This week in the Hill Times, Peter Jon Mitchell says he wants to get rid of the $10 a day federal child care program. But too many families now love it and depend on the increased child care affordability that has made their lives better. So instead Peter Jon argues that the Canada Child Benefit or the Child Care Expense Deduction should be amended to provide child care assistance to those who can’t find child care. But neither solution would be much help. The Canada Child Benefit goes to nearly every family independent of whether they want to use any form of child care so this would be a very expensive way to deliver assistance. And the type of tax credit that Peter Jon would use to replace the Expense Deduction has been an unmitigated disaster for child care quality in Quebec, as the charts below show.
Peter Jon hopes to convince us that the federal child care funding program is a complete failure and shambles, so he throws as much mud as possible at the wall to see if any of it will stick. He has these complaints about the program:
- Space creation is difficult because the child care agreements favour expansion predominantly in the not-for-profit/public/family child care sector
- Many existing licensed spaces are empty or not operating
- Most children under six years of age don’t benefit from the program
- Only 71% of centres are in CWELCC – the federally funded program
- The program breeds inequality. Child care enrolment by low-income families is declining – by 31% in Ontario.
- Not-for-profit
The not-for-profit issue has been tested in practice. As Peter Jon reminds us “Quebec’s daycare program, upon which the CWELCC is modelled, has long depended on private, for-profit childcare businesses.” It’s true that since about 2010, Quebec has relied on a tax-credit-funded expansion of for-profit child care operators. There are three types of centres in Quebec. There are the CPEs which are not-for-profit community-based centres that charge a flat fee less than $10 a day. There are the funded for-profit child care centres (shown as GS on the charts) that also charge the low flat fee. There are the tax-credit-funded child care centres that grew since about 2010, shown as GNS on the charts.
It might surprise Mr. Mitchell to hear that Quebec Families Minister Mathieu Lacombe told the Globe and Mail in 2022 that “allowing for the expansion of private daycares was the biggest mistake that the Quebec government committed in the last 25 years.” And the Quebec Auditor General has shown us why in her 2023-24 report, reflected in the charts below.
The first chart shows us the results for on-site quality evaluations by the Ministry. The other shows us the percent of centres that fail to meet the current requirements for fully-qualified staff (which is one out of every two staff). Together they indicate that for-profit child care, which seems to be Peter Jon’s preference for the rest of Canada, is much lower in quality and cuts costs by avoiding hiring the required numbers of qualified staff, compared to the not-for-profit CPEs.
So, yes, there are good reasons to want space creation to take place predominantly in the not-for-profit and public sectors. Relying on for-profit expansion may seem faster and cheaper in the short run, but at what cost for our children’s future?
- Enrolment
It’s true that there are too many existing licensed spaces that are empty or not operating. The Auditor General of Ontario found this was true of 27% of the funded spaces in Ontario, but it is also true elsewhere. The substantial majority of this is due to staffing shortages. Early Childhood Educators in most of Canada require a college education to be a fully-qualified educator, but they earn wages that are surprisingly low. As a result about half of all new hires in child care do not stick around for very long. Recruitment and retention of staff both fall well behind what is needed.
However, empty spaces suggest a solution different from Peter Jon’s – raise educator wages and benefits closer to the average wage in the province or territory. I’m sure that many trained educators currently working in retail and elsewhere will come flooding back to allow the spaces to open. Families would be happy, educators would be happy and the child care system would be more stable. The number of parents having difficulty finding child care would drop fast.
- How many children benefit?
Peter Jon says that most children in Canada don’t benefit from CWELCC. CWELCC is intended to be a universal program, but that doesn’t mean that everyone will want to use child care from their child’s birth through until school. Many families take a year or more off after a child’s birth using maternity and parental leave to spend time with their infant. Many families live in jurisdictions with full-day kindergarten, sometimes for both four and five year olds and don’t need additional child care beyond that. Some parents want to stay home with their young child and do not need child care.
If we looked only at families where the main caregiving parent was employed, was not on maternity/parental leave, and whose child was not in kindergarten, then already in 2023, 62% of Canadian children were enrolled in and attending some form of licensed child care across Canada, most of it receiving federal funding. We still have a way to go to serve all children who need or want good quality affordable child care, but we’re much farther forward than Peter Jon says we are.
- Is it true that nearly 30% of centres are not in CWELCC?
In fact, there are very few eligible centres not enrolled in the CWELCC program. Mr. Mitchell should be more careful with his “facts”.
The source he cites looks at centres serving children 0-12. This data source says that only 71% of centres said they were enrolled in CWELCC. But many of these centres serve only school-age children and these centres are not eligible to get federal funding, which is only for children 0-5.
Ontario is the province (outside Quebec) with the largest number of centres that are not part of CWELCC and as of March 31, 2025, 91.8% of all centres serving children 0-5 in Ontario were enrolled in the CWELCC program.
- Child care enrolment by low-income families
This is a serious issue, but Peter Jon misunderstands it. It is true that the Auditor General of Ontario recently found that the number of children receiving child care subsidies in that province has declined by 31%. But that is compared to 2019 before CWELCC started, and the decline in subsidies before Ontario signed onto CWELCC was more rapid than since that time.
There is a legitimate worry that not enough low-income families will be able to access newly available spaces. The Auditor General cited favourably a program in one region where a percent of spaces in each centre are reserved for children receiving child care subsidies. This might be a useful reform that I hope Peter Jon would support. Already, there has been a strong prioritization for child care expansion in Ontario to favour underserved areas with more vulnerable populations.
However, rather than look only at subsidies, there is more comprehensive data on child care use by family income that comes from a 2023 parent survey done by Statistics Canada. Here’s what it shows:
The data suggests, yes, that access to licensed child care by lower income families is not as high as for the more affluent. But the differences are probably smaller than you thought they were. I don’t mean to minimize the issue. Most studies show that children from lower-income or vulnerable families are especially likely to benefit from quality child care. So working on this issue is a high priority. However, the sky is not falling. It is just a persistent problem that provincial and territorial child care systems need to address. In fact, it is a persistent problem in child care systems, no matter how they are funded, often less so the more universal the service is.
Instead of trashing the $10 a day child care program, maybe Peter Jon Mitchell should spend his time lobbying the Alberta Government to re-instate the child care subsidy system that they completely eliminated this year! This will definitely hurt lower and middle income families in Alberta. The Alberta Minister complained at the time that federal funding regulations did not allow him to fund a targeted program like child care subsidy. However, he had a subsidy system receiving federal funding ever since signing the CWELCC agreement with Ottawa, and nearly all other provinces have child care subsidy systems, so that excuse is untrue. Alberta should re-instate its subsidy system as part of its CWELCC funding.
What is to be done?
The $10 a day child care program is only partly developed and is far from perfect. Much more affordable licensed child care is now wanted by many more parents. Of course. And expansion of services is too slow. There is little capital funding and too little planning for expansion of not-for-profit child care. Also, crucially, child care wages in most provinces are too low to attract qualified educators.
Making child care more accessible is central to the health of the program. I hope Mark Carney recognizes that in the upcoming budget. After all, isn’t a universal child care system a pillar of the new economy that families with children need – the kind of nation-building project that will make Canada stronger, fairer, and more affordable?