to expansion of child care supply is a widespread shortage of qualified educators.  This is mostly due to wages and benefits that are insufficiently high to attract and retain staff.  As a result, there are long waiting lists to get into licensed child care (115,000 children with mothers whose main activity is paid work).  We do not have much good current data on our child care workforce, but Statistics Canada is attempting to begin to fill that hole.   Towards the end of December last year, Leanne Findlay and Thomas Charters from Statistics Canada published a …

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A Fact-Based Response to Cardus’ Odd Assertions

Since its beginning, Canada’s plan to build a system of child early learning and child care – the “$10 a day plan” –  has been panned by a handful of players. These include spokespeople for some political parties, some child care centre owners, right-wing “pundits”, and social and economic conservatives, all with their own agendas. Relying on misrepresentation of research literature, misinterpretation of public opinion polls and Statistics Canada surveys, the common agenda is to paint the $10 a day plan as a “failure” and “disaster” rather than the first largely successful phase of a Canada-wide project to build a …

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ONTARIO’S NEW FUNDING FORMULA – AN EVALUATION

Ontario’s new funding formula is, of course, new. To be implemented in January 2025.  So, everyone is feeling around it like the proverbial seven blind men around the elephant.  There are different opinions depending upon which part you are touching. What we do know for sure is that this is a cost-based funding formula, seeking to take into account the different cost situations facing different child care centres.  It will replace the revenue-replacement model which began in March 2022, which was based only on what parent fees were charged by a centre, not on their costs.  For many centres, the …

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HALLELUJAH!  ONTARIO FINALLY HAS A NEW FUNDING FORMULA

Hallelujah!  As of August 14th, 2024, there finally is a funding formula to provide some revenue-certainty for child care providers in Ontario. Not a moment too soon, in fact, a year or two too late. As of January 2025, this formula for the provision of operational funding to providers will be implemented to replace the inequitable revenue-replacement model that has existed since April 2022. As the new funding guidelines admit “[w]hile a revenue replacement approach is transparent and simple to implement, it is not responsive to the true cost of providing child care in Ontario.” (p. 7).  Revenue replacement was …

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Affordable Child Care Services vs Money for Parents

Those who oppose the $10 a day program often argue that there is a simple and better program to replace it – give money directly to parents instead.  The logic is, at first glance, persuasive.  If you give parents money, it seems like they should be able to purchase exactly the child care they need.  And competition among different providers should, you might think, keep fees down.  Programs that directly fund child care services, like the $10 a day program, are said to be bureaucratic and inflexible and to create huge shortages and long waiting lists.  There is some truth …

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Ontario Is Violating the Early Learning and Child Care Agreement

Most child care in Ontario is provided by non-profit or public operators.  This has been true for years.  A full 70% of the licensed/regulated child care spaces for children 0-5 were non-profit or public back in 2022, when Ontario signed the Canada-Wide Agreement with Ottawa.  So, two things are not in doubt.  First, it is obviously possible for non-profit and public child care services in Ontario to grow and expand, given the right conditions.  They have done it successfully in the past, more successfully than the for-profit child care operators.  Second, the Ontario government, with the support of municipal governments …

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Who’s To Blame For Child Care Shortages In Ontario?

Todd Smith is Ontario’s new Minister of Education and he has already decided who he wants to blame for Ontario’s child care shortages – it’s the federal government.  So, Todd Smith wants federal minister Jenna Sudds to release Ontario from the agreement it signed back in 2022 that limits expansion by for-profit enterprises to a maximum of 30% of the total expansion.  Ontario never wanted to limit for-profit expansion;  apparently they only signed the agreement under duress. The problem of child care shortages is a real one.  We need a lot more child care expansion in Ontario and we need …

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New Support for the Economic Benefits of Universal Child Care

I met Sebastien Montpetit at the Canadian Economics Association meetings in Winnipeg last year.  He is a Canadian and Quebecer who has been studying for his PhD in economics at the University of Toulouse.  And he, with co-authors, has come up with a really fascinating analysis of the impacts of Quebec’s universal child care program ushered in the late 1990s and the early 2000s.  The paper is complex, has multiple parts, and the latest version of it is available here.  It has been selected as one of three finalists for the Canadian Labour Economics Forum prize at the upcoming Canadian …

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Supply-Side or Demand-Side – A Contribution to the Australian Discussion

John Cherry, from Goodstart Early Learning, has written an evaluation of child care in Quebec and New South Wales.  Apparently his purpose is to determine whether supply-side funded systems (like Quebec’s) are better or worse than demand-side funded systems (like in Australia).  To summarize briefly, John finds that Quebec does better on workforce participation and affordability, NSW does better on child care accessibility and quality.  So, John concludes that Australia’s system is pretty good.  His conclusion appears to be that Australia shouldn’t flirt with Quebec’s fixed-fee, supply-side-funded system.  It’s a problematic paper for several reasons.  First, some of the details …

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