Child Care Growth, Expansion and Availability

August 5, 2024October 17, 2024

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 and school boards, knows exactly how to facilitate and co-ordinate the expansion of non-profit and public child care, because it has done this in the past.

So, if non-profit and public child care are not expanding rapidly in Ontario, it must have to do with the failures of Ontario government policy (as described in my recent blog post).

Ontario has failed to fix shortages of early childhood educators. Starting wages in Ontario are $5.00 an hour less than in P.E.I.!
It has failed to provide or enable sources of capital funding for expansion of community non-profit child care.
It has starved child care providers of revenue in the $10 a day program and has failed to provide any certainty about future revenue streams for operators.
Ontario has failed so comprehensively that you have to wonder if the failings are deliberate.

To cap it all off, we now find that Ontario is deliberately violating the terms of the Canada-Wide Agreement that it signed with the federal government back in March 2022. Ontario promised to increase child care capacity by at least 86,000 spaces, and it promised that a maximum of 30% of these new spaces would be operated by commercial for-profit operators. The balance would be community-based or school-based non-profit and public child care. It also promised that it would prioritize development of child care in underserved areas and amongst families with greater needs.

Instead, about 75% of the expansion that has occurred has been in for-profit spaces. And at least half of the new spaces are in areas of greater profitability rather than areas of greater need. Half of the new spaces can charge whatever fees they want, rather than being affordable spaces.

We know some details about Ontario’s expansion because of good journalism by Allison Jones of Canadian Press. She has recently written:

“Ontario’s deal committed the province to 86,000 new child–care spaces since 2019, though the deal was signed in 2022. But so far while there have been about 51,000 new spaces since 2019 for the kids five and under, the age group covered by the national program, only 25,500 of those are within the $10-a-day system.”

So, let’s do the math:

Pretty well all of the new spaces that are outside the $10 a day system (without any controls on fees) are for-profit, so that is already half of the 51,000 spaces.
Much of the growth inside the $10 a day system is also for-profit. When Ontario published its Action Plan in 2022 it told us that 15,000 spaces had opened since 2019 and 45% of this was for-profit.
A further 21,200 spaces were said to be “in the pipeline” and 66% of this was for-profit.
I estimate therefore that about half of the growth since 2019 that is inside the $10 a day system is for-profit (the Ministry of Education has these figures and is shy about releasing them, which tells you that they know they have something to hide).
In other words, about 75% of the total of 51,000 new spaces in Ontario since 2019 are in the for-profit sector.

This is a clear violation of the Canada-Wide Agreement Ontario signed in 2022. In that agreement it promised that “at the end of this Agreement, the proportion of not-for-profit licensed child care spaces for children age 0 to 5 compared to the total number of licensed child care spaces for children age 0 to 5 will be 70% or higher.” (emphasis added). The agreement clarifies the purpose of this clause: “to ensure that the existing proportion of not-for-profit licensed child care spaces for children age 0 to 5 will be maintained or increased by the end of this Agreement.”

In case there was any doubt, the “definitions” section of the agreement refers to the Child Care and Early Years Act, 2014 in defining licensed child care. In other words, it refers to all licensed child care governed by that act.

So, Ontario is taking federal money intended to build a publicly-managed, affordable and accessible high quality child care system and it is not doing what is necessary to provide spaces for children and families.

Of course, parents who are desperate for child care spaces right now don’t care if the spaces are for-profit, non-profit or public. They just want a space for their child and they want it now. The negative effects of relying on for-profit child care without sufficient controls won’t show up for a while.

That’s what happened in the early 2000s when the Government of Quebec, under Jean Charest, tried the same trick – relying on for-profit child care for expansion. The results were disastrous for the quality of child care services, with nearly half of the new for-profit centres failing quality assessments sponsored by the Quebec Government. Similar quality problems are what led Mathieu Lacombe, the Quebec Minister of Families from 2018 to 2022 to say that allowing for the expansion of private daycare, was the ‘biggest mistake the Quebec government committed in the last 25 years.”

As I wrote in that recent blog:

I am not trying to say that all for-profit operators provide poor quality child care or that all of them skimp on child care staffing. Some small for-profit operators provide good quality care and devote themselves to quality improvements. You can have a certain percentage of for-profit providers in a publicly-funded child care system, but there need to be strong measures of public management that limit the ability of for-profit enterprises to extract profit at the expense of quality.

