Category: The Clash of Child Care Policies – What’s Best?

Universal $10 a day child care? Tax credits for any type of care? Money to parents as a family allowance?

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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 here, but much falsehood, and much deliberate ignoring of the evidence on the impact of a “family allowance” approach.  I have just written a report for The Prosperity Project that examines the likely impacts of giving parents money instead of funding and providing child care services that parents can use.  I unearth a lot of new data about families that are using child care in Canada and the number of parents who want access to affordable, accessible, high quality child care. 

The evidence shows that this type of “family allowance” fails as public policy because it:

(a) isn’t what most families want

(b) doesn’t address families’ needs for child care

(c) would be much more expensive than the $10 a day program

(d) would have negative effects on women’s employment and the economy, and would increase the gender-based child penalty that mothers pay with reduced earnings

(e) has been tried before and hasn’t solved child care issues, and

(f) ignores the very large child benefit programs that already provide money to parents.

You should read the report in full (19 pages), or at least its Executive Summary (3 pages).  Below, I provide a few tidbits to encourage you to dig deeper.

  • As of 2023, when Statistics Canada collected large amounts of data from parents about child care and employment, there are 938,000 Canadian children using licensed or accredited child care services – the kind of services supported by the federal government program.  In fact, over three-quarters of children using any kind of child care are in licensed care.   In 8 of Canada’s 13 jurisdictions, average fees for this child care is down to $10 a day or less.  Other jurisdictions have lowered fees by at least half relative to fee levels in 2019-20.  In other words, although the press scarcely covers it, a very large number of Canadian children and families are already benefiting from licensed child care that is subsidized to be affordable and more accessible.
    • Licensed child care is not the only part of the set of services and benefits that will make up a fully developed early learning and child care system.  Many children benefit from full-day or part-day kindergarten at ages 4 and 5 years.  Many children and families benefit from paid maternity and parental leave for up to 12 or even 18 months.  If we put these all together, it is already true that in 2023 over 1.5 million children currently benefit from Canada’s early learning and child care and leave arrangements.  That is about 2/3rds of all children 0-5 years of age.  
    • Some people think that the reason some parents don’t currently use child care is because they don’t want to.  But, outside Quebec, most families (58%) that currently do not use any child care would like to use some type of non-parental child care if they can find what they need and want.  And, of these, the lion’s share – 62% – would like to use licensed child care, largely as a means to join or rejoin the workforce. 
    • Some people argue that it is mostly affluent parents that benefit from universal child care programs and that marginalized families and those from diverse backgrounds are left behind.  That is certainly true of market-based child care systems when fees are not controlled; high parent fees are only affordable by affluent families and many vulnerable families do not qualify for income-based subsidies.  However in fixed-fee systems like the $10 a day program, families from all backgrounds gain access.  I show a series of charts from Quebec making this point.
    • A family allowance program would have to give parents an amount of money that was equivalent, on average, to what they gain by having $10 a day child care.  This family allowance program would cost the federal government just over $28.5 billion annually and its net cost would be three times as much as the cost of providing child care services.  
    • Women who have children suffer substantial losses in earnings after the birth of a child.  Economists have found that mothers’ earnings decrease by 49% in the year of a child’s birth.  Even ten years later, women suffer from an average earnings loss of 34% relative to their earnings before childbirth. Universal child care has been found to substantially reduce these “child penalties”.  In other words, accessible child care services make an important contribution to increasing gender equity.

    Please read the full report and executive summary. 

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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 about Quebec are wrong.  Second and more fundamentally, only part of Quebec’s child care system is supply-side funded and charges parents a fixed fee of approximately $10 a day.  The other part (about 20% of the total) is demand-side funded like in Australia.  In the demand-side-funded part, child care providers can set whatever parent fees the market will bear and some of this later gets reimbursed to parents.  So, some of John’s comparisons, particularly on affordability and quality, are actually comparing a mixed system (Quebec) to a demand-side-funded system (New South Wales).  These comparisons don’t tell us much about how a supply-side funded system would perform in Australia.  Third, John does not explain how a demand-side funded child care system can deliver what we want from a universal child care system – dependably low fees, financial accountability for public funds, and planned expansion of capacity according to need.  Let me explain.

    Much of John’s paper is captured in Table 1 – Summary of ECEC Indicators.  There’s a column for Quebec and one for New South Wales, comparing results on different indicators of ECEC health.  I reprint it below.

    Workforce Participation
    John agrees that Quebec does a better job than New South Wales in workforce participation.  Absolutely true.  85% labour force participation for Quebec mothers with young children vs 71% in Australia.  Add on top of that the fact that most Quebec mothers work full-time vs. Australian mothers mostly part-time and it does appear that a fixed low parent fee really does have a very substantial impact on mothers’ employment. 

    Affordability
    John then presents comparisons of affordability, but his numbers are too generous to New South Wales and not generous enough to Quebec.  The differences in parent fees between supply-side funding and demand-side funding are much bigger than he admits.  On NSW, John calculates that for a family with average income, the parent fee for a first child is $29.50 per day and for a second child it is $10.05 per day.  In fact, the Productivity Commission draft report says that the average per child out-of-pocket parent fee across Australia (and therefore likely in NSW) is just shy of $45 per day. That includes the extra charges for centres open more than 10 hours per day, where parents have to pay the full fee for these extra hours even though they don’t use them.

    And the Quebec numbers on parent fees are too high.  In the supply-side funded centres and family homes, the daily fee for every child in 2024 is CA $9.10 (or about AU $10).  The figure John quotes for Quebec of  CA $17.20 per day includes the children who pay $9.10 but it also includes the high parent fees paid by demand-side funded parents before the tax credit reimburses them.  In a fair comparison, Quebec’s child care is cheaper than in NSW by a considerable amount, not just by a little bit.  That helps us understand why mothers’ employment has been so responsive in Quebec.

    Accessibility
    Then there is accessibility.  According to John, NSW scores high on accessibility of child care.  But, he chooses a strange way of measuring it.  He chooses the growth in the number of centre-based child care spaces in the last 5 years.  NSW has added more child care spaces so therefore he concludes that accessibility is better in NSW.  

    A much better measure of accessibility would have been the coverage rate – what percent of the child population could be accommodated in approved services (licenced services in Canada).  John provides these numbers on page 6 of his paper, but not in Table1 and not in his conclusions about accessibility.  In fact, as he records, about 75% of  children 0-5 in Quebec are in early childhood services.  This compares to about 60% in New South Wales.  John makes a big deal about services growing in New South Wales and not growing in Quebec.  Of course, that’s what you would expect if accessibility was already better in Quebec; it wouldn’t need to grow its services as fast.  The current rate of growth of services is not a good measure of current accessibility.

    And if you compare the number of days of child care attended in Quebec and NSW, the accessibility in Quebec is even stronger.  Over 90% of the children in Quebec who attend ECEC do so on a  full-time basis, compared to about 30% in Australia (with another 25% in Australia attending 4 days a week).

    Quality
    Finally, we get to a part of the comparison between Quebec and NSW on which John and I agree.  The quality of child care in Quebec is lower than it should be, and probably is lower than it is in NSW.  The most obvious indicators of this are the child-staff ratios.  5 children to 1 staff member for very young infants in Quebec vs. 4 to 1 in NSW.  Personally, I think both of these ratios are too high for the very young, but I agree that a 5 to 1 ratio is shocking.  As is a ratio of 8 to 1 in Quebec after children turn 19 months of age. 

    Quebec is an outlier here in Canada too.  In Ontario, the required ratios are 10 children to 3 staff members for children 0-17 months, 5:1 for children 18 months to 35 months, and 8:1 for children 3 years to 6 years (except for before-and-after school care for kindergarten children).  NSW’s ratios are comparable to Ontario’s. 

    Similarly, the wage rates paid to educators in Quebec are worse than in New South Wales.  John is right on this.

    John overstates the differences in percent of educators required to be qualified.  He says it is 50% in Quebec and 100% in New South Wales.  The regulated percent in Quebec is really 66.6% or 2/3rds.  It was temporarily lower due to staff shortages during the pandemic. And the requirement in NSW is for 100% of front-line staff to be certified.  But this is a bit misleading because only 50% of the front-line staff in NSW must have an ECE Diploma or above.  The other 50% can have a Certificate III which is a qualification well below what is needed to provide good quality care for children on one’s own.

