Gordon Cleveland

December 14, 2022December 24, 2024

How much do Early Childhood Educators earn?

How much do Early Childhood Educators earn? Everyone knows that their wages are low – too low – but it’s hard to find a reliable source of data to make wage comparisons.

One very interesting data source is a Government of Canada web site called Job Bank (www.jobbank.gc.ca). It’s a web site designed to help people find jobs and plan their careers by providing information. And it has a lot of data on many different occupations in many different geographic locations in Canada.

The data on Early Childhood Educators comes from the Labour Force Survey, a monthly survey conducted by Statistics Canada that produces well-known updates of unemployment rates in Canada, but also collects detailed information about wages and occupations. Each month there are about 54,000 households that respond to the survey about members of their household.

Early Childhood Educators are part of an occupation called Early Childhood Educators and Assistants. You might know it as occupation 4214 in the National Occupational Code. However, there is a new revision of this coding system and in future Early Childhood Educators and Assistants will be known as NOC 42202.

The chart below shows the latest data available for the wages of Early Childhood Educators and Assistants from the Job Bank web site. We get information on the average hourly wage rate (grey line), the “low wage” level (blue line; this is the 10^th percentile of the wage distribution), and the “high wage” (orange line; this is the 90^th percentile of the wage distribution). The exact number for the average wage is shown as a set of data labels on the chart.

The data seems very precise and useful. It tells us that the average wage across Canada is $20.88 per hour. However, hourly wages range from about $15 an hour to about $26.50 per hour when we look at the range from the 10^th percentile to the 90^th percentile. We can also see that some jurisdictions have lower wages (the Atlantic Provinces, Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta) compared to other jurisdictions. We could download similar data from other years and see how wages have changed over time.

Hourly-wages-of-ECEAs-Canada-wide-2020-21 Download

However, the precision of this data is somewhat illusory. We are, perhaps, interested in finding out the hourly wages of program staff with certificate, diploma or university qualifications (early childhood educators) separately from the hourly wages of early childhood educator assistants who don’t have this level of qualifications. This data source does not allow us to do this; both educators and educator assistants are grouped together in the same occupation. Similarly, we can’t get data separately on supervisors and directors as opposed to ECEs that are exclusively employed in direct contact with children.

There’s another problem as well. We might well be interested only in program staff working in licensed child care centres. However, this occupation (NOC 42202) includes early childhood educators that work in kindergartens and other early childhood services as well as those in licensed centres.[1] Elementary School Teachers’ Aides are in a different occupation, as are family home care providers, but still NOC 42202 does not give us a wage for licensed child care centre employees only.

A major alternative source of data is available for Ontario. This comes from a census survey of all licensed child care providers in the province that is conducted annually by the Ministry of Education. The last data that has been released on wages is from 2019 (!) https://www.ontario.ca/page/ontarios-early-years-and-child-care-annual-report-2020.

It is likely that the Ministry of Education has data from 2022, but this has not yet been published. Here is the data from the 2019 Ontario survey.

Hourly-wages-of-full Download

This Ontario wage data is collected from centres, so reflects only the wages that are paid to staff in licensed child care centres. Centre directors are asked to report how many staff with different qualification levels have hourly wages in a number of different ranges. Wages for early childhood educators with an RECE are reported separately from wages for staff in an RECE position but who needed a director’s approval because of lack of full qualification. Wages for other program staff (without formal qualifications) are also reported. Because the data is collected in ranges, it is not possible to calculate either the average wage or the median wage for RECEs and other program staff.

The median wage is, however, the wage of the staff member in the 50^th percentile position. With 47% of RECEs having hourly wages of $20 or less and 53% of RECEs having hourly wages of over $20, it would appear that the median wage of RECEs in child care centres in Ontario in 2019 was very close to $20. By the same logic, we can say that the median wage for staff with a director’s approval and for other program staff was between $15.01 and $20.

If I use the Job Bank web site to get data on Early Childhood Educators and Assistants for Ontario in 2019, I find that the median wage in 2018-2019[2] was $19.75 and for 2019-2020 was $20. Interestingly, this median is very close to the estimate for RECEs in Ontario that comes from the Ontario annual census survey.

In my next blog post, I will look at wage comparisons based on the Job Bank data.