That was the spirit of the Agreement that Ontario signed up to in 2022. If Ontario were to implement this agreement in good faith, it would adopt a generous funding formula to cover actual costs, it would make expansion of child care into an all-of-government priority with a range of provisions for capital financing, it would develop a wage grid for child care educators that is at least as generous as the one in PEI and it would implement the agreement it signed on the balance of non-profit and for-profit expansion. Ontario’s parents and children need the $10 a day child care system they were promised.

December 5, 2023December 24, 2024

The story coming from the CSELCC survey – I don’t think we’re going to make it…not even close!

We know that child care affordability is improving dramatically because of the $10-a-day program (otherwise known as CWELCC or the Canada-Wide Early Learning and Child Care Program). But what about access and availability? It’s difficult to know. There is some activity, and lots of announcements, but are there actually more children using licensed child care? A really important question, because most of the social and economic benefits of the $10-a-day program come from improving access to children and families that haven’t used child care before.

Finally we have some solid answers. Statistics Canada just completed a massive survey of parents across the country that tells us how many children have access to centre-based child care (the overwhelming bulk of licensed child care in the CWELCC program is in centres). We can compare this to the situation before the pandemic in 2019. Unfortunately, the picture is not positive.

Looking only at the provinces and territories that are part of the CWELCC program (i.e., leaving out Quebec), there are 521,800 children 0-5 using centre-based child care in 2023. There were 483,200 children 0-5 using centre-based child care in 2019. That’s an increase of centre-based spaces in the provinces and territories participating in CWELCC of 38,600 spaces over the course of the last 4 years, an increase of about 8%.

However, the agreements signed between the federal government and the provinces and territories promised that there will be 250,000 additional child care spaces available by March 31^st, 2026. That would be an increase of over 50% compared to the spaces that were available in 2019. That’s just over two years away. I don’t think we’re going to make it. Not even close!

The CSELCC survey indicates that 49% of parents using child care reported difficulty finding it. Up from 36% in 2019.

In 2023, 26% of parents with children 0-5 who are not using child care reported that their child is on a waitlist for child care, up from 19% in 2019. Almost half (47%) of infants younger than one year who are not using child care are on a waitlist!!! That’s up from 38% in 2022.

Yes, the affordability problem has improved. But availability or access is either worse or not much better depending on your point of view. And accessibility is improving at a snail’s pace compared to the promised additional 250,000 spaces. Hurray for Statistics Canada giving us a clear picture of this problem. Now federal and provincial/territorial governments have to seriously address the problems of how to grow our wonderful child care system in the not-for-profit and public sectors that are the priority.

August 17, 2023December 24, 2024

British Columbia’s New Spaces Funding Program

My opinion of British Columbia’s New Spaces Fund is shaped by the context. It’s a valuable, if imperfect, source of capital funding for the expansion of not-for-profit and public child care.

The context is that we’re not doing a good job in expanding the availability of child care services in Canada. That’s disappointing, of course, but also a danger to the ultimate success of the Canada-Wide Early Learning and Child Care program.

Without rapidly expanded capacity, most parents will not be able to benefit from $10 a day child care. Women will not be able to enter the labour force. The economic growth benefits of child care will not happen. Parents will be angry and frustrated at governments that have promised them services they can’t deliver. A new government may come in and turn everything over to the for-profit sector, loosening staffing regulations, and allowing operators to surcharge parents for “extras” to make providing child care more profitable.

The decision of federal and provincial/territorial governments to rely on the not-for-profit and public sectors for child care capacity was good for the long-run, but it’s having lots of problems in the short run. Not-for-profit and public services are typically of higher quality with better effects on children’s lives. Not-for-profit and public services become trustworthy community assets, here for the long term, in a way that for-profits do not, always anxious to sell assets or property to the highest bidder.

But, not-for-profits need more help to expand than the for-profits do. For-profits have better access to capital funding from the private sector than not-for-profits do; many banks and financial institutions are unwilling to make construction loans and mortgages to not-for-profit organizations. Most not-for-profit organizations find it too risky to make expansion promises until future on-going operational funding arrangements for services are settled; some for-profit organizations are willing to take a gamble that future operational funding will be generous, or that costs can be slashed to ensure a profit. On top of all this is the shortage of qualified early childhood educators. Not-for-profits are typically unwilling to expand until they can hire enough fully-qualified educators to run good-quality programs. For-profits are often willing to plan to operate without a full complement of trained staff, hoping they can get exemptions from government regulations and be able to operate with unqualified staff.