    However, the inadequate quality of Quebec’s child care system is not really evidence that supply-side funding does not work.  Instead it is evidence that Quebec services have not been adequately funded.  The history of Quebec’s system explains this.  Back in the 1990s, Quebec struck out on its own to build a universal child care system, without any funding from Canada’s federal government.  Relying only on its own funding, Quebec ended up cutting corners on quality.  If New South Wales were operating either a demand-side funded or a supply-side funded system with no Commonwealth funding – relying only on state funds – I am sure that quality would suffer too.  But Quebec’s history is not New South Wales’ inevitable destiny.  With strong Commonwealth commitment to spending on universal child care, New South Wales can have both supply-side funding and good quality care.  As you can see in John Cherry’s Table 1, public funding of child care in New South Wales is already 50% higher than in Quebec – AU $5.7 bn vs. AU $3.7 bn annually.

    What Conclusions Should We Draw From This Comparison?
    I understand John Cherry and Goodstart’s hesitation about a switch to supply-side funding.  It would be a big transformation of funding arrangements and would constrain the power of child care operators to set their own fee levels.  If it was done badly, it could have negative effects. 

    However, I think John and Goodstart need to explain how they will build a publicly-accountable universal low-fee high-quality child care system on Australia’s existing demand-side funding base.  In my opinion, they need to answer (at least) three questions.  How would they guarantee that the system will have low child care fees in the future?  How can they build financial accountability for public funds into the existing system?  And, what mechanisms of public planning for location of new services can ensure an equitable and efficient growth of new services in Australia?

    Australia has seen parent fees rise consistently as public funding has increased over the years.  The average parent fee per child is now about AU $135.00 per day.  Every time the Commonwealth government pours more money into the system, out-of-pocket child care fees fall temporarily.  After a short while, these out-of-pocket costs gradually rise back to previous levels.  Nothing has worked to keep fees down in the long term.  Supply-side funded systems guarantee low dependable out-of-pocket fees.  Until Australia’s demand-side-funded child care system can provide the same guarantee, it cannot be considered a good basis for a universal system.

    In a universal child care system, the vast majority of operator revenues come from governments.  It is unacceptable to continue to have no public accountability for these substantial amounts of public funds.  Currently, child care operators do not have to justify the fees they charge or show that public moneys are spent on legitimate costs of service provision.  Goodstart should explain how this will be remedied in their plans for a universal child care system built on the existing demand-side foundations.

    Finally, an equitable universal system of child care services needs to plan where new child care services will be located.  It cannot leave this to the whims of private investors who all want to crowd their new services into higher income areas.  How will this be accomplished within Australia’s demand-side funded system?  These are the tough questions that need to be answered by the champions of a continuation of demand-side funding for Australian child care. 

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    The Fraser Institute’s Evaluation of the $10 a Day Child Care Reforms

    This is not his best work.  Phillip Cross has had a notable career at Statistics Canada.  He’s an expert in macroeconomic trends.  But, one thing that he knows very little about is child care.    Unfortunately, he has written a short paper for the Fraser Institute evaluating the success or failure of the Canada-Wide Early Learning and Child Care reforms so far. 

    It’s bad. Almost everything in the paper is either wrong or misleading.

    So what does Phillip Cross say?

    • He says that the Canada-Wide early learning and child care program had 3 goals:

    (1) providing more jobs in the child care industry,

    (2) enabling mothers to join the labour force, and

    (3) providing better care for young children. 

    His paper will look at the first two.

    • He looks at some evidence and concludes that there has been no change in the employment trends in child care staff.
    • Then, he looks at evidence about women’s labour force participation and concludes that it has hardly changed since 2015.
    • Having concluded that the Canada-Wide child care reforms are a failure, he goes on to take pot shots at Quebec’s child care system concluding that its universal child care system doesn’t really help low-income families, wasn’t really responsible for the boost in its labour force participation, has long waiting lists due to inadequate supply, and isn’t really universal.

    Phillip Cross is wrong on all counts, contributing yet more false information to child care discussions in Canada.  There are many problems with the rollout of the Canada-Wide program across the provinces and territories – particularly slow rates of growth in child care capacity.  However, the Fraser Institute paper does not grapple with real issues and propose real solutions.

    Phillip Cross, believe it or not, ignores improving the affordability of licensed child care in his list of goals of the Canada-Wide program.  This, of course, is the greatest success of the program so far.  Hundreds of thousands of children and families have benefited from less expensive child care.  Their very high child care costs have been cut by half or more.  These parents are very happy with the marvellous success of the program.


    Employment in the Child Care Industry

    There has been substantial growth in employment in the day care industry (NAICS Code 6244) since April 2021 when the Canada-Wide program was announced.  By my reckoning, the number of persons employed in Canada outside Quebec has risen by 36.9%, a total of 32,885 additional persons employed.  Phillip Cross hides this growth in two ways.  First, he looks at Canada including Quebec, which is inappropriate.  Quebec has a mature child care system and its employment of child care staff is not growing quickly.  The focus of growth in the Canada-Wide program is on the provinces and territories outside Quebec.

    Second, Phillip Cross ignores the collapse of child care employment during the pandemic and assumes that child care employment should have grown as if the pandemic did not happen.  In fact, child care employment in Canada outside Quebec collapsed from over 100,000 at the beginning of 2020 to less than half of that a few months later.  Employment did not climb above 100,000 until March of 2022.  So, the Canada-Wide program has helped the revival of employment in the child care industry and gone well beyond.  We should celebrate this, rather than hiding it.  This evidence can be found in Statistics Canada CANSIM Table 14100201.


    Mothers in the Labour Force

    Phillip Cross concludes that the Canada-Wide program has also shown no progress in supporting mothers to enter the labour market.  According to him, labour force participation hit its peak in 2015 and even after all this money spent on child care, it has only just about reached the same level.  As he notes, the participation rate was 61.7% in 2015 and now it is just 61.5%.

    But, Cross is not looking at the right statistics.  He is looking at the labour force participation of all women 25-54 years of age.  However, most women do not currently have a child 0-5 years of age.  Women without young children would not have their labour force participation affected by the Canada-Wide child care program.

    The Fraser Institute report should instead be looking at labour force participation of mothers with children 0-5 who are the target of the program.  Here, participation rates are up by several percentage points from April 2021 to now (from 76.9% to 79.9%) even though expansion of child care has been slower than it should be.  And compared to 2015, which the Fraser Institute cites as the high water mark, the labour force participation of mothers with children 0-5 is over 6 percentage points higher now than it was then.  So this evidence of “failure” is false news and should not be left to become conventional wisdom.  This data can be found in Statistics Canada CANSIM Table 14100397.


    Quebec’s Universal Child Care System

    Phillip Cross would presumably be very surprised to hear that Quebec’s child care system is very popular with parents and with the Quebec government.  He believes that low-income families have been squeezed out of access to child care.  In fact, there is good evidence that a much higher percentage of low-income families in Quebec have been able to access child care than was true for low-income families in the rest of Canada in the period before the Canada-wide system[1]. The universal system of child care in Quebec encouraged many more low income mothers into the labour force and into using child care.  It is true, and a problem, that on average low-income families are more likely to have their children in the lower-quality for-profit child care services.  The Quebec government is expanding not-for-profit centres as a partial remedy.

    Cross claims that Quebec’s child care system is not universal.  His evidence for this seems to be that there are 51,000 families on a waiting list for child care services.  Here his lack of child care knowledge is really showing.  This is a waiting list to get into one part of their child care system – the preferred part with a fixed fee and many better quality services. 

    There is no overall shortage of child care spaces in Quebec; in fact there are many empty spaces in the for-profit child care services funded by a tax credit.  But parents don’t prefer these for-profit spaces where there is no guaranteed parent fee.  These services have been shown to be much poorer quality than the not-for-profit spaces in CPEs (early childhood centres).  So, yes, there are 51,000 children on a waiting list to get out of these tax-credit-funded spaces and into the fixed-fee services that they prefer.