[1] For example, the Annual Report of Ontario’s College of Early Childhood Educators for 2020-21 tells us that only 56% of Registered Early Childhood Educators (RECEs) in the province are actually employed in licensed child care. Another 32% are employed in the education sector and 12% elsewhere.

[2] Job Bank uses two years of Labour Force Survey data to get its wage estimates for NOC 42202, averaging the wage reports over the surveys from that two-year period.

November 23, 2022December 24, 2024

Child Care Wages and Workforce Strategies – Looking at Australia: What Do They Have That We Need?

Canada has a crisis on its hands – a child care workforce crisis. Already, child care operators across the country are unable to find staff; rooms are closing and centres are closing because of the inability to attract and retain early childhood educators. That’s BEFORE the estimated need for 60,000 new early childhood educators as we move to $10 a day child care.

Australia is not the first country that springs to mind when looking for child care policies to emulate. For instance, Australia funds child care with vouchers that encourage the growth of the for-profit sector and lead to ever more expensive child care services. This kind of funding has made the buying and selling of child care real estate into big business.

However, Australia does have a wage grid and a strategy for workforce development, which jurisdictions in Canada do not have. We can learn from their example.

Australia has something called a Fair Work Commission whose job it is to design the wage grid and set the minimum wages and minimum conditions of employment in different sectors. Children’s Services is one of those sectors, and the award made by the Fair Work Commission is a legal document that child care employers have to follow. Employees can bargain for more than the minimum, but employers cannot pay less than the minimum award rate.

Here’s a link to the Fair Work Commission award for Children’s Services workers updated in November 2022. There’s a detailed classification structure of qualifications and responsibilities that forms the basis of the wage grid. The wage grid lays out the minimum hourly and weekly rates that can be paid for different classification levels in children’s services occupations. The two most frequent qualification levels are for staff with a Certificate III in Children’s Services (typically a 6-month course) and a Diploma in Children’s Services (typically an 18-month course). The current award sets the starting hourly rate for less qualified staff (Certificate III) at $24.76 per hour and for qualified educators with a Diploma at $29.17 per hour. Wages rise above these starting rates with increased experience. Minimum hourly rates for a Director of a child care centre (called long day care) range from about $35 to $40 depending on the size of the centre and experience.

The Children’s Services Award covers many but not all ECEC employees – most others are covered by the Educational Services (Teachers) Award. That award sets out the wage grid for Early Childhood Teachers (ECTs) who have a Bachelor degree qualification (typically a 4-year course) or higher. All ECEC services in Australia must engage or have access to an ECT for a particular amount of time per week, determined by the number of children in attendance. Entry-level pay for an ECT is $32.20 per hour and increases with experience.

Since late 2019, Education Ministers across Australia have led a process involving extensive consultation to develop a ten-year strategy to build up and support the children’s education and care workforce. It lists 21 actions – short, medium and long term – to be implemented over the ten-year period. There is an implementation and evaluation plan to shape and ensure progress of this workforce strategy.

On top of all that, Australia is collecting detailed data about its workforce from all service providers (response rate of 99%). There is a National Workforce Census, which is a population survey of early childhood education and care service providers across Australia. It collects data on service usage, children with additional needs, access to programs and staffing. On the workforce specifically, the census collects information about hours of work, qualifications, exemptions from qualification requirements, experience and tenure, professional development, gender, age, and Indigenous status of staff members. The survey also collects data about whether these staff members earn the award-level wage (as determined by the Fair Work Commission) or a higher wage, and if higher by how much. So, for instance, in the 2021 Workforce Census report we find that 57% of contact staff in child care centres earned the award rate, 34% earned above the award rate and for 9% of staff the wage rate was unknown.

None of this is perfect, of course. Early childhood educators in Australia still receive low wages relative to many other workers and there is a movement for an immediate wage rise to keep educators in the sector. However, many of the elements necessary to know about and improve wages and working conditions are in place in Australia. I wish I could say the same about Canada.

November 7, 2022December 24, 2024

Do You Want to Know How to Make Child Care Expansion Happen in Ontario?

I’m done some work recently with Building Blocks for Child Care (B2C2) on how to facilitate the expansion of not-for-profit and public child care in Ontario. They are an organization that knows a lot about all the different steps necessary to expand child care services – planning, design, rules and regulations, financing. With their advice, I wrote a primer called How to Make Child Care Expansion Happen in Ontario, giving 10 recommendations for action in Ontario to make not-for-profit and public child care grow.