British Columbia’s New Spaces Fund is not perfect. Yet, in the context I’ve just described, it provides some important support for child care expansion to not-for-profit and public organizations in B.C. And that’s a lot more than I can say for most of Canada’s provinces, outside Quebec. The New Spaces program provides capital grants only to not-for-profit and public organizations who are willing and anxious to expand the supply of child care services. Previously, it was available to the for-profit sector who did not need it; that was a big mistake that has since been corrected. The budget last year was $292 million, about $84 million from provincial funds and the rest from federal funding under the Canada-Wide ELCC program.

Some of the projects are for minor renovations, some for equipment only, but some are for much bigger projects. The new Ministry of Education and Child Care prefers to have projects that are funded for $40,000 or less per space, but this restriction can be waived. Since, construction costs have been rising rapidly, $40,000 per space is now below full cost for many projects. And applicants are expected to come up with 10% of the entire project cost from other sources.

It’s also a one-time capital grant, so you have to know a lot of detailed cost and design elements up-front when you apply. At the time you apply, you are guessing at much of this. This is a disadvantage. A capital program, instead of a one-time capital grant, can be more flexible.

Eligible costs for the New Spaces program include project management, design/engineering costs and site evaluations, architect and accountant fees, and business planning development (business case model and analysis). Also eligible are infrastructure costs – water, sewer, roads, sidewalks. And equipment. And GST/PST and a 10% contingency.) Not included are costs of purchasing real estate, or buildings or commercial space (however, modular buildings to be erected on site are an eligible expenditure).

Many of the applicants for New Spaces funding are local governments, school boards, health district authorities, public post-secondary institutions, and First Nations. This is a great use of the program. Many of these bodies may have access to land for building, and many will have considerable experience in managing large development projects.

The New Spaces Fund is application-driven. In other words, organizations have to take the initiative and plan child care expansion and apply for capital funding. The New Spaces Fund is therefore a capital grants program, it is not part of a program of capital expansion. In many ways, this is a weakness and this feature has been criticized. Advocates say that B.C. needs planned child care expansion, focused first on areas of higher need, with support for many aspects of expansion – not just capital grants. Most child care centres do not have the resources to take on major capital development, raising millions of dollars of capital funding and managing multi-year expansion projects. Capital expansion requires more than just money. It needs organizations that will take responsibility for development; it needs architects with knowledge of child care, it needs design standards. It also needs a much longer guarantee that facilities will stay in place than the current 10-year requirement of the New Spaces Fund. Manitoba’s Ready-to-Move program is a model to look at for how resources of different actors can be mobilized for child care expansion.

While that’s true, let’s give B.C. some kudos for having a program of capital grants at all. Believe it or not, most provinces apparently believe that (capital) money grows on trees (for not-for-profit and public organizations). Alberta offers $5,000- $6,000 per space. Ontario offers about $7,000 per space. In the context where the cost of new-build construction is often more like $50,000-$60,000 per space, that’s not a serious amount of capital assistance.

B.C. has much to do. They are planning development of a wage grid to attract early childhood educators, but there is no deadline for when this will happen.

B.C. has not yet developed a funding formula for the provision of operational funding when parent fees are an average of $10 a day for everyone. This means that future revenue streams are uncertain, so the planning of child care expansion for not-for-profit and public services is more risky than it needs to be.

B.C. has not yet developed mechanisms for planning and guiding the child care expansion that will have to happen. Based on current use patterns in Quebec where parent fees are now $8.75 a day, we can expect that B.C. will need to have spaces for 174,180 children 0-5. That would mean a need for about 77,750 additional child care spaces compared to 2021. So, B.C. needs to get its game on. As many other provinces do.

June 27, 2023December 24, 2024

Modular Child Care Expansion in Manitoba: An Idea Worth Looking At

This is a good-news story about the expansion of child care capacity.

Right now, there are not many good-news stories; child care expansion is happening much slower than it should be. And all the indications are that even the 250,000 additional child care spaces that provinces and territories have planned (but not funded!) by 2026 will not be enough. TD Economics, in its recent publication, calculates that at least 243,000 MORE spaces will be needed to satisfy demand for child care when it is available at $10 a day.

So, we had better get working on designing, funding and building extra child care capacity.

Manitoba has a good plan for how to expand child care services in rural, remote and northern communities. It’s called the Ready-to-Move project. Its origins were with the 2017 Canada-Manitoba ELCC agreement when the Department of Families in Manitoba developed three rural child care facilities through a modular construction project. The initiative was developed by the Department in co-operation with Manitoba’s Social Innovation Office which seeks innovative solutions for complex social and environmental issues. By the way, Early Learning and Child Care is , since 2022, part of the Department of Education and Early Childhood Learning.