    Finally, Phillip Cross tries to deny that the universal child care system in Quebec has been responsible for dramatic increases in labour force participation of mothers.  He writes that “proponents attribute the increase in female participation in Quebec to its childcare program” and “Clearly, some determinants of female labour force participation are not understood by researchers, who nevertheless loudly endorse Quebec’s initiative.”  This is a bit strange, because if there is one thing that all economic studies of the Quebec child care program are agreed upon, it is that there was a substantial boost to mothers’ labour force participation and hours of work as a result of universal child care.

    A summary of the results of one of the many studies goes like this:  “Lefebvre and Merrigan[2] (2008) use Statistics Canada’s Survey of Labour and Income Dynamics (SLID) annual data from 1993 to 2002. Using the sample of all Canadian mothers with at least one child aged 1 to 5, they find that the policy had substantial effects on a diversity of labour supply indicators (participation, labour earnings, annual weeks and hours worked). In 2002, the effects on participation, earnings, annual hours and weeks worked of the childcare policy are respectively between 8.1 and 12 percentage points, $5,000 to $6,000 (2001 dollars), 231 to 270 annual hours at work, and 5 to 6 annual weeks of work.“   

    The Fraser Institute is not noted for the complete accuracy of its studies, but this is a bit ridiculous.  As an evaluation of the success or failure of the Canada-Wide Early Learning and Child Care program, the Fraser Institute study is worse than useless. It is, perhaps deliberately, misleading. 

    Instead, we should conclude that:

    • Hundreds of thousands of children and families have benefited from more affordable licensed child care
    • There are now nearly 33,000 more persons working in the day care industry than there were when the program was announced in April 2021 – an increase of nearly 37%.  Many more qualified educators are needed, but this is a good start.
    • Even though the growth in the number of child care spaces has been too slow, there has still been a rise of 3 percentage points in the labour force participation rate of mothers with children 0-5 since April 2021.  Again, only a start, but definitely a start.
    • Quebec does have a universal child care program and many families access child care for less than $10 a day.  It is a very popular program with families.  There is no overall shortage of child care spaces in Quebec, but many families want to get into the fixed-fee part of the child care system, especially the better-quality not-for-profit CPEs.  Many of these families are on a waiting list.  A large number of low-income families have benefited from the universal child care program in Quebec, a much larger percentage than benefited from Canada’s targeted child care assistance.  There is still important work to do to ensure that low-income families also benefit equally from better quality in child care services.

    [1] Cleveland, G. (2017) “What is the Role of Early Childhood Education and Care in an Equality Agenda?” pp. 75-98 in Robert J. Brym ed. Income Inequality and the Future of Canadian Society ISBN-13:978-1-77244-044-7 Oakville, ON: Rock’s Mills Press. Proceedings of the inaugural S.D.Clark memorial symposium.  That study found that:” In Quebec, 61.8 percent of children 1-5 years with an employed or studying mother with a high school education or less use licensed child care. Including children with a mother who is not employed, 43.1 percent of Quebec children whose mother has a high school education or less are using licensed child care — about 30 percentage points higher than the comparable figure in the rest of Canada.“

    [2] Lefebvre, P., Merrigan, P. (2008). Childcare policy and the labor supply of mothers with young children: a natural experiment from Canada. Journal of Labor Economics 23, 519–548.

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    Some Thoughts About Australian Child Care Policy

    The Labor federal (i.e., Commonwealth) government of Australia has declared its intention to move towards universal child care. There is a lot of interest in the Quebec model. The Commonwealth government asked the Productivity Commission to investigate and to provide a roadmap towards universal early childhood education and care throughout Australia.

    The post below is my submission in response to the draft report of the Productivity Commission which you can find here. As you can see, my advice and comments are strongly informed by Canada and Quebec’s experiences.

    Response to the Productivity Commission Draft Report

    Main Messages

    • The final report of the Productivity Commission should lay out a 10-20 year vision of recommended steps to achieve universal affordable, accessible, high quality child care.  The recommendations in the draft report go only\ part way to universal child care.  The recommendations should include ways in which there can be guaranteed fee levels for parents, much greater financial accountability of operators, and substantial introduction of supply-side operational  funding. 
    • There should be a much stronger gender equity lens by which recommendations are judged and through which recommendations are presented.  This would affect recommendations that imply that 3 days a week is the norm for child care attendance and mothers’ participation in the labour force.
    • The commercialization of child care provision should be an issue of concern.  Child care growth has been very unbalanced; nearly all new centre-based child care for at least 10 years, and probably 20 years, has been commercial.  There are not adequate supports needed for expansion of not-for-profit services.
    • In the draft report, the description and lessons learned from the experience of child care reforms in Quebec is one-sided.

    There are some good things about the lengthy and detailed Productivity Commission Draft Report. 

    If there is not enough money to do everything right away, it is often sensible to prioritize providing child care services to children in lower-income families.  Moving to 100% subsidy and getting rid of the activity requirement for 3 days a week of child care services will address some important barriers to participation by children in lower-income families while directing over half of the additional assistance to families in the lowest 20% of the income distribution.  Even here, there are potential issues with the proposals[1].

    Getting rid of the activity requirement for 3 days a week will also help some middle-income families where parents have irregular work activity and will tend to normalize regular child care attendance for children.

    And the Productivity Commission dips its toe in the water of supply-side funding in remote communities where the profit motive clearly does not adequately encourage needed supply.  This is an important start, even if a minor one.

    However, as a guide to the pathway to universal child care in Australia,  the Productivity Commission’s draft report is disappointing.

    1. The government asked for a plan to move towards universally accessible, affordable and high-quality child care.  This draft report does not deliver this.  Instead it chooses to primarily fill one hole in the current state of accessibility – access by lower-income families.  Unless the Productivity Commission believes that all other families already had affordable access to child care (which is unlikely since the average out-of-pocket amount that parents pay for centre-based child care is $44.42 a day per child), remedying this one (important) problem will certainly not deliver universal child care. As long as there is no legislative or regulatory limitation on parent fees and no limitation on centres charging full fees for unused hours above 50 in a week, child care in Australia will be unaffordable and inaccessible for some families, perhaps many families, who have middle and higher incomes, as well as families with lower incomes.   As long as there are either financial or supply barriers that prevent access, early childhood education and care is not universal.  Frankly, despite the Productivity Commission’s mandate to study how universal child care can be achieved, there is evidence in the draft report of some bias against universal child care, reflected in the cautious nature of the recommendations and in the one-sided evaluation of Quebec’s system of universal early childhood services.

    2. The Productivity Commission’s draft report appears to reflect a view that child care markets work well in Australia, and that strong competitive pressures already compel commercial operators of early childhood services to keep costs low, expand to serve new needs and continually enhance quality.  In other words, the Productivity Commission believes that current funding and regulatory arrangements provide the appropriate incentives and controls to make child care providers serve the public interest.  Apparently, only a few tweaks are necessary to make these services more accessible.

    This optimistic view is less true than the Productivity Commission believes; the problems are larger and the need for reform is greater.  First, we know that competition in child care markets is very localised, largely because few parents want to regularly transport their children more than a couple of kilometres to a child care service.  So, each centre only really competes – on price, services and quality – with other centres close by.  Generally, that means that competitive pressures are not that strong. 

    Fees have not been kept down by competition; they have been continually rising for many years. The current average daily fee for centre-based child care is $133.96 per child. Over 20% of child care centres charge more than the hourly rate cap (currently $13.73 per hour for centre-based day care for children younger than school age), particularly for-profit centres.  There is little evidence that costs and fees are controlled by strong competitive pressures.

    One of the hallmarks of competitive markets is that prices charged are forced down close to actual costs. If the price of one product or service is much higher than its per-unit costs, we would expect profit-seeking producers in a competitive market to offer this product or service at a lower price and take a large number of customers away from existing providers. In centre-based child care, given the required staff-child ratios, the labour costs for infant care must be close to 3 times the labour costs of child care for three- and four-year-old children.  And labour costs are the large majority of total costs.  Yet, competition does not drive centres to charge much lower fees for older children than they do for infants. There is a large variation in per-child costs and there is virtually no difference in fees.  And there are long waiting lists for child care for children less than two years of age, mostly because infant care is less profitable. These facts are a strong signal suggesting that child care markets in Australia are only weakly competitive. 

