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Do You Want to Know How to Make Child Care Expansion Happen in Ontario?

I’m done some work recently with Building Blocks for Child Care (B2C2) on how to facilitate the expansion of not-for-profit and public child care in Ontario. They are an organization that knows a lot about all the different steps necessary to expand child care services – planning, design, rules and regulations, financing. With their advice, I wrote a primer called How to Make Child Care Expansion Happen in Ontario, giving 10 recommendations for action in Ontario to make not-for-profit and public child care grow. Briefly, they are: A system of capital grants and loan guarantees for not-for-profit and public operators …

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Accessibility and Quality of Child Care Services in Quebec

These (link below in next paragraph) are slides from a recent webinar presentation I made along with colleagues from Équipe de recherche Qualité des contextes éducatifs de la petite enfance at UQAM. You can listen to the French version of my talk  https://youtu.be/R-JIAjvfQew or the whole webinar https://qualitepetiteenfance.uqam.ca/evenement/leducation-a-la-petite-enfance-sinvite-dans-la-campagne-electorale-27-septembre-2022/ But, I have also reproduced most of that talk in English here: Christa Japel has also done similar work here https://childcarecanada.org/blog/learning-experience-access-and-quality-qu%C3%A9bec%E2%80%99s-profit-child-care

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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 …

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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 …

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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/ Factor Progress Description Child care spaces Positive There were a lot more licensed child care spaces in 2019 than there were in 1986 — 7 times as many — serving a fairly stable number of children. Children in centre care Positive The popularity and acceptance of licensed centre-based child care has increased dramatically. Back in the early 1980s, only about 10% of …

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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 …

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

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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 …

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$10 a Day Child Care Will Dramatically Reduce Employment Barriers for Parents

A major new study (https://childcarepolicy.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Ten_a_day-paper-web.pdf ) addresses the question of whether the $10 a day program will truly improve child care affordability and reduce barriers to employment for families.  It was written by economists Gordon Cleveland and Michael Krashinsky from the Department of Management at University of Toronto Scarborough. Their study focuses on the situation facing couple families with one infant child and one preschooler in each of the three provinces at different possible levels of income.  The authors’ main conclusion is that the $10 a day program can and should dramatically change child care affordability and make employment a …

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Lies, Damned Lies, and Conservative Politicians

What a lot of whoppers!  If Erin O’Toole were Pinocchio, his nose would be 10 feet long by now.  Erin O’Toole, leader of the Conservative Party of Canada, has now come out with a full platform of policies, including policies on early learning and child care.  In it, he promises  (1) “to provide increased support for working families by providing increased funding for child care” (2) that “nobody should be prevented from getting back to work because they can’t afford child care” (3) that the Conservative policy will be “covering up to 75% of the cost of child care for …

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