Before Alberta launched its subsidized child-care program in 2022, Christine Pasmore’s daycare had between 100 and 150 children on its waitlist.
This year, there are more than 900 children on it.
“Since the $10-a-day [program] has come into play, [the waitlist has] ballooned,” Pasmore said at an event hosted last week by the Association of Alberta Childcare Entrepreneurs, an advocacy organization.
“Unfortunately, we’re only seeing about one per cent of those children get off the waitlist in a year,” said Pasmore, who runs Step Above Learning Society, a non-profit child-care centre in Grande Prairie, Alta.
Pasmore and other child-care experts spoke at the association’s Sept. 11 virtual event, which covered how Ottawa’s subsidized program has impacted frontline child-care workers and families whose children attend — or are on waitlists for — child care.
The program — formally called the Canada-Wide Early Learning and Child Care — launched in 2021 with a projected cost to Ottawa of $30 billion over five years. It has the stated goals of bringing parents’ child-care fees down to $10-a-day and creating an additional 250,000 child-care spaces by 2026.
But experts say that, at current funding levels, the program cannot achieve its aims of making child care affordable, accessible and attractive for child-care operators to participate in.
“I can say with 100 per cent confidence [that with the] system designed the way it is, it just cannot achieve all the factors that [the] government says it will,” said Andrea Mrozek, a senior fellow at the think tank Cardus, who has studied family and child-care policy for 20 years.
“High quality, affordable, flexible and inclusive … the system in Canada cannot and will not be all of those things,” she said. “So the question is: which one will it be?”
The federal government did not respond to multiple requests for comment by press time.
‘It is a dream’
Each province has negotiated separate agreements with Ottawa regarding funding and the number of spaces they are required to bring into the program. The federal government is currently covering the majority of the program’s costs, but aims to eventually share costs equally with the provinces.
Last year, Ottawa sent the provinces $5.2 billion, according to 2022-23 public spending accounts. That funding covers about 750,000 subsidized spaces, the prime minister said in a March 2024 press statement. Ottawa is projected to send the provinces $9.2 billion by 2025-2026, reflecting lower parental fees and more subsidized spaces.
Ottawa’s funding “sounds like a lot of money, but it doesn’t even scratch the surface,” said Ray Lewchuk, a board member at the Association of Alberta Childcare Entrepreneurs.
Funding would have to drastically increase to achieve the government’s affordability and accessibility goals, while also enabling child-care centres to properly operate, says Lewchuk, who co-owns Creekside Creative Academy in Red Deer, Alta. As Canadian Affairs has previously reported, many subsidized child-care centres are struggling to stay afloat at current funding levels.
In Quebec, about two-thirds of children are in subsidized child care, which the province has funded for 28 years. To raise the rest of Canada to this participation level while lowering fees to the $10-a-day target, federal and provincial governments would need to collectively spend $32 billion a year, Lewchuk says.
For the program to cover all 2.23 million Canadian children under the age of six, governments would need to collectively spend $47 billion. This number assumes parents paying $10-a-day and child-care operators incurring average annual costs per child of about $22,000 for wages, real estate and food.
“The dream of $10-a-day is just that. It’s a dream,” said Lewchuk, who presented his estimates at the virtual meeting.
And this level of funding is for basic child-care services, Lewchuk adds. At present, subsidized centres cannot afford to hire additional staff to cover for sick workers, forcing operators to send children home to meet the legal child-to-adult ratio. They can also not afford to spend on educational material or special activities, such as reading workbooks and music lessons.
Lewchuk estimates that providing enough funding for enhanced levels of care could cost Ottawa as much as $60 billion a year.
‘Write a letter’
Inadequate funding is also preventing child-care operators from opening new spots to serve more children, says Krystal Churcher, chair at the Association of Alberta Childcare Entrepreneurs.
“Most children will actually age out before they get a child-care space under this $10-a-day program,” said Churcher, referring to the fact that only children under six are eligible to enrol. “The availability of spaces is remaining at a critical level.”
Pasmore says she receives about 10 to 15 calls a day from parents looking for a child-care space.
“I have moms that phone me and say, ‘You’re my very first phone call, I haven’t even told my husband yet that I’m expecting’,” she said.
In Ontario, a provincial quota that caps how many for-profit centres can participate in the subsidized program is further hamstringing the government’s goal of adding more spaces.
For-profit child-care centres should not be stigmatized as being a lesser form of child care, says Laura Mae Lindo, a former NDP MPP for Kitchener, Ont. In 2023, Lindo resigned from the Ontario legislature over difficulties securing affordable child care to cover her irregular work hours.
In Ottawa’s 2021 budget, the government promised it would be “[w]orking with provinces and territories to support primarily not-for-profit sector child care providers to grow quality spaces across the country.”
“I feel like their heart was in trying to create something that everybody would have access to, so they emphasized the not-for-profit,” Lindo said at the event. “But what they forgot was that a lot of for-profit child-care operators actually grew out of trying to address a need that didn’t exist in the not-for-profit sector.”
For instance, parents of children with disabilities “opened up their own child-care centres because they were the expert in understanding what their little people needed … And then more and more parents who also had kids with similar needs would come to them.”
For families who are still on waitlists, Pasmore urges parents to advocate with their local governments.
“Write a letter to your MLA or MP, your local city council,” said Pasmore. “We did a waitlist campaign here in Grand Prairie. I had over 900 families and letters to our city council and local MLA, and I’ll tell you that within 30 days, we had somebody on our City Council whose only job is to help create child-care spaces in Grand Prairie.”
“Those letters make a huge difference and a huge impact.”
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