    Figure 4 of the interim ACCC report suggests that average occupancy rates of large providers of centre-based day care are about 75%.  We know that occupancy rates are a key driver of per-unit costs.  In a competitive market, we would expect strong pressures on operators to cut fees in order to increase occupancy, lower per-child costs and maintain quality.  This does not appear to be widespread in child care markets.

    In short, the main mechanism that makes the Productivity Commission so complacent – competitive pressure – cannot realistically be assumed to deliver publicly beneficial results on its own.  There is a need for more public management – active market stewardship – and financial accountability.

    3. There is no realistic plan to keep child care fees from rising faster than the CPI (which they have been doing for many years)[2].  Draft recommendation 6.2 suggests a new hourly rate cap for Child Care Subsidy based on the “average efficient costs of providing early childhood education and care services”.   Unfortunately, there is no unique average efficient cost.  As mentioned above, just think of infant care with required child-staff ratios of 4 to 1 vs. care for children over 36 months of age with required child-staff ratios of 11 to 1 in many states and territories.  How could there possibly be a unique average efficient cost per unit across these different age groups?  And look at cost variations that are recognized in supply-side-funded jurisdictions.  In Quebec and New Zealand[3], for instance, child care operating payments vary across a number of important factors that drive key cost variations – staff experience levels and qualifications and pay rates, legitimate variations in arms-length occupancy costs, higher per-unit costs in thinner markets, etc.  Unless the Productivity Commission can propose a realistic set of rate caps tailored to different circumstances and a means of regularly updating them and enforcing them, this recommendation may not work.

    4. The recommendations in the report would establish 3 days a week as a norm for the number of days a mother should work.  This is negative for gender equity, which is already dramatically impacted by the almost universal assumption that women are primarily or solely responsible for the day-time care of children before school.  The draft Productivity Commission report shows that the average size of the motherhood penalty in Australia – the amount of previous earnings that is lost when mothers bear children – is 55% (!), higher than in many other countries.  The motherhood penalty is explained by lower rates of employment, lower hours per week of employment, and lower hourly pay of mothers. The Productivity Commission is doing a good thing by reducing the impact of the activity test on access to child care.  That will lower barriers to employment for mothers. However, they should recommend its elimination entirely for 5 days a week.  To me, the recommendation as it stands suggests that children only need child care for 3 days a week, and that child care for more than 3 days a week may be negative for children and is done only for the mothers who insist on working too long weekly hours (to whom the activity test is applied).   There is increasingly strong evidence[4] that universal child care in Quebec and elsewhere has reduced motherhood penalties substantially.

    5. The Productivity Commission appears to believe that the widespread use of only three days a week of child care is due to maternal preference rather than to the unaffordability of 5 day a week child care.  They show self-reported numbers that allegedly prove that very few mothers would work longer hours each week (and use 5 days of child care) under any circumstances.  In other words, the motherhood penalty in Australia is the result of mothers’ deliberate and free choices.  I doubt it.  In contrast, the ACCC believes that “the price of childcare significantly impacts how much childcare households use.” (p. 22).

     It is true that lower labour force participation and part-time work for mothers are strong norms in Australia, compared to many other countries.  However, there are reasons to believe that if child care was universally affordable and accessible in Australia, those norms would change.  As evidence, look at the very substantial changes in labour force participation of mothers with children 0-4 in Australia over the 12 years from 2009-2021.  In 2009, 48% of mothers with young children stayed outside the labour force.  By 2021, that number had fallen by one-third (16 percentage points!) to 32%.   That would seem to indicate that mothers’ employment decisions may be quite sensitive to changes in policy, rather than fixed by historical norms.  This matters for the motherhood penalty, but it also matters a lot for the funding of child care programs; in Quebec, a large portion of the fiscal costs of child care programs is funded by increased incomes and taxes due to changed employment.

    6. There is no plan for requiring financial accountability of providers for the vast sums of government money they receive.  The legal fiction is that parents who receive subsidies for the purchase of child care are effective watchdogs of how the money is spent.  This is so obviously not true that it needs little argument to reject it.  But, there is no requirement for providers to show that they have spent money wisely to achieve publicly desirable purposes.  There are some serious red flags that the Productivity Commission does not really address.  They report that there are many hours of ECEC services that are paid for each day (by parents and the government) but are not used. This sounds like evidence of substantial inefficiency in current funding and attendance arrangements.  The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) report concludes that for-profit child care providers pay more for occupancy costs than not-for-profit providers (and that part of this may be due to the use of facilities for which ownership is not at arms-length)[5].    Further, for-profit services are found by the ACCC to be of worse average quality[6] than that provided by not-for-profit providers.  The Productivity Commission should be making recommendations about compulsory and regular financial accountability. I believe that, in Australia as in Canada, child care is fundamentally a public service (with about 80% of costs paid by the public purse) but one that is delivered by private operators. Detailed and regular reporting on how public moneys are spent should be an obvious requirement.

    7. The final report of the Productivity Commission should lay out a 10- to 20-year vision for the establishment of universal child care services in Australia.  The recommended National Partnership Agreement would be a part of this plan.  Wrap-around child care for preschools would be a part of this plan.  The expansion of supply-side funding of services with fees controlled would be part of this plan.  The new independent ECEC Commission would monitor and report on progress towards universal access and make ongoing recommendations to move towards it.  The Productivity Commission hints at a long-term vision but is not explicit.  This allows the Productivity Commission to duck a lot of longer-term questions about affordability, commercialization of the system, financial accountability, and generally the evolution towards serving public interests better.

    8. Australia has a long-established demand-side (voucher) funding system for child care.  It allows providers to set their own fees, decide on staff compensation conditional on meeting the award levels set by the Fair Work Commission, choose the children and parents they will serve from those who apply and choose the hours of service to provide.  This is not, in my opinion, the best system going forward; I believe that a system of supply-side-funded services with a guaranteed set fee level (plus fees reduced below the set-fee level or to zero for some families) would be better.  However, changing funding systems is not easy and there is often a lot of push-back from those in the system.  Why not think outside the box? Why not establish an alternative supply-side funding system that would exist in parallel with the existing demand-side funding system with incentives for centres to switch? 

    Centres that were funded on the supply-side would have a fixed fee, and enhanced regulatory requirements.  In exchange, they would have guaranteed funding to cover costs above parent fees. Set-fees that are known and predictable are very popular with parents at all income levels and, in Quebec, have encouraged high child care participation by children in lower-income families.  There would be strong elements of financial accountability and reporting by centres, requirements to pay above-award wages, reduced ability to rely on part-time and casual staff and other requirements related to quality of care, but some centres and some parents would prefer this.  There would be obvious transition difficulties, but this kind of recommendation would boldly look towards transforming Australia’s system into a universal and affordable one.

    9. The Productivity Commission does not address the increasing commercialization of child care services in Australia.  Virtually all of the expansion of centre-based child care services (not preschools) in the last decade – a 50% increase in the number of spaces available – has been in the for-profit sector.  As the ACCC interim report notes: “the child care sector is widely viewed as a safe and strong investment with guaranteed returns, backed by a government safety net.” The Productivity Commission report does not even raise the question of whether this extremely unbalanced growth pattern is desirable. The growth in services that has occurred is disproportionately located where returns are higher, rather than where need is greater, as shown in Figures 3 and 7 of the draft report.  1% of providers now provide 35% of all centre-based child care services. The Productivity Commission should be making recommendations about means of encouraging growth in not-for-profit and public provision of services.  These recommendations would call for planned development and dedicated loan guarantees or other capital funding targeted at not-for-profit providers.  I believe that Australian children and families are unlikely to prefer a universal child care system with unplanned expansion and complete domination of service provision by commercial incentives and ethics.

