Category: Affordability and Funding of CC

Cost of child care to parents and how governments fund child care

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$10 a Day Child Care Will Dramatically Reduce Employment Barriers for Parents

A major new study (https://childcarepolicy.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Ten_a_day-paper-web.pdf ) addresses the question of whether the $10 a day program will truly improve child care affordability and reduce barriers to employment for families.  It was written by economists Gordon Cleveland and Michael Krashinsky from the Department of Management at University of Toronto Scarborough.

Their study focuses on the situation facing couple families with one infant child and one preschooler in each of the three provinces at different possible levels of income.  The authors’ main conclusion is that the $10 a day program can and should dramatically change child care affordability and make employment a worthwhile option for many caregiving parents.  However, even if provinces and territories adopt a flat fee of $10 a day, they will need to have some kind of sliding scale to ensure that low-income families are not disadvantaged.

On the basis of this work, Dr. Gordon Cleveland says

  • “Ontario should sign a funding deal soon with the federal government; if they don’t reach an agreement by early next year, Ontario will lose about $1 Billion in child care funding.”  
  • “Our work shows that child care costs are a very large barrier to employment for many two-parent families, and that $10 a day child care will dramatically reduce those barriers.” 
  • “To reach an agreement, Ontario needs to develop a child care Action Plan.  That plan needs to include support for dramatic expansion of non-profit child care – at least 150,000 spaces over 5 years.   It needs a plan to phase-in more affordable child care, so that supply and demand increase together.  And it needs plans to pay early childhood educators more so we can recruit more trained staff now.”

Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland’s April Budget is spending $30 Billion over 5 years to make child care affordable enough to eliminate this major barrier to the employment of mothers of young children across Canada. As of December 2021, nine provinces and territories have signed on to the $10 a day early learning and child care program, with Ontario being a notable holdout.  This timely study seeks to determine whether the $10 a day policy gamble is likely to work, and what kind of funding reforms will make the effects more equitable.

Specific conclusions of the study include:

  • Under current policies, if a couple family with two children cannot access subsidies in Ontario (and most cannot) licensed child care at any income level is remarkably unaffordable. 
  • If Ontario offered licensed child care at a flat fee of $10 a day per child along with the existing tax credit, a couple family with two children would pay less than 15% of the caregiving parent’s income contribution in child care fees, no matter what their income level.  The child care cost barrier to employment would be dramatically reduced.
  • Alberta’s new funding policies agreed to with the federal government will improve affordability, particularly for families at higher levels of income.  Alberta plans to offer substantial operating grants to child care centres and homes to allow them to lower parent fees.  And Alberta is extending its subsidy system to cover families with partial subsidies out to $180,000 of family income.
  • The combination of grants and subsidies will still leave Calgary couple families with two children giving up more than 30% of net extra employment income if the caregiving parent earns less than $44,000 (family income of $110,000).   In other words, child care will be unaffordable for these families even when Alberta’s new child care policies are fully implemented. 
  • Edmonton families will be better off than Calgary families because median fees start off at a lower level before the new funding programs.  Only families where the caregiving parent earns less than about $18,000 (family income of $45,000) will find child care unaffordable (30% or more of the net income contribution of the second earner).
  • Manitoba pioneered flat fees for child care, and operational funding to lower fees.  However, its positive reputation is not supported by measures of current child care affordability. 
  • A flat fee of $10 a day per child (with no subsidy system) would improve affordability for nearly all couple families with two children in Manitoba except when the caregiving parent’s income is $14,000 or below.    However, a flat fee will mean that affordability is always worse for families the lower their income. 
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Lies, Damned Lies, and Conservative Politicians

What a lot of whoppers!  If Erin O’Toole were Pinocchio, his nose would be 10 feet long by now.  Erin O’Toole, leader of the Conservative Party of Canada, has now come out with a full platform of policies, including policies on early learning and child care.  In it, he promises  (1) “to provide increased support for working families by providing increased funding for child care” (2) that “nobody should be prevented from getting back to work because they can’t afford child care” (3) that the Conservative policy will be “covering up to 75% of the cost of child care for lower income families” and (4) that “this will massively increase the support that lower income families receive and provide more assistance to almost all families”.  All of these promises are on page 47 of “Canada’s Recovery Plan” published by the Conservative Party of Canada. 