Briefly, they are:

A system of capital grants and loan guarantees for not-for-profit and public operators
Creating public planning mechanisms with provincial, municipal, school board and community members
An inventory of publicly-owned lands and buildings suitable for child care expansion
Mandate where possible the co-location of licensed child care services whenever business and housing developments happen
Explore the use of Land Trusts to preserve the preservation of child care assets in public hands for future generations
Use provincial legislation and regulations to control transfers of child care assets and ensure they are not controlled by big-box corporate child care chains
Early guarantees of operational funding and licensing of not-for-profit and public operators that plan expansion following public plans.
Development and implementation of a province-wide salary and benefits grid and much more funding to increase compensation of educators and other staff. Recruitment and retention of qualified educators is Job #1.
Transparent and effective future funding guidelines to support expansion. Assistance to municipalities to implement financial accountability measures in a long-term funding model.
Public funding of organizations such as B2C2 that support not-for-profit operators to negotiate hurdles associated with expansion of child care services.

It’s not rocket science. These are some obvious steps to help the necessary expansion of not-for-profit and public child care services. Parents and children will suffer when expansion doesn’t happen. Soon there will be long waiting lists to get into child care facilities in Ontario if the government does not act now.

October 26, 2022December 24, 2024

Accessibility and Quality of Child Care Services in Quebec

These (link below in next paragraph) are slides from a recent webinar presentation I made along with colleagues from Équipe de recherche Qualité des contextes éducatifs de la petite enfance at UQAM. You can listen to the French version of my talk https://youtu.be/R-JIAjvfQew or the whole webinar https://qualitepetiteenfance.uqam.ca/evenement/leducation-a-la-petite-enfance-sinvite-dans-la-campagne-electorale-27-septembre-2022/

But, I have also reproduced most of that talk in English here:

Click to access English-Version-of-the-Quebec-Presentation.pdf

Christa Japel has also done similar work here https://childcarecanada.org/blog/learning-experience-access-and-quality-qu%C3%A9bec%E2%80%99s-profit-child-care

October 25, 2022December 24, 2024

Give Them an Inch and They’ll Take a Mile: The Story of For-Profit Child Care in Ontario

The Ministry of Education in Ontario is beginning to understand that they really can’t satisfy for-profit child care providers with anything less than the full cake and eat it too. The Ontario government has bent over backwards to accommodate the for-profit child care operators; they want them to opt into the Canada-wide Early Learning and Child Care (CWELCC) system. What has the Ministry done so far for the for-profit operators?

It changed the regulations so that municipalities (mandated to be Service System Managers) no longer have the discretion to sign purchase-of-service agreements only with not-for-profit providers (16 of the 47 had this type of provision);
It changed regulations so that measurement of quality in a centre could not be used as a criterion for eligiblity for CWELCC sign-up;
It completely gutted the new Management and Funding Guidelines for 2022 which the Ministry itself had established back in April. The April version of the guidelines affirmed that municipalities should judge whether the funds given to operators in 2022 were based on actual costs. In other words, the municipalities should judge whether operators had ineligible expenditures or excesssive profit claims. The August Guidelines eliminated these provisions.
It ordered municipalities to collect very little financial data from operators. The April version of the Guidelines said that “CMSMs/DSSABs are required to collect sufficient and detailed financial information from Licensees…. CMSMs/DSSABs will review all financial components including cost and expense line items for reasonability and eligibility, while ensuring CWELCC System objectives will be achieved….” The August version of the Guidelines said “Information collected from Licensees to support implementation should be kept to the minimum amount necessary to meet the reporting requirements outlined in the CWELCC Guidelines….”

As of October 18^th, the Ministry of Education has announced that the August 2022 Guidelines will continue for 2023; there will be few controls over how child care operators spend the revenues they receive from the CWELCC program. Information collection will be kept to a minimum. All of this despite the fact that, with a 50% cut in fees at the end of 2022, more than twice as much government money will be going to operators.

Ontario’s Action Plan (part of the CWELCC Agreement with the federal government) said there would be a revised allocation methodology in 2023. That didn’t happen. Now, the new costs-based funding system will be in place for 2024.

But that’s not enough concessions as far as the for-profit operators are concerned. They want more. Sharon Siriboe, the director of the Ontario Association of Independent Childcare Centres wants guaranteed funding rules before for-profit operators will join the system. “How can any small business remain viable and be asked to make such significant changes with only 14 months of clarity?”