    10. The Productivity Commission draft report provides a one-sided summary of the experience and effects of Quebec’s universal child care system.  Although it is true that economic researchers found short-run negative effects on some children (effects were found to vary substantially across different child groups[7]), the most recent and comprehensive work on Quebec, using a triple-difference estimator similar to other studies (Montpetit et al., 2024[8]) does not find any long-run negative effects on children’s completed education.  Rather, they find that the long-run education levels of Quebec children who had been eligible for $5 a day child care were no different than their peers in other parts of Canada.  In particular they write: “We find no evidence of negative effects on educational attainment of eligible children in the long-run. This pattern is true for each educational level, namely for university, high school, and college completion….

    The results suggest a positive but statistically insignificant impact on completion of a university degree, the most comparable outcome across provinces, and no impact at lower levels.”(p. 21).  Further, Montpetit’s study calculates the social cost of increased “youth criminal activity” identified by Baker, Gruber and Milligan (2019[9]) and finds negligible social costs because the identified transgressions were minor. 

    11. The Productivity Commission draft report gives little sense that this fixed-parent-fee child care program is an incredibly popular social program with Quebec parents.  The reader will struggle to understand why the Canadian federal government decided in 2021 to spend $30 billion over 5 years to spread the Quebec child care model of a fixed-fee, supply-side-funded program across the country.  The reader of the draft report will not be told that Quebec’s child care reforms had sufficient impacts on mothers’ employment and economic growth to more than pay for the costs of the program according to the influential opinion of prominent Canadian economists (Fortin, Godbout, St. Cerny, 2013[10]).  Lefebvre and Merrigan (2008[11]) find that Quebec’s policy reforms increased labour force participation of mothers with children 0-4 by 7.6 percentage points from 61.4%  before the policy.  They estimate the labour force elasticity to child care price to be 0.25.  In addition the child care reforms increased the annual hours worked, weeks worked and earnings; these elasticities were 0.26, 0.28, and 0.34, respectively.  With these elasticities, a 10% decrease in the fee would increase annual hours worked by 2.6%, increase weeks worked by 2.8% or increase earnings by 3.4% on average.

    Lefebvre, Merrigan and Verstraete (2009[12]) found that the labour force impacts lasted beyond the preschool child care years when mothers no longer had any children 0-5 years of age, and that the positive labour force impacts were particularly strong amongst mothers with lower levels of education. Even if long run labour force effects are ignored, the recent study by Montpetit and colleagues (2024) finds that the overall benefits of universal child care in Quebec are three and a half times the costs.  This includes a careful evaluation of the value of the improvements in the well-being of Quebec mothers from universal child care services.

    12. The Quebec model of funding and management of child care services is not a perfect one.  Two factors made its birth particularly difficult.  First, when they initiated the $5 a day program, Quebec only had enough child care supply to provide services to 15% of the child population 0-4 years.  For 20 years, they scrambled to increase supply and have now reached nearly 70%. However, this scramble to increase supply meant relying too heavily on both family child care and for-profit child care with weaker regulation.  These types of care have been the Achilles heel of quality[13] in the Quebec system, a problem that is now being addressed.  Second, this was a program funded exclusively by the provincial government; at that time, the federal government was unwilling to provide any financial support.  The provincial governments in Canada have modest taxing powers, so services were not as generously funded as they should have been.  With the federal government coming to the table in 2021 with billions of dollars of additional funding, child care services in Quebec will now be funded more appropriately.  I have described the problems of the Quebec model of child care here[14], warts and all.   However, these problems are not inherent in a universal program; Australia already has a large child care supply and substantial financial resources available to support good quality programming. It can gain the substantial benefits of Quebec’s universal program without the birth pangs that Quebec has faced.

    Commentators have noted that low-income families in Quebec do not have as much access to good quality child care as do middle income families.  That is true and is a problem. As far as I can tell, that is true and is a problem in most countries whether child care systems are universal or not; it is certainly true in Australia[15]. However under Quebec’s universal program it is also true that a much higher percentage of low-income families were able to access licensed child care than was the case with the targeted funding that predominated in the rest of Canada[16].  Children from low-income families also were particularly likely to benefit from their access to early childhood programs[17].

    13. The terms of reference of the Productivity Commission enquiry require that it study “the operation and adequacy of the market, including types of care and the roles of for-profit and not-for-profit providers, and the appropriate role for government.” Further, these terms of reference direct that “The Commission should have regard to any findings from the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission’s Price Inquiry into child care prices….”   However, the findings in the ACCC draft report about the child care industry scarcely get any mention, including differences in costs and priorities of for-profit and not-for-profit providers.  The ACCC report provides important insights about costs and performance not available elsewhere.

    14. I hope that many of these issues will be addressed directly in the final report of the Productivity Commission.

    Gordon Cleveland, Ph.D.,
    Associate Professor of Economics Emeritus,
    Department of Management,
    University of Toronto Scarborough

    FOOTNOTES/ENDNOTES

    [1] These policy changes -removing activity requirements for 3 day attendance and 100% subsidy up to $80,000 -should mean many more lower-income families wanting access to child care.  Some operators prefer to serve a more exclusive clientele; this is known as creaming.  Under current rules, centres that charge a fee that is above the maximum hourly-fee limit are likely to effectively exclude most of these children.  Perhaps the Productivity Commission should require that centres be compelled to serve these children at the maximum hourly fee if parents apply to attend.

    [2] The cost of child care in Australia is pretty high.  Centre-based child care fees per hour (averaged across ages 0-5) were $11.72 in 2022.  The Productivity Commission reports that the average daily fee is $124 per day.   From 2018 to 2022, gross fees in Australia increased by 20.6% in comparison to the OECD average of 9.5%.  The OECD ranks Australia as 26th out of 32 countries on affordability of child care for a typical couple family with two children.  This is despite the Australian Government contribution to fees being significantly higher than most other OECD countries – 16% in Australia compared to the OECD average of 7%.

    [3] See https://childcarepolicy.net/cost-controls-and-supply-side-funding-what-does-quebec-do/ for a discussion of details of child care funding in Quebec and see https://childcarepolicy.net/new-zealands-funding-system-for-early-childhood-education-and-care-services/ for a discussion of details of child care funding in New Zealand.

    [4] See Connolly, M., Mélanie-Fontaine, M. & Haeck, C. (2023). Child Penalties in Canada.   Canadian Public Policy doi:10.3138/cpp.2023-015.  See also Karademir, S., J.-W. Laliberté, and S. Staubli. (2023). “The Multigenerational Impact of Children and Childcare Policies.” IZA Discussion Papers No. 15894, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA), Bonn, Germany.  As Karademir et al indicate “The disproportionate impact of children on women’s earnings constitutes the primary factor contributing to persistent gender inequality in many countries.”

    [5] Land and occupancy costs are about 18% of the total of all costs for large for-profit providers compared to about 10% for large not-for-profit providers. This is not due to what the Aussies call “peppercorn rents” (i.e., below-market rents provided on a goodwill basis).  The average profit margin for large centre based day care providers was about 9% for for-profit providers and about 6% for not-for- profit providers in 2022. 

    [6] About 95% of the staff in not-for-profit centres are paid “above-award” compared to 64% in for-profit centres.  Not-for-profit providers are much more likely to hire their staff on a full-time basis, whereas for-profit providers primarily rely on part-time staff.  As the ACCC report suggests: “large not-for-profit centre-based day care providers invest savings from lower land costs into labour costs, to improve the quality of their services and their ability to compete in their relevant markets.”  The ACCC finds that centre-based day care services with a higher proportion of staff paid above award and with lower staff turnover have a higher quality rating under the National Quality Standard. 

    [7] Kottelenberg and Lehrer provide evidence of substantial heterogeneity in the impacts of the Quebec child care reforms by the age of the child, the child’s gender and by initial abilities in a series of studies published in 2013, 2014, 2017 and 2018.  Kottelenberg, M. J. and Lehrer, S. F. (2013). New evidence on the impacts of access to and attending universal child-care in Canada. Canadian Public Policy, 39(2):263–286. Kottelenberg, M. J. and Lehrer, S. F. (2014). Do the perils of universal childcare depend on the child’s age? CESifo Economic Studies, 60(2):338–365. Kottelenberg, M. J. and Lehrer, S. F. (2017). Targeted or universal coverage? assessing heterogeneity in the effects of universal child care. Journal of Labor Economics, 35(3):609–653. Kottelenberg, M. J. and Lehrer, S. F. (2018). Does Quebec’s subsidized child care policy give boys and girls an equal start? Canadian Journal of Economics/Revue canadienne d’ ́economique, 51(2):627–659. Kottelenberg and Lehrer (2017) finds that levels and changes in home learning environments by some parents in response to the Quebec reforms were an important explanatory factor of differential effects on children.

