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Modular Child Care Expansion in Manitoba: An Idea Worth Looking At

This is a good-news story about the expansion of child care capacity.  Right now, there are not many good-news stories; child care expansion is happening much slower than it should be.  And all the indications are that even the 250,000 additional child care spaces that provinces and territories have planned (but not funded!) by 2026 will not be enough.  TD Economics, in its recent publication, calculates that at least 243,000 MORE spaces will be needed to satisfy demand for child care when it is available at $10 a day.  So, we had better get working on designing, funding and building …

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Ontario’s 2024 Funding Formula

Ontario’s new funding formula should be providing clarity about guaranteed operating funding going forward.  It should provide for significantly increased staff compensation to deal with the obvious crisis in retention and recruitment.  It should give guarantees of sufficient future funding to make possible the rapid growth in not-for-profit and public facilities.  It should provide spending discretion to operators to spend funds in ways that are most appropriate to their program and community.  It should make clear that there will be ongoing and detailed financial accountability at the end of the funding year.  Further, the funding formula should be designed to …

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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 …

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 Why the Preference for Not-for-Profit and Public Child Care Services? 

This is my submission to the Parliamentary Committee studying Bill C-35 in Canada. I am an economist who specializes in the analysis of child care systems and in the design of child care policies and their effects. I have taught economics at the University of Toronto for 24 years.  I have published numerous articles analyzing issues related to child care in academic and policy journals.  I was the economist for the Special Parliamentary Committee on Child Care established by the Mulroney government in 1986-87.  I was the main author of a major report on child care reform in Ontario for …

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For-Profit Operators Don’t Want Child Care to Be a Public Service for Families

There’s a new Canada-wide organization of for-profit child care operators that has just been formed in Calgary.  Appropriately enough, they were brought together by CIPR Communications, a PR and marketing company they have hired to state their case.  They don’t like the new Canada-Wide Early Learning and Child Care system that the federal government and all provincial and territorial governments have agreed to create (to complement Quebec’s system).  They don’t want you and other families to have $10 a day child care. Instead, their new policy idea is the same as the much-tested and discredited old policy idea – fund …

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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 – …

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New Zealand’s Funding System for Early Childhood Education and Care Services

New Zealand has a substantial amount of supply-side funding (i.e., direct funding of operating costs) of its various types of early childhood education and care services.  In that way, it’s quite different from Australia; in Australia, the large majority of funding is on the demand-side – a payment to services on behalf of parents (and varying in amount according to the circumstances of the parents) when they use certain types of regulated child care. In Canada, we’re very interested in looking at different examples of supply-side funding.  Of course, child care providers in different circumstances have different costs.  An effective …

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Cost Controls and Supply-Side Funding: What Does Quebec Do?

As provinces and territories move towards $10 a day child care, they have committed themselves to creating new funding systems that implement cost controls on child care operators.  You’re probably wondering what the heck that means. Well, child care in Canada outside Quebec is being transformed from being funded mostly by parent fees to being funded mostly by direct funding from the government to child care operators.  In return for the provision of specific services, child care operators get operating funding, often known as supply-side funding.   These child care operators also commit to lowering their parent fees, eventually down to …

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Is Ontario About to Violate the Early Learning and Child Care Agreement it Signed?

Not-for-profit and public services are at the heart of Ontario child care.  Overall, they care for more than three-quarters of our children in licensed child care.  For children 0-5 years of age, that number has been 70% of children compared to 30% in commercial child care arrangements. I guess that’s why Ontario didn’t fuss too much about agreeing with the federal government that this percentage – at least 70% not-for-profit and public – would stay the same when licensed child care moves to $10 a day by 2026.  In March 2022, Ontario signed an agreement with the federal government to …

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