What is the problem here?

Ontario signed an agreement with the federal government back in late March of 2022 – the Ontario-Canada Canada-wide Early Learning and Child Care Agreement. In it, Ontario committed itself to the vision of building a largely not-for-profit system of accessible, affordable, inclusive child care services of high quality with federal money – $10 Billion of it over 4 years.

In Section 4.1 of that agreement, it states that “Ontario intends to maintain and build upon its existing robust accountability framework by introducing a further control mechanism. Ontario proposes to implement a cost control framework following the signing of the agreement that will be in place for all providers that opt into the Canada-wide ELCC system. The Parties are interested in approaches to ensure the sound and reasonable use of public funds, ensuring that costs and earnings of child care licensees that opt-in to the Canada-wide ELCC system are reasonable and that surplus earnings beyond reasonable earnings are directed towards improving child care services.”

I don’t really like calling it a “cost control framework”. It would be better to call it a “wise spending of public dollars” framework. The objective is not to have costs that are as low as possible; the objective is to spend public dollars sensibly to achieve the objectives of affordability, accessibility and quality. Ontario has agreed with the federal government that there will be a mechanism that ensures that all providers spend public funds wisely and that both the costs claimed by these providers and the earnings (profit) claimed by these providers are reasonable in achieving the objectives of this new child care system.

What is this new cost control/wise spending of public dollars framework? Ontario tries to claim they have one already, but they don’t. They have what we could call a fee control framework. In other words, base fees for every operator are frozen at whatever their value was on March 27, 2022. Each operator will get revenue from government equal to 25% of this base fee if they join CWELCC in 2022. The operator will use these funds to backdate a 25% fee reduction to parents. There will be another cut to fees at the end of December. This will take fees down by 50% compared to the level they had in 2020. And, in 2023, operators will get revenues from government to cover these fee reductions for parents. These rules control the fees charged by operators, but they in no way validate the costs and earnings that are covered by the new government revenues. There is effectively no reporting on what these costs and earnings are. There is no way to calculate the amount of surplus taken by operators, or to see how it is used.

That’s the way the for-profit operators like it. No requirement for reporting on how the public funds they receive are spent until well into 2024. Even then, only a requirement for an annual audit. No need to justify the salaries paid to management. No need to justify the profits they claim each year, which are built into the fees they charge. We know from the CCPA fees survey that for-profit operators in cities across Ontario charge higher fees than not-for-profits. Their median fees are between 8% and 40% higher than the not-for-profits, depending on the municipality. Why? Are these fee (and revenue) differentials justified? The for-profit sector would prefer not to tell. They don’t want detailed accountability for the public funds they receive.

I have recently argued that the Ministry of Education should be requiring all operators in 2023 to submit detailed budgets of planned expenditures. These would be reconciled against actual spending (and profit) at the end of the year. This, along with related operating data, could provide the detailed costs and spending information the Ministry of Education would need to design a new costs-based funding system. But the Ministry doesn’t want to do that. Instead they are giving the for-profit child care operators a free pass for another year. The Ministry plans to develop a new costs-based funding system for 2024 with virtually no costs data upon which to build it. And, the for-profit operators are even objecting to this. They apparently want the free pass to continue for ever.

Why, you might wonder? From an economic point of view, the position of the for-profit operators is quite rational. They have a licence to provide child care services in Ontario and many of them make good money providing these services. From now on, having a licence to provide child care services to children 0-5 in Ontario is going to mean receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in guaranteed government funding; by September 2025, government-provided revenues will cover over 80% of the per-child costs of most centres. Access to this kind of government funding is scarce; not everyone can get a licence In a similar situation in Quebec, some fixed-fee centres have been able to sell their licences to new operators for over a million dollars. That’s not selling equipment or real estate; that’s just the price of buying the licence. In Ontario, the fewer the reporting requirements, the fewer the controls over how operators spend their money, the fewer the controls on profit, the higher will be the price when you come to sell your licence. Large big-box for-profit child care chains may be willing to pay top dollar for existing licences of small for-profit operators if there are very few controls on the reasonableness of costs and earnings. So, the demands of the for-profit operators are rational; they’re just not very good for Ontario children, families and for the building of a financially accountable child care system.