    [8] Montpetit, S., Beauregard, P., & Carrer, L. (2024). A Welfare Analysis of Universal Childcare: Lessons From a Canadian Reformhttps://drive.google.com/file/d/1dDWvj2e08YodXAWd5zdmBKP3j-kxt1Uj/view

    [9] Baker M., Gruber J., & Milligan K. (2019). The Long-Run Impacts of a Universal Child Care Program American Economic Journal. Economic Policy, Vol.11 (3), p.1-26; American Economic Association.

    [10] Fortin, P., Godbout, L. and St.Cerny, S.. (2013). “Impacts of Quebec’s Universal Low-fee Childcare Program on Female Labour Force Participation, Domestic Income and Government Budgets. University of Toronto. Toronto, ON.  Translated from French https://www.oise.utoronto.ca/home/sites/default/files/2024-02/impact-of-quebec-s-universal-low-fee-childcare-program-on-female-labour-force-participation.pdf  Original reference is Fortin, P., Godbout, L., and St-Cerny, S. (2013). L’impact des services de garde a contribution reduite du quebec sur le taux d’activite feminin, le revenu interieur et les budgets gouvernementaux. Revue Interventions economiques. Papers in Political Economy, 47.

    [11] Lefebvre, P., Merrigan, P. (2008). Childcare policy and the labor supply of mothers with young children: a natural experiment from Canada. Journal of Labor Economics 23, 519–548.

    [12] Lefebvre, P., Merrigan, P., Verstraete, M. (2009) Dynamic Labour Supply Effects of Childcare Subsidies: Evidence from a Canadian Natural Experiment on Low-fee Universal Child Care.  Labour Economics 16: 490-502.

    [13] Couillard, K. (2018) Early Childhood: The Quality of Educational Childcare Services in Quebec. Observatoire des tout-petits. Montreal, Quebec, Fondation Lucie et André Chagnon.  Page 25 of this document charts the measured quality differences between CPEs (not-for-profit centres) and the for-profit non-subsidized daycares.  In the CPEs that are the heart of the supply-side funded system, in two age categories, 4% or fewer of centre rooms are of poor quality.  In the for-profit child care centres funded by demand-side tax credits to quickly boost supply, 36%-41% are of poor quality.

    [14] Cleveland, G., Mathieu, S., and Japel, C. (2021) What is “the Quebec Model” of Early Learning and Child Care? Policy Options, Institute for Research on Public Policy, Montreal QC. https://policyoptions.irpp.org/magazines/february-2021/what-is-the-quebec-model-of-early-learning-and-child-care/#:~:text=The%20plan%20in%20Quebec%20was,educational%20child%20care%20after%20that.

    [15] See Cloney, D., Cleveland, G., Hattie, J., and Tayler, C. (2016) Variations in the Availability and Quality of Early Childhood Education and Care by Socioeconomic Status of Neighborhoods Early Education and Development Vol. 27(3 ):384 – 401, and also see : Australian Children’s Education and Care Quality Authority (ACECQA) (2020) Quality ratings by socio-economic status of areas, ACECQA, Sydney

    [16] Cleveland, G. (2017) “What is the Role of Early Childhood Education and Care in an Equality Agenda?” pp. 75-98 in Robert J. Brym ed. Income Inequality and the Future of Canadian Society ISBN-13:978-1-77244-044-7 Oakville, ON: Rock’s Mills Press. Proceedings of the inaugural S.D.Clark memorial symposium.

    [17] Kottelenberg and Lehrer (2017) op. cit.

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    An Open Letter to Kevin Rudd…from a Canadian economist who cares about Australian child care

    This is a letter I wrote in 2008 (yes, 15 years ago) to the Prime Minister of Australia, Kevin Rudd. He had recently promised to expand demand-side funding in Australia by extending the Child Care Tax Rebate to cover 50% of parents’ child care spending, up from 30%. I argue in this letter that this will do little in the long run to improve child care affordability, but that it will put a lot of money into the pockets of for-profit child care operators. Unfortunately, I think I have been proven right. I propose that Australia should treat child care as a public service funded with operational funding with strong measures of financial accountability for public dollars. I would make the same proposals today as Australia’s Productivity Commission studies how to make child care provision universal.


    Dear Prime Minister Rudd,

    The spectacular “collapse” of Eddy Groves’ debt-fuelled ABC Learning empire in the last week leads me to offer you some thoughts on future child care policy in Australia, which has become my second home in increasingly lengthy visits over the last few years.  Under the Howard government, Australia has become the leading example of a country that delivers child care services according to the late Milton Friedman’s dictum on public services: deliver them through private providers funded by vouchers that maximize consumer choice. 

    The theory is that private providers would compete against each other for consumers, ensuring low costs and high quality that parents would purchase with their vouchers plus a parent contribution.  The private market would deliver public services much more efficiently than a bloated, inefficient, public sector could. In theory, the Child Care Benefit (geared to parents’ incomes) combined with the Child Care Tax Rebate provide the “voucher” for parents to be spent on approved child care services.  In theory, competition between providers, along with a nudge from the National Childcare Accreditation Council, ensures good quality child care services at affordable prices.  However, as the great baseball philosopher Yogi Berra once famously observed “In theory, there’s no difference between theory and practice.  In practice, there is.”

    Competition is not a good mechanism for developing quality in child care.  The kind of quality that optimally promotes child development is very difficult for parents to observe.  It’s based on the nature of the interactions, over time, between teachers/caregivers and children.  Most parents don’t have hours and days to sit in their child’s child care centre and judge the nature and quality of interactions.  And, in any case, the interactions would change because the parent was there.  So parents can’t play their gatekeeper role in the child care market of punishing low quality producers and rewarding high quality ones.

    In this case, the profit motive, normally loved by economists, becomes pernicious.  Corporate child care providers, anxious to serve their shareholders’ interests, do best by claiming to produce high quality services, but failing to hire the expensive trained staff necessary to actually provide them.

    I do love Australia, but I believe that the Australian model of child care funding and regulation needs rethinking.  Although Milton Friedman’s model of private delivery of public services works not too badly for some public services, it doesn’t work well for child care.  The evidence lies in front of you.  Instead of competitive private provision, you have a single corporation completely dominating the market.  Instead of competitive pressures to keep prices low, you have prices leaping up each time the government tries to increase funding to make services more affordable.  Instead of high quality child care services, you have the Australian Council of Social Services identifying the “variable quality of early childhood care and education” as a major concern. Instead of good quality child care services delivered by knowledgeable staff trained in early childhood education, you have an expensive child care system in which, nonetheless, about 40% of staff are “unqualified” – have no early childhood education diploma or equivalent (National Children’s Services Workforce Study, 2006) and your legislated standards for staff:child ratios are low by international standards.

    Instead of a free flow of public information about the quality of services, helping parents to make choices and forcing providers to compete to raise quality, you have the Accreditation Council guarding quality information to protect commercial confidentiality, you have an accreditation process that pretends to guarantee high quality but only actually slaps the hands of the worst offenders.  In fact, instead of inviting the cleansing winds of free competition into the production of a high quality public service, the Friedman model of funding has produced the inefficiency and greed of managed and protected private monopoly.

    I realize that you have promised to expand the Child Care Tax Rebate from 30% to 50% in order to improve affordability for parents.  I think you should delay and rethink this change (while putting priority on the companion promise of 15 hours of free preschool).  You know full well what an expanded CCTR will do. Immediately, it will increase the value of Eddy Groves’ assets and that of other private producers.  Next, it will lead to an increase in the price of child care.  Several years down the road, child care will be no more affordable than it is today.

