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

One of the main barriers to expansion of child care supply is a widespread shortage of qualified educators.  This is mostly due to wages and benefits that are insufficiently high to attract and retain staff.  As a result, there are long waiting lists to get into licensed child care (115,000 children with mothers whose main activity is paid work). 

We do not have much good current data on our child care workforce, but Statistics Canada is attempting to begin to fill that hole.   Towards the end of December last year, Leanne Findlay and Thomas Charters from Statistics Canada published a report on child care workers who care for children 0-5 years of age.  The data is from 2021-22 and its source is the 2022 Canadian Survey on the Provision of Child Care Services (CSPCCS).

The authors restrict the sample to look only at centres who provide child care to children 0-5 years of age, and they address several issues:

  • Centre employees –  hours, training and roles
  • Typical rates of pay
  • Numbers hired, departed and staff vacancies
  • How all of the above vary by auspice and organizational structure

There are some important findings and observations in this study.   The study reports on weighted results for nearly 12,000 centres serving children 0-5.  Nearly half (48.6%) of child care centres serving children 0-5 are for-profit.  Centres employ nearly 137,000 staff, including full-time and part-time, program staff, supervisors, and support staff.  Nearly 90,000 of these employees are in Ontario and Quebec, and close to 15,000 each in Alberta and B.C. About 38% of these staff are hired in multi-site centres and about 62% in single-site centres.

A typical centre has about 56 children and close to 12 staff.  About 8 of these are front-line program staff.  There are either 1 or 2 supervisors and between 1 and 2 support staff.

Staff Qualifications

Most centres (83%) have a supervisor with an ECE certificate, diploma or degree.  For-profit single-site centres are below this average at 77%.

50% of centres have at least one staff member with no ECE training, and in those centres on average there are 3.7 staff members with no training.  47% of centres have at least one staff member with training of less than one year and on average in those centres there are 3.1 staff members with this modest level of training.  88% of centres have at least one staff member with a one-, two-, or three-year ECE certificate or diploma and these centres have on average 6.5 staff members with this level of training.  Finally, 17% of centres have at least one staff member with a four-year ECE degree or higher and on average these centres have 4 staff members with this level of training/education.

Wages

Survey respondents provided information about the most typically paid hourly wage rates for different categories of staff.  The average for supervisors was $27.80 per hour, but for-profit centres paid between $25 and $26 typically, and not-for-profit centres on average paid between $29 and $32. 

The same pattern was seen for wages of staff with an ECE credential – the for-profits paid an hourly average wage of between $20.50 and $21.50.  The not-for-profits paid between $22.50 and $23.00. 

Unfortunately, the wage question asked respondents to include wage enhancements but not provincial top-ups when reporting on staff wages.  This may have resulted in underreporting of wages in some centres.     In any case, it is obvious that typical wages in the sector are rather low.

Benefits

Amazingly, only about 76% of centres report that they provide any benefits at all to centre employees!  Those benefits include supplementary health and dental plans, life or disability insurance, pension plan contributions or group RRSPs, paid sick leave, paid vacation leave and financial assistance or paid time for training. 

The provision of benefits varies a lot by auspice and organizational structure.  Only about 62% of the single-site for-profits have any employee benefits.  Between 78% and 79% of both the multi-site for-profits and the single-site non-profits offer some employee benefits.  On the other hand, 93% of multi-site non-profit centres have at least some employee benefits. 

The biggest gap appears to be in pension benefits.  Only about 20% of for-profit centres of either kind have some pension or RRSP benefits.  About 46% of single-site non-profits have these benefits and 63% of multi-site non-profits do, as well.

Vacancies

The survey also provides information about job vacancies experienced by centres.  In April 2022, there were 7,560 vacancies in centres for ECE positions and another 2,960 vacancies for non-ECE positions.  In other words, nearly 8% of staff positions were vacant.  No wonder expansion of services has been slow and difficult.  In fact, 35% of centres had at least one vacancy for an employee with ECE credentials or training.

All of these issues are good ones to look at and the authors have done a good job with the data, but there are problems that affect interpretation and clarity.  In particular, the data is cross-Canada data; the sample size was too small to break responses down by province and territory. 

Further, CSPCCS is not a survey of members of the child care workforce, with questions answered by each staff member.  Instead, the CSPCCS is a survey of centres, so the respondent is some representative of the centre, and the responses are statements about the whole centre, not about the individual staff member.  So, there is less detail than you would like in some answers.  As an example, the categories for staff qualifications are (1) No ECE-related training, (2) ECE training of less than one year, (3) one, two or three year ECE certificate or diploma, (4) Four-year ECE degree or higher.  So, we can’t see how many staff have certificates vs. diplomas.  That’s potentially a very important difference.

The information is useful, but we still need a workforce survey where the respondents are individual supervisors, educators and assistants (and perhaps support staff as well).  That kind of survey, with a large enough sample, would allow us to get more detailed information about qualifications, remuneration, and recruitment and retention issues. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is the problem here?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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My Recent Presentation on Child Care Affordability

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

Child-Care-Affordability_CARE-ECONOMY-presentationDownload

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