The Winnipeg Metropolitan Region has an incorporated entity called JQ Built that is providing project management support to municipalities that wanted to be involved. The result is known by the name “Daycare in a Box”. It creates modular buildings with a pre-fabricated construction process. The child care centres are made in a manufacturing facility in Winnipeg and transported to a permanent site in the relevant municipality for assembly.

To date, there are 23 communities with projects approved and another 14 applications being considered for future rounds of development. The first batch of facilities began construction in February 2023, and the first facility is planned for opening on July 21, 2023. That’s quick!

Municipalities and First Nations communities that want to participate have to provide serviced land in their community rent-free for 15 years. And they have to agree to provide maintenance, snow clearing and repair services for this period.

The province is providing 100% of the capital funding for the centres. This is an investment of between $4 million and $6 million each depending upon the size of facility. A 74-space facility is about $4 million while a 104-space facility is closer to $6 million. The centres will become municipal assets.

So, let’s make a tally:

100% capital funding from the province – check

Municipalities and First Nations communities have serious skin in the game – check

There is an experienced public sector project manager to provide development services that child care centre leadership cannot readily do – check

The centres become municipal assets in perpetuity – check

The whole process is designed to provide new spaces quickly in areas that are currently underserved – check.

I like it.

Of course, it’s only a beginning. It is not the model for every situation. And attracting sufficient fully-qualified educators is still an unsolved problem. But, it’s a good initiative that deserves attention from other jurisdictions. Good on you, Manitoba.

January 20, 2023December 24, 2024

Is Ontario About to Violate the Early Learning and Child Care Agreement it Signed?

Not-for-profit and public services are at the heart of Ontario child care. Overall, they care for more than three-quarters of our children in licensed child care. For children 0-5 years of age, that number has been 70% of children compared to 30% in commercial child care arrangements.

I guess that’s why Ontario didn’t fuss too much about agreeing with the federal government that this percentage – at least 70% not-for-profit and public – would stay the same when licensed child care moves to $10 a day by 2026. In March 2022, Ontario signed an agreement with the federal government to get about $10 billion over 4 years in order to transform Ontario’s child care into an affordable, increasingly accessible service provided predominantly by not-for-profit and public providers.

That Agreement is admirably clear on the limits to for-profit expansion. In Section 2.1.1, Ontario commits that “at the end of this Agreement, the proportion of not-for-profit licensed child care spaces for children age 0 to 5 compared to the total number of licensed child care spaces for children age 0 to 5 will be 70% or higher.” (emphasis added)

This commitment is repeated in Ontario’s Action Plan in Section 4.4.

However, there is increasing evidence that Ontario regrets the terms they agreed to in March of 2022. I have now heard from the Ministry of Education that Ontario no longer plans to respect this part of the Agreement.

Of course, the Canada-Ontario Agreement is a contract and payment of federal money depends on following its terms. So, the Ministry of Education is twisting itself into a pretzel trying to justify its new intentions. The Ministry of Education has now decided that the insistence upon a minimum of 70% not-for-profit services, despite the clear wording above, refers only to services that are in receipt of federally-provided operating funding and does not apply to all licensed child care. But – read the underlined section again – they are obviously wrong.

Why is this happening now? For-profit expansion was front-end-loaded by the current government. Many for-profit operators applied for licences over the months that Ontario was dithering about whether to sign an agreement to take billions of dollars of federal child care money. As a result in order to stick to the original 70% rule, the province could only license about 2,300 more spaces between now and 2026, according to my calculations. All the rest of the expansion, tens of thousands of spaces, would have to come from either not-for-profit or public operators.

Apparently, the government of Ontario, and the for-profit lobbyists that appear to dictate its recent policy changes, did not like this logic. Ontario now wants to be allowed to license dozens or hundreds more of these for-profit operators whose fees will not be controlled.

The Ministry of Education’s reinterpretation of the Agreement would mean more for-profit expansion than the current limit of 2,300 within federally-funded services. Plus, it would allow for an infinite amount of for-profit expansion outside of the funding agreement. Presumably, once this agreement ends in 2026, all these new for-profits outside the agreement could be welcomed by Ontario into a new five-year funding arrangement with the federal government.

For-profit expansion outside of the funding agreement will not be planned or controlled in any way. It will, no doubt, happen in the big population centres where most services are already located, not in priority underserved neighbourhoods.

This latest travesty comes on top of other instances of Ministry of Education fealty to Ontario’s for-profit operators. We need to make it clear that this is unacceptable. Parents want and need good quality, affordable child care. They will get that in a system dominated by not-for-profit logic. But they will not get good quality affordable child care if commercial interests are allowed to take complete control of Ontario’s child care policies.