    Good quality early learning and child care services have important public benefits, both by reducing the barriers to employment for those mothers that are anxious to enter the labour force, and by stimulating the play-based development of children while their parents are working or studying.  Government can contribute to the achievement of these twin public objectives only if it can find a way of facilitating the provision of high quality care at affordable prices for parents, with special attention to affordability for low-income families.  I would argue that Australia is not scoring particularly well on any of these objectives: not on quality, not on affordability, and not on affordability for low-income parents.  You do have some fine examples of good programs scattered around Australia, and many good individuals working hard to provide better services, but these are only at the margins of the system, rather than at its centre.   It appears that the system of delivery of this important public service is broken, and needs more than a quick-fix solution.

    In what direction do solutions lie?  I think you should acknowledge that early learning and child care is, fundamentally, a public service rather than a private market commodity.  Public and community-based not-for-profit providers will have fewer incentive-conflicts in pursuing the public objectives of good quality, and the integrated delivery of care and education.  Many parents recognize this, as the ballooning waiting lists of many community-based centres attest. Governments should find ways of strengthening this sector’s ability to act as a leader and a standard in the provision of community-oriented high-quality integrated child care and family services. 

    If the private for-profit sector is going to continue to be an important part of the Australian delivery system, it will need to have strong incentives to serve public interests better.  This means using the money promised for expansion of the Child Care Tax Rebate to, instead, develop effective, conditional, supply-side funding for long day care facilities.  The OECD’s 2006 report on child care policy in member countries (with a prominent Australian co-author) advised that “direct public funding of services brings…more effective control, advantages of scale, better national quality, more effective training for educators and a higher degree of equity in access and participation than consumer subsidy models.”  This subsidy money would be provided to services conditional on their openness and transparency, and on observed meeting of quality standards and measures.

    Finally, and importantly, based on my Canadian experience, I would advise serious consideration (in the 2020 review and elsewhere) of publicly-provided maternity and parental leave and benefits.  In Canada, nearly every currently-employed new mother is eligible for 15 weeks paid leave, and, on top of this, employed mothers and fathers can share another 35 weeks of paid leave in the year after the child’s birth.  The leave and benefits are enormously popular, and provide a superb opportunity for (both) working parents to bond with their new-born children.  The benefits are financed by employer-employee contributions; because only a small fraction of the employed population is on leave at any time, the necessary contributions are small.  For many families, maternity and parental leaves make it possible to reduce the conflict between employment and raising a family, making continuous labour force attachment possible.  Maternity and parental leave also make the use of child care before the age of one unnecessary for most families.  This is the age at which child care, when it is done well, is startlingly expensive; when it is not done well, this is when child care can have important negative effects on children.

    I urge you to take the opportunities you have created in your new government to redirect early learning and child care policy in new directions.

    A shortened version of this letter will be sent for possible publication in an Australian newspaper. 

    I would be happy to clarify, or defend, any of the propositions I have advanced here, in further correspondence. 

    Yours very truly,

    Dr. Gordon Cleveland,
    Economist and Associate Chair,
    Department of Management,
    University of Toronto Scarborough

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    WHAT COURSE-CORRECTIONS ARE NEEDED IN ALBERTA’S NEW EARLY LEARNING AND CHILD CARE ACTION PLAN?

    There are many opportunities for “course-corrections” built into the provincial and territorial Canada-Wide Early Learning and Child Care Agreements.  For instance, in the Alberta-Canada Early Learning and Child Care Agreement (ACELCCA), there is an Implementation Committee with federal and provincial representatives that has wide responsibilities to assess progress outlined in Section 6 of the Agreement.  The major opportunity for course correction comes in the form of a new Action Plan to be proposed by the Alberta government and agreed by federal representatives by April 1st, 2023.  The initial Agreement and its accompanying Action Plan (covering the first two years – 2021-22 and 2022-23) laid out a vision, objectives and specific programs and actions that would be taken to transform Alberta’s early learning and child care system.   Now, it’s time for a new Action Plan.  This Action Plan will determine what happens over the next three years to child care services that parents rely on.

    So what course-corrections should be included in this Action Plan? What should Alberta stakeholders and parents be insisting upon?  What should be the key must-haves that federal government representatives are looking for in this new Action Plan?

    IMHO, there are seven important course corrections that should be the centrepiece of the new Action Plan.

    1. Alberta should transition towards fixed-fee child care instead of having widely varying child care fees for parents to pay.
    2. Alberta needs to develop a new funding system that provides cost controls and financial accountability and encourages quality improvements.
    3. Alberta needs to ensure that lower-income families are not disadvantaged by the funding system but rather are encouraged to benefit from the use of child care
    4. Alberta needs to ensure that ECE wages are high enough to solve the staffing crisis and avoid lowering qualification requirements.
    5. The expansion of not-for-profit and public child care spaces needs to be prioritized in practice rather than simply in words.  This will require additional capital funding and support mechanisms.  Expansion of early learning and child care services needs to be planned, not haphazard.
    6. Planning of expansion should ensure that inclusion and flexibility goals are met.
    7. Alberta needs to report now and regularly on progress or lack of progress in achieving the goals of the Alberta-Canada Agreement.

    Let me try to briefly justify these priorities.

    1. Alberta should transition towards fixed-fee child care instead of having widely varying child care fees for parents to pay.

    Alberta has made a lot of progress in lowering child care fees since January 2022, moving faster than expected.  Great!  But it achieved this in an odd way.  Instead of lowering all fees by 50% (like Ontario) or having the same fee for all child care services (Newfoundland, now $15 a day), Alberta provided a new system of operating grants to lower fees by a constant dollar figure across centres. 

    Operating grants per enrolled space are $635 per month for centre-based infant care, $510 per month for centre-based toddler care, and $450 for centre-based care for children of preschool age.  In family day homes, there are operating grants of $350 per month for infant children, $325 a month for toddler children and $300 a month for children of preschool age.  Whatever the parent fee per month was at the end of 2021, it was lowered by these amounts in every centre and family day home that joined the program.

    Reducing parent fees with a fixed-amount operating grant (varying by child age category) has preserved differences in fee levels rather than eliminating them.  Albertans living in Calgary, where higher costs led to higher parent fees, have had their child care fees drop by much less than 50%.  In other parts of Alberta, fees have fallen more than 50%.  It should be a priority in the upcoming Action Plan to move closer to a fixed-fee system, so that parents in higher cost and lower cost situations face similar parent fees.   Alberta’s recently published Cost Control Framework and For-Profit Expansion Plan says that in 2023-24 parent fees for licensed child care will average $15 a day.  It is unclear what variation in fees will be permitted within this average.

    2. Alberta needs to develop a new funding system that provides cost controls and financial accountability and encourages quality improvements.

    If the costs faced by different operators are different but the child care fee faced by parents is the same or nearly the same, operators in high cost situations will have to receive larger amounts of operating funding to offset costs that are legitimately higher.  This principle is already well accepted for different age categories of children; operating grants for infant care are higher to offset the higher costs of providing child care for infants. 

    Providers that have higher costs because their early childhood educators have more years of experience and have higher educational qualifications should have these legitimate cost differences offset.  On the other hand, higher per-child costs that are due to under-enrolment due to profit-seeking expansion in areas that are already well-served should not be fully offset.  Higher costs due to exorbitant salaries for owner-administrators should not be fully offset.  There should be expenditure limits.  And so on.

    In order to develop a system where legitimate cost differences are offset, Alberta needs to research and develop a cost control or value-for-money framework to determine which cost variations should be offset and by how much.  On January 31st, 2023, Alberta published its new agreed “Cost Control Framework and For-Profit Expansion Plan”.  The Cost Control Framework might as well have been written on the back of a napkin; it provides no details about what cost variations will receive what amounts of support.   

