Most child care in Ontario is provided by non-profit or public operators. This has been true for years. A full 70% of the licensed/regulated child care spaces for children 0-5 were non-profit or public back in 2022, when Ontario signed the Canada-Wide Agreement with Ottawa.
So, two things are not in doubt. First, it is obviously possible for non-profit and public child care services in Ontario to grow and expand, given the right conditions. They have done it successfully in the past, more successfully than the for-profit child care operators. Second, the Ontario government, with the support of municipal governments and school boards, knows exactly how to facilitate and co-ordinate the expansion of non-profit and public child care, because it has done this in the past.
So, if non-profit and public child care are not expanding rapidly in Ontario, it must have to do with the failures of Ontario government policy (as described in my recent blog post).
- Ontario has failed to fix shortages of early childhood educators. Starting wages in Ontario are $5.00 an hour less than in P.E.I.!
- It has failed to provide or enable sources of capital funding for expansion of community non-profit child care.
- It has starved child care providers of revenue in the $10 a day program and has failed to provide any certainty about future revenue streams for operators.
- Ontario has failed so comprehensively that you have to wonder if the failings are deliberate.
To cap it all off, we now find that Ontario is deliberately violating the terms of the Canada-Wide Agreement that it signed with the federal government back in March 2022. Ontario promised to increase child care capacity by at least 86,000 spaces, and it promised that a maximum of 30% of these new spaces would be operated by commercial for-profit operators. The balance would be community-based or school-based non-profit and public child care. It also promised that it would prioritize development of child care in underserved areas and amongst families with greater needs.
Instead, about 75% of the expansion that has occurred has been in for-profit spaces. And at least half of the new spaces are in areas of greater profitability rather than areas of greater need. Half of the new spaces can charge whatever fees they want, rather than being affordable spaces.
We know some details about Ontario’s expansion because of good journalism by Allison Jones of Canadian Press. She has recently written:
“Ontario’s deal committed the province to 86,000 new child–care spaces since 2019, though the deal was signed in 2022. But so far while there have been about 51,000 new spaces since 2019 for the kids five and under, the age group covered by the national program, only 25,500 of those are within the $10-a-day system.”
So, let’s do the math:
- Pretty well all of the new spaces that are outside the $10 a day system (without any controls on fees) are for-profit, so that is already half of the 51,000 spaces.
- Much of the growth inside the $10 a day system is also for-profit. When Ontario published its Action Plan in 2022 it told us that 15,000 spaces had opened since 2019 and 45% of this was for-profit.
- A further 21,200 spaces were said to be “in the pipeline” and 66% of this was for-profit.
- I estimate therefore that about half of the growth since 2019 that is inside the $10 a day system is for-profit (the Ministry of Education has these figures and is shy about releasing them, which tells you that they know they have something to hide).
- In other words, about 75% of the total of 51,000 new spaces in Ontario since 2019 are in the for-profit sector.
This is a clear violation of the Canada-Wide Agreement Ontario signed in 2022. In that agreement it promised that “at the end of this Agreement, the proportion of not-for-profit licensed child care spaces for children age 0 to 5 compared to the total number of licensed child care spaces for children age 0 to 5 will be 70% or higher.” (emphasis added). The agreement clarifies the purpose of this clause: “to ensure that the existing proportion of not-for-profit licensed child care spaces for children age 0 to 5 will be maintained or increased by the end of this Agreement.”
In case there was any doubt, the “definitions” section of the agreement refers to the Child Care and Early Years Act, 2014 in defining licensed child care. In other words, it refers to all licensed child care governed by that act.
So, Ontario is taking federal money intended to build a publicly-managed, affordable and accessible high quality child care system and it is not doing what is necessary to provide spaces for children and families.
Of course, parents who are desperate for child care spaces right now don’t care if the spaces are for-profit, non-profit or public. They just want a space for their child and they want it now. The negative effects of relying on for-profit child care without sufficient controls won’t show up for a while.
That’s what happened in the early 2000s when the Government of Quebec, under Jean Charest, tried the same trick – relying on for-profit child care for expansion. The results were disastrous for the quality of child care services, with nearly half of the new for-profit centres failing quality assessments sponsored by the Quebec Government. Similar quality problems are what led Mathieu Lacombe, the Quebec Minister of Families from 2018 to 2022 to say that allowing for the expansion of private daycare, was the ‘biggest mistake the Quebec government committed in the last 25 years.”
As I wrote in that recent blog:
I am not trying to say that all for-profit operators provide poor quality child care or that all of them skimp on child care staffing. Some small for-profit operators provide good quality care and devote themselves to quality improvements. You can have a certain percentage of for-profit providers in a publicly-funded child care system, but there need to be strong measures of public management that limit the ability of for-profit enterprises to extract profit at the expense of quality.
That was the spirit of the Agreement that Ontario signed up to in 2022. If Ontario were to implement this agreement in good faith, it would adopt a generous funding formula to cover actual costs, it would make expansion of child care into an all-of-government priority with a range of provisions for capital financing, it would develop a wage grid for child care educators that is at least as generous as the one in PEI and it would implement the agreement it signed on the balance of non-profit and for-profit expansion. Ontario’s parents and children need the $10 a day child care system they were promised.