January 6, 2023December 24, 2024

HOW CAN EARLY LEARNING AND CHILD CARE EXPANSION HAPPEN IN ONTARIO?

These are the slides from my presentation January 5th, 2023 to the Building Blocks for Child Care (B2C2) webinar on expansion of child care in Ontario. The table of wages in different occupations in Ontario that supports the chart in this presentation is also posted on this website nearby.

Gord Cleveland presentation B2C2-webinar-on-expansion-in-Ontario Download

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 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.

May 25, 2021December 24, 2024

How Big Will the Expansion of Child Care Services Need to be in Ontario?

The federal budget puts forward very substantial amounts of money for early learning and child care – $30 Billion over 5 years, or more importantly $8.3 Billion of new federal money in perpetuity from 2025-26 onwards. The federal template calls for a cut of 50% in parent fees by the end of 2022, and an average fee of $10 a day for children 0-5 years of age across Canada (outside Quebec) by 2025-26.

How much more child care capacity will Ontario need? It’s an important question. Ontario will need to plan a very rapid expansion of capacity, but do it wisely so that the new child care capacity offers good quality services and is created where it is most needed.

The bottom-line conclusion from the rough calculation below is that when we lower parent fees dramatically in Ontario, we will have a very substantial number of children wanting to use licensed child care. We are likely to need about 200,000 new spaces if parent fees are cut by 50% and we will need about 300,000 spaces if parent fees are reduced to $10 a day (similar to Quebec).

TABLE 1
Children, Spaces, and Need for Child Care Capacity in Ontario

	# of children in ON	Current # of spaces in centres and home child care ( 2019 -20 est.)	Total # of licensed spaces needed to match Quebec take-up rates	Est. # of licensed spaces needed if fee cut by 50%	Children in ON with mothers in labour force
Infant (0-18 months)	201,900	14,800	70,300	24,400
Toddler (18-30 months)	135,600	51,000	89,300	84,200
Preschool (30 – 48 months)	278,900	120,000	203,500	198,200
Kindergarten (48–72 months)	286,500	111,900	236,900	184,800
Total for 0-5 years	902,900	297,600	600,000	491,600	545,000*

Notes: Numbers are rounded to nearest 100. Numbers for preschoolers have been corrected.
* Number of children 1-5 years with mothers in labour force is 466,100. The number of children 0-5 years of age currently using any form of non-parental child care is about 475,000.

Table 1 gives the numbers. It tells us how many children in each of the traditional age groupings (infant, toddler, preschool and kindergarten) there are in Ontario. It tells us the estimated number of centre-based plus home child care spaces currently available[1]. It tells us how many spaces would be needed in each of these age groupings in Ontario if our child care take-up rates were the same as those in Quebec. In the next column, we show a rough calculation of how many licensed spaces would be needed if parent fees are cut by 50% (this is supposed to happen by the end of 2022). The final column shows us, for reference, how many children in Ontario currently have mothers in the labour force (and might therefore switch into licensed child care from some other arrangement).

We are likely to need about 200,000 new spaces if parent fees are cut by 50% and we will need about 300,000 spaces if parent fees are reduced to $10 a day. This calculation ignores any increase in the use of school aged child care for children in Grade 1 and above (which we should expect). It also ignores any decisions by parents to use infant care in order to get around waiting lists for services for older children.

If we take the rough estimates of demand when parent fees are cut by 50%, these imply that we will need nearly 10,000 more infant spaces, 33,000 more toddler spaces, 78,200 more preschool spaces and 73,000 additional kindergarten spaces by the end of 2022 to avoid facing shortages of child care supply.

The shortage of trained ECEs will be a very significant constraint on expansion as well. Already there are substantial shortages of Registered Early Childhood Educators. For a very rough calculation, we might assume (based on calculations in Appendix B of Affordable for All: Making Licensed Child Care Affordable in Ontario) that one new staff member will be needed for every four children in 0-5 year old licensed child care and, varying across ages, about half of these will need to be RECEs. If this were true, Ontario would need about 18,750 new ECEs by the end of 2022 and a total of about 31,250 new ECEs by 2025-26. And this does not account for additional centre supervisors needed.

These calculations have lots of potential policy implications. One is that capital expansion has to proceed very quickly. A second is that the expansion of the trained workforce cannot wait. A third is that there will be excess demand at certain times, so we need to consider how waiting lists and other ways of managing this demand will work. I will explore these and other implications soon.

[1] Currently available means 2019-20 which is before the pandemic. Hopefully, most of these spaces will reopen after the pandemic, but this is uncertain.