I live in Ontario, so I am going to look at this from an Ontario perspective.   Ontario ALREADY HAS a refundable tax credit for child care.  It already pays some money back to you in compensation for child care expenditures that are related to parental work or study.  The O’Toole policy is a bit more generous, especially for higher-income families, but has the same eligibility rules.  Since you can’t get paid twice for the same expenditures, the best the federal program can do is to REPLACE THE ALREADY EXISTING PROVINCIAL TAX CREDIT. At the same time, O’Toole is going to get rid of the federal Child Care Expense Deduction.

What does this mean for families in Ontario?  If you currently earn $30,000, your new tax credit will give you $640 more than the old one, but you will lose up to $1,200 of Child Care Expense Deduction.  You will be worse off.

If you currently earn $120,000, your new tax credit will give you $3,360 more than the old one, but you will lose up to $2,080 of Child Care Expense Deduction.  You will be better off to the tune of $1,280 per child per year.  Many other families’ situations will lie between these two examples.

Conclusions?

In Ontario, low income families will be worse off with the O’Toole plan.  Higher income families will be better off, but only by a couple of thousand dollars.   The chief beneficiary will be the Doug Ford government that will save about $400 million per year when it’s current child care tax credit program is superseded.

Should we be surprised?  The median cost of licensed child care in Ontario in 2020 was just over $17,000 for infants, just over $14,000 for toddlers, and just over $12,000 for preschoolers (2½ – 5 years).   For most families that can’t afford these fees now, a tax credit that gives you a couple of thousand dollars at best and limits the maximum subsidizable fee to $8,000 probably won’t change things much.

Should we be surprised?  Since we already have a refundable child care tax credit in Ontario and we have had it since 2019, we know whether this program will solve the child care affordability problem.  It doesn’t. 

Should we be surprised?  The Financial Accountability Office of Ontario analyzed what the effects of the Doug Ford tax credit would be back in 2019.  They concluded that: “Families that receive the CARE tax credit will receive an average benefit of approximately $1,300.”  Not $6,000 or $4,000, but $1,300.  They knew this program would not do much.  And the Financial Accountability Office also knew that low-income families were NOT going to benefit much.  As they concluded: “fewer than 300 families, or 0.1 per cent of all CARE tax credit recipients, will receive the maximum benefit entitlement per child” (p.3).  In other words, fewer than 300 families across Ontario would receive back 75% of their child care expenses.

Should we be surprised?  We know the approximate cost of the Erin O’Toole tax credit.  A very similar proposal was analyzed in 2017 by the C.D. Howe Institute.  The net cost was $1.2 Billion per year.  The ongoing amount of federal spending announced in the recent federal budget was $9.2 Billion per year.  Does Erin O’Toole really think that a program that is less than 1/7th the size of the proposed federal program will have a bigger impact on child care affordability?  I don’t think so.

Should we be surprised?  Reducing the child care affordability barrier to women’s full participation in employment is a big problem, not a small problem.  In a 2018 report to the Government of Ontario, I calculated that in 45% of Ontario families, the cost of licensed child care would eat up over 60% of the mother’s earnings contribution to household income.  For another 33% of families, the costs would eat up between 30% and 60% of the mother’s earnings contribution.  The Ford tax credit for child care expenses has not changed this situation by much, and neither would the O’Toole tax credit.  It will cost a lot of money to change this major employment barrier and O’Toole is not willing to spend it. 

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How much will Doug Ford’s tax credit for child care cost?

Doug Ford’s promised in the last election to deliver child care affordability for a small amount of money ($389 million per year) for all children in Ontario 0-14 years of age. That’s a total of 2.2 million children. In other words, Doug Ford thinks he can make child care affordable for a price of less than $180.00 per child per year. On the face of it, this cannot possibly be true.

Continue reading “How much will Doug Ford’s tax credit for child care cost?”

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Full Report: Affordable for All

Here is the full final report “Affordable for All: Making Licensed Child Care Affordable in Ontario” as submitted to the Ontario Ministry of Education. This report is still being translated into French, so it is possible that page numbers will change in the final version released by the Ontario Government. Those who intend to reference this report in an academic publication should refer back here in a few weeks for the absolutely final version.

Continue reading “Full Report: Affordable for All”