October 19, 2022December 24, 2024

FOUR URGENT STEPS TO BETTER CHILD CARE HEALTH

The second theme in today’s publication by IRPP (see earlier blog post for the first) is what needs to happen now to make sure that $10 a day child care works out for families and children. There’s a tsunami of additional demand for child care on the horizon as child care fees plummet and we’re not ready for it. Many provinces have not placed much emphasis on expansion of not-for-profit child care spaces and haven’t provided the funding or tools necessary to make it happen.

In today’s publication, which is available here…

IN ENGLISH: https://irpp.org/research-studies/early-learning-and-child-care-in-canada/

IN FRENCH: https://irpp.org/fr/research-studies/apprentissage-et-garde-des-jeunes-enfants-au-canada/

… I make the following recommendations to federal and provincial governments:

Rapidly expand not-for-profit and public child care facilities. Provincial and territorial governments should provide substantial capital grants or loan guarantees to not-for-profit operators to accelerate a planned and coordinated expansion. Large jurisdictions should enable specialized development agencies to design, plan and build not-for-profit centres, and should encourage the delivery of more child care services by municipalities, colleges and school boards.

Increase the wages of early childhood educators. With little improvement in pay for child care educators in over 30 years, wages have to rise substantially to recruit and retain enough qualified early childhood educators to meet demand and maintain or improve staff-child ratios.

Be prepared to inject more funding. No one has yet addressed whether $9 Billion a year is enough money to provide universal $10 a day child care in all jurisdictions, especially those where child care fees have been particularly high for years (e.g., B.C., Alberta, and Ontario). It probably isn’t. A cost-shared federal-provincial supplementary financing program in high-fee jurisdictions would make good fiscal and social sense, as governments get a substantial revenue boost from the increased labour force participation of mothers.

Close gaps in maternity and parental benefits. There is a stark difference in the coverage and generosity of maternity and parental benefits between Quebec, which has its own program, and the rest of Canada, which relies on federal Employment Insurance. The federal government should address these gaps as part of planned Employment Insurance reforms. It should follow through on the Liberals’ 2019 election platform promise to ensure that parent who do not qualify for paid leave through EI receive income benefits during the first year of their child’s life.

October 19, 2022December 24, 2024

Comparing Then and Now: Child Care and Child and Family Benefits

Here’s a quick summary of some key conclusions from my new study published by IRPP today – Early Learning and Child Care in Canada: Where Have We Come From, Where Are We Going?

IN ENGLISH: https://irpp.org/research-studies/early-learning-and-child-care-in-canada/

IN FRENCH: https://irpp.org/fr/research-studies/apprentissage-et-garde-des-jeunes-enfants-au-canada/