    Section 6.3 of the Alberta-Canada Agreement promised that this cost-control framework would “ensure the sound and reasonable use of public funds, ensuring that costs and earnings of child care businesses are reasonable and that surplus earnings beyond reasonable earnings are directed towards improving child care services.”  These words are repeated in the recently published Framework, but there are no details on amounts of funding, on which factors will be rewarded with extra funding and which behaviours will be discouraged by remaining unfunded.  In short, there are insufficient details to judge whether the Cost Control Framework will have positive or negative effects.  The single item on which there is clarity is that child care operators can charge extra parent fees for what are called “Enhanced Services”.  Enhanced services include field trips, special programming and any other services that are innovative or creative that cost extra.  We can imagine the two-tier system of early learning and child care services that may result.  It’s surprising and disappointing that federal representatives on the Implementation Committee in Alberta were willing to accept it. 

    Have a look at these examples from Quebec and New Zealand to see what real funding systems and cost control frameworks actually look like.  Alberta has a lot of work in front of it to design a new funding system and get feedback from the sector.

    3. Alberta needs to ensure that lower-income families are not disadvantaged by the funding system but rather are encouraged to benefit from the use of child care

    A fixed-fee child care system can make child care affordable for nearly all parents; however, even a fixed fee of $10 a day is an important barrier to child care access and labour force participation for some lower-income families. 

    With the fee reductions in January 2022 and accompanying changes in the child care subsidy system, lower income families have seen the smallest percentage improvement of all income groups in the fees they pay.  Calgary families earning less than $60,000 annually with one preschool child and many families with more than one child will still pay out more than 10% of their after-tax income for licensed child care.  Further amendments to the child care subsidy system could reduce these affordability barriers.

    Further, it is desirable to provide increased child care access to lower-income families independent of activity requirements (employment, seeking employment or school).  This would require some additional changes to subsidy eligibility requirements.

    4. Alberta needs to ensure that ECE wages are high enough to solve the staffing crisis and avoid lowering qualification requirements.

    As is true in most of Canada, early childhood educators in Alberta are paid high-school-wages not college-wages.  Level 2 and Level 3 early childhood educators in Alberta require a college certificate or diploma but receive much lower hourly wages than other occupations requiring college qualifications.  They receive wages similar to other occupations where only a high school education is required. That’s the main reason there is a crisis in recruiting and retaining qualified staff in Alberta child care centres.

    On top of this, the hourly wages of early childhood educators and assistants in Alberta are below the Canada-wide average.  And the hourly wages of competing occupations in Alberta are above the Canada-wide average.  Substantially raising wage levels of ECE 2s and ECE 3s should be a priority for the upcoming Action Plan. Alberta desperately needs a wage grid for its Early Childhood Educators.   This would be a wage grid of minimum acceptable wage levels calibrated by education/certification level and by amount of relevant job experience, and providing incentives for ongoing professional development.  Provision of benefits is important as well.

    There are three certification levels for early childhood educators in Alberta:
    Level 1 ECE (3-credit course in early learning and child care or equivalent; 54 hours of online training);
    Level 2 ECE (1-year ELCC Certificate or equivalent; 720 hours of training);
    Level 3 ECE (2-year ELCC Diploma or equivalent; 1,445 hours of training). 

    Raising wage levels of Level 2 and Level 3 ECEs will be essential to maintaining quality levels and meeting the stated target of a 15 percentage point increase in their numbers.  In June 2021, 60% of Alberta’s certified ECEs were at Level 2 or Level 3.  An increase of 15 percentage points in these certification levels would mean that 75% of ECEs had these qualifications.  The total number of certified staff envisioned in the previous Action Plan for 2025-26 is 22,243.  To meet the 75% target, Alberta would need to have 16,682 ECEs at Levels 2 and 3 by 2025-26, or nearly 8,800 more Level 2 and Level 3s than it had in June 2021 – more than doubling the numbers of these ECEs.

    Alberta has long had a wage top-up program.   It provides all certified ECEs in licensed facility-based and home-based child care programs with a wage enhancement.  As of January 2023, wage top ups are $2.64 per hour for Level 1, $5.05 for Level 2, and $8.62 for Level 3.  According to Statistics Canada’s Labour Force Survey, the average hourly wage for early childhood educators and assistants in 2020-2021 was $18.80 per hour, which includes the effect of the wage top-ups that existed before recent increases.  Even at the 90th percentile of the wage distribution, this “high-paid” educator only earned $24.48 an hour in Alberta.

    5. The expansion of not-for-profit and public child care spaces needs to be prioritized in practice rather than simply in words.  This will require additional capital funding and support mechanisms.  Expansion of early learning and child care services needs to be planned, not haphazard.

    There has been very little evidence of the expansion of child care spaces in not-for-profit or public child care centres, despite the ACELCCA commitment that this would be a major priority in 2022.  The current amounts of capital funding available are low – between $5,000 and $6,000 per new child care space.  On a 50-space child care centre, where the capital costs could easily be in the millions of dollars, capital funding is $300,000 or less.  Given restrictions that financial institutions generally place on access to borrowing by not-for-profit institutions, Alberta’s plans for not-for-profit expansion are bound to fail. 

    Similarly, there is no evidence of progress on the development of an expansion plan for child care services over the 2023-2026 period for not-for-profit and public child care services.  Even the new Cost-Control Framework and For-Profit Expansion Plan provides not the slightest hint of the existence of any planning mechanisms to guide expansion to where it is most needed.  There need to be planning tools, there needs to be consultation on planning, and for not-for-profit and public child care services there needs to be development support and capital funding mechanisms.  Planning mechanisms should take into account Alberta’s persistent under-enrolment problem that drives up per-unit child care costs and should propose methods for better matching of enrolment and capacity.

    There is evidence that unplanned development of child care services does not deliver equitable access.  Full-day coverage rates in 2021 varied from 14.8% in Leduc to 37.6% in Lethbridge.  Full- and part-day coverage rates in 2021 varied from 18.6% in Leduc to 48.7% in Medicine Hat.

    Over time, there will need to be much greater expansion of licensed child care services than is currently planned (likely a doubling of current capacity).  It would make sense to develop the planning mechanisms and supports now for this future expansion. The Roadmap to a Quality Early Learning and Child Care System in Alberta has many good ideas about planning a transformed early learning and child care system.  

    6. Planning of expansion should ensure that inclusion and flexibility goals are met.

    It is unclear what mechanisms Alberta is using to achieve its commitment on inclusivity: “Alberta commits to develop and fund a plan to ensure that vulnerable children and children from diverse populations … have equitable access to regulated child care spaces, in proportion to their presence in the population.” The mechanisms should be clarified in the forthcoming Action Plan.

    7. Alberta needs to report now and regularly on progress or lack of progress in achieving the goals of the Alberta-Canada Agreement.

    Alberta has not yet provided reports on key child care indicators that it agreed to in the ACELCCA.  Alberta was to have reported progress on a wide range of indicators by October 2022 (see Section 5.2.2 of the Agreement); unfortunately, there is no evidence that this data has been provided. 

    We are told in the original two-year Action Plan that “Alberta’s existing data collection is comprehensive; mechanisms are in place to monitor the growth and quality of the child care system.”  This has not translated into publicly available reports that would allow us to judge progress achieved since the Alberta-Canada Agreement was signed.  There is no report on baseline data apart from that provided in the original Action Plan.  There is no report on progress which would allow for the determination of course-correction priorities since the agreement was signed.  This mirrors the lack of progress on developing cost control (i.e., accountability) measures and the lack of progress on planning for the expansion of child care facilities.

    Alberta does not currently report regularly on the number of facilities and the numbers of staff who have been granted exemptions to the certification/qualification requirements so that the facilities in which they work can continue to provide services despite not meeting the letter of the regulatory requirements.   This should include reporting on the number of staff in Level 1 ECE positions that have not yet completed their required orientation training, but are nonetheless acting in a Level 1 position. This is important data to monitor the development of Alberta’s early learning and child care system.

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    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.

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    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/

    FactorProgressDescription
    Child care spacesPositiveThere 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 carePositiveThe 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 kindergartenPositiveKindergarten 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 workforcePositiveLabour 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 feesNegativeChild 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 ratiosMixedIn 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 familiesMixedFunding 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 operatorsPositiveDirect 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 deductionPositiveThe 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 benefitsPositiveParental 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 wagesMixedChild 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 benefitsPositiveFederal 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.
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    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.

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    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.