Factor	Progress	Description
Child care spaces	Positive	There were a lot more licensed child care spaces in 2019 than there were in 1986 — 7 times as many — serving a fairly stable number of children.
Children in centre care	Positive	The popularity and acceptance of licensed centre-based child care has increased dramatically. Back in the early 1980s, only about 10% of preschool children of employed mothers used centre care, 40% were in informal paid care and about 50% were cared for by family members. In 2019, about half of preschool children of employed parents were in centre care, 20% in paid family child care and 30% cared for by family members.
Full-day kindergarten	Positive	Kindergarten in public schools has moved from mostly half-days during the school year for 5-year-olds to being widely available for full schooldays to 4- and 5-year-olds.
Mothers in the workforce	Positive	Labour force participation of mothers has increased substantially since 1986. For instance, in 1986 the labour force participation rate for mothers with the youngest child 3 to 5 years of age was 62%. Now, it is 78%. This is still below rates in Quebec or for mothers with older children.
Child care fees	Negative	Child care fees have risen substantially over the period from the mid-1980s. In fact, using preschool fees as the marker and adjusting for inflation, typical child care centre fees are over $3,000 more expensive in Ontario, Alberta and Nova Scotia, and more than $2,000 more expensive in British Columbia and New Brunswick. Quebec and Manitoba have been notable exceptions.
Staff-child ratios	Mixed	In most provinces and territories, legislated staff-child ratios for centre care have not changed very much since 1986. Quebec’s staff-child ratios for children younger than 3 years are the worst across jurisdictions. The only province or territory to have gotten pretty consistently worse in staff-child ratios from 1986 to 2019 is Alberta.
Funding for low-income families	Mixed	Funding of child care services across Canada has changed dramatically over the years. Back in 1986, the main federal funding instrument was the Canada Assistance Plan, which funded child care subsidies. All provinces and territories had child care subsidy payment systems targeting lower-income families and children. More than half of all child care funding came in the form of subsidies — often much more than half. Nowadays, Quebec no longer has a child care subsidy program of this type. In other provinces and territories, child care subsidies now comprise about 40% of total funding. However, there were approximately twice as many children receiving low-income child care subsidies in 2019 as in 1986 (176,738 compared to approximately 82,000)
Funding for operators	Positive	Direct operational funding to licensed/regulated child care services — to lower fees, to raise wages, to improve quality — was in 2019 a very substantial proportion of all funding. It was nearly 100% of Quebec’s funding, and 50% on average in other provinces and territories.
Child care expenses deduction	Positive	The Child Care Expenses Deduction allows earners to deduct work-related child care expenses from income before taxes are assessed. In 1986, the claimable limit was $2,000 per child. Now, limits are $8,000 annually for children 0 to 6 and $5,000 annually for children 7 to 15 years.
Maternity and parental benefits	Positive	Parental benefits have changed very dramatically since 1986. There were no legislated parental benefits at that time, only 15 weeks of maternity benefits under Unemployment Insurance. Now, Quebec and the rest of Canada have different maternity and parental benefit schemes, offering different levels of income replacement and different amounts of benefits reserved for the non-birthing parent. The total length of benefits — maternity, parental, paternity — can exceed a year, and can now include self-employed parents.
Child care educator wages	Mixed	Child care staff were poorly paid in 1986 and they are still poorly paid. Data on child care workers’ compensation are sketchy, but the evidence suggests that child care wages have improved and that wage enhancement grants in various provinces and territories have had some effect. But the picture is uneven. In some of Canada’s largest provinces, where the bulk of child care educators are located, and compared with the average hourly earnings of other workers, the movement in wages over time has been small.
Federal child benefits	Positive	Federal child benefits are, without doubt, larger than they were in 1986. These benefits provide between $5,000 and $7,000 per child (depending on age) to families with low incomes and some amount of child benefits to nearly all families. These benefits have had an impact on child poverty and are a very significant boost to income for families with very low incomes.

March 27, 2022December 24, 2024

What Should We Look for in Ontario’s Child Care Agreement?

How should we judge whether the new Ontario child care agreement with the federal government is a good one? There are many things to look for; I’ve written about this before. Yet, if I boil it down, the key concern is how quickly Ontario is able and willing to expand services – moving towards a quality universal system of child care for preschool children.

There are two issues here. First, does Ontario have an ambitious plan to expand not-for-profit licensed capacity? We know that Ontario will eventually need between 200,000 and 300,000 additional child care spaces. We also know that even with no additional funding from the Ontario government, there is enough federal money to expand by at least 100,000 spaces in the new four-year agreement. Without dramatic expansion NOW there will be shortages and long waiting lists. Without substantial expansion, lower income families will be pushed to the back of the line and employment barriers for mothers will still be high. Ontario’s target should be at least 150,000 spaces over the term of the agreement. Anything less will be a big problem.

The second issue is really the first issue (in priority). Expansion cannot happen without more trained early childhood educators. An early childhood educator must have a two-year college diploma and related practicum experience. All jurisdictions across Canada are short of fully qualified educators already and we will need a minimum of 20,000 more in Ontario for capacity to expand. It will not be possible to expand the supply of trained educators and maintain quality services without improving salaries and benefits substantially. Does the new Ontario agreement have substantial up-front money flowing to increase staff compensation? If not, you know the government is not really serious about moving towards universal affordable high-quality care.

There are two things we know will be in the Ontario agreement, because they form the federal government’s bottom line. There will be a cut in licensed child care fees to 50% by the end of December 2022. And Ontario will agree that fees will be down to an average of $10 a day by the end of 2025-26. But is there a plan to deal with the very large increase in demand this will create? Is there capital money in grants and loans? Is there up-front money to help municipalities and non-profit providers jump into the development process now? Ontario’s Action Plan should answer this. If it doesn’t, Ontario has been wasting the year they waited to sign the agreement.

It’s about time that Ontario signed up and started working on affordability, availability, quality, and inclusivity. Better late than never. But I am concerned that Ontario is only worried about pinching pennies and has not done the work to plan for transforming Ontario’s child care system to meet parents’ needs.

February 15, 2022December 24, 2024

My Recent Presentation on Child Care Affordability

The Institute for Gender and the Economy recently sponsored a workshop on Care Work in the Recovery Economy. I did a short presentation with slides looking at Alberta’s new child care policies – following on the funding agreement with the federal government. Do the new policies get us to $10 a day? Are low-income families still disadvantaged with the burden of child care costs? I thought you might like to see the slides and draw conclusions.

Child-Care-Affordability_CARE-ECONOMY-presentation Download

And how about this neat graphic provided to me after the workshop by the workshop organizers!! It summarizes some of my main themes.

January 30, 2022December 24, 2024

ARMINE IS WRONG ABOUT DOUG FORD

I like Armine Yalnizyan. Usually, I agree with her. But I don’t appreciate her recent sympathy for Doug Ford (https://www.thestar.com/business/opinion/2022/01/25/doug-ford-is-the-only-premier-who-has-yet-to-sign-ottawas-10-a-day-child-care-deal-hes-right-to-push-back.html ). She sympathizes with Doug Ford’s reluctance to sign an agreement with the federal government to get billions of dollars per year to make licensed child care more affordable and more accessible for Ontario families. She agrees with Doug Ford that there is not enough money in the pot to lower fees on existing child care spaces AND expand child care capacity.

But she’s wrong. There is enough money on the table to take giant steps towards making child care both affordable and accessible in the next five years. After all, right now Ontario only spends about $2 billion per year on licensed child care. By 2025-26, the federal government will be providing over $3 billion of additional funds for Ontario to spend on child care. That more than doubles Ontario’s child care spending. Come on, Ontario! Sharpen your pencils! Can’t you figure an intelligent way to spend an extra $3 billion per year making child care more accessible and affordable for Ontario families?

Yes, it will be tough. Child care is expensive in Ontario, so cutting fees in half and then getting them down to $10 a day will be expensive. I estimate that it will cost just over $1 billion per year to cut current fees by half for existing child care spaces. And I estimate that the net cost of lowering fees on existing spaces to $10 a day will be just over $1.5 Billion. I’ve shared these calculations with Armine. That’s a lot of money, but over the next five years, offering existing child care spaces at $10 a day will eat up only about one-half of the cumulative total of $10.2 Billion that Ontario will get from the federal government over that time. That leaves half of the federal money to devote to expansion and to lowering the fees on new spaces down to $10 a day. And to increasing staff compensation so that new qualified staff can be recruited and existing staff will stay in the sector. And to all of the other aspects of building an affordable, accessible, high-quality system of child care in Ontario.

I calculate that the operating funding to lower fees to $10 a day for 100,000 new child care spaces would be about $1.2 Billion annually. That would bring Ontario’s coverage rate up to 47% – there would be capacity for 47% of all Ontario children 0-5. That’s not the 59% coverage that some other provinces – but not all – have promised. But 47% in Ontario means a lot more children have access to early childhood education than 47% would mean in other jurisdictions. Fortunately, we have very good full-day kindergarten for 4- and 5-year-olds. This was the same full-day kindergarten that Doug Ford wanted to dramatically downgrade back in 2019-2020. (https://members.etfo.ca/AboutETFO/Publications/PositionPapers/PositionPapersDocuments/Dr%20Gordon%20Cleveland%20Kindergarten%20Research%20Report%20Executive%20Summary.pdf ).

In fact, Doug Ford has a pretty poor record when it comes to supporting good-quality affordable early learning and child care. When he came into office back in 2018, he immediately cancelled Kathleen Wynne’s decision to proceed with providing free child care to preschool-age children. That would have cost about $1.6 Billion of provincial money. In its place, he devised the Ontario Child Care Tax Credit to provide a sprinkling of expenditure relief for the use of any type of child care. That provided very little support for families and did nothing to build a child care system. And then Ford and his ministers made plans to weaken full-day kindergarten but backed off at the last minute when they read the polls about how popular full-day kindergarten is. So, I don’t trust Doug Ford’s motives in delaying signing a child care agreement – he is not my child care knight in shining armour.

The federal government is offering provincial/territorial and Indigenous governments enough money to go a long way towards building an affordable, accessible Canada-wide child care system. Families need it; children need it – it’s time for Doug Ford to stop playing games and sign up for child care.