From the standpoint of the Justin Trudeau Liberal government, the $10-a-day child care program’s implementation in Ontario is a smashing success. If there is credit to be had for this seeming bargain, the Liberals get all of it. When problems arise with the unrealistic and underfunded entitlement program, well, that’s the fault of the Doug Ford government.
Implementing the federal child care program has created a trifecta of trouble for the Ontario government. Parents are facing long wait-lists for the subsidized care, child care centres are complaining about inadequate funding, and now, a major public sector union is up in arms over private sector involvement. All of this for a federal program that the provincial government never wanted in the first place.
Education Minister Todd Smith recently, and very reasonably, wrote to the federal government pointing out that a “lack of adequate funding and imposed policies that are significantly limiting growth.” These were problems that the provincial government flagged in negotiations before the program started, Smith said.
Specifically, Smith wants the federal government to loosen a rule that limits for-profit providers to just 30 per cent of the total number of spaces in the program. Smith says the for-profit sector is ready to add thousands of additional spaces, but it is being held back by federal rules as wait-lists continue to climb.
In response, a spokesperson for Jenna Sudds, the federal minister of minister of families, children and social development, said, “As the last province to sign on, Ontario has made progress, however, as all of us can agree, more work needs to be done.”
This week, Smith took a more conciliatory tone, saying that he wants to work with Sudds to create the spaces families are counting on. It appears the quiet diplomacy stage has begun, but Smith’s criticisms were very much to the point.
In the earlier letter, Smith said, “With waitlists so high, parents and guardians across the province are seeking quality child care for their children in their local community regardless of whether they be for-profit, not-for-profit, or home based.”
A major Ontario union and the non-profit sector have reacted strongly to that kind of crazy talk. Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) Ontario president Fred Hahn said Smith wants “to open the floodgates to big business by using taxpayer dollars to subsidize private operators’ profits.” CUPE represents more than 5,000 child care workers in Ontario.
In CUPE’s view, “big box” daycare providers are waiting to pour billions of dollars into the daycare market, taking over smaller operators and short changing children. To make it worse, they would do this just to make a buck.
Smith says about 96 per cent of for profit operators in Ontario own just one or two centres and the sector is predominately female. The government says the cost of a child care space varies across the province, but there is no consistent pattern between non-profit and for-profit centres.
Non-profit operators certainly think they are superior. They produced an open letter asserting that for-profit care “presents real and unnecessary risks.” Pity the 30 per cent of children who receive that type of care under the Liberal plan, then.
In effect, the people who clamour for more government-funded child care are willing to deny it to parents unless the program follows their own ideological preferences.
Child care at the artificially low price of $10 a day is certainly not a program the Ford government would have started. Ontario was the last province to sign on to the federal scheme, finally capitulating in March of 2022, just before the provincial election.
The province’s reservations about funding and the child care sector’s ability to meet demand for the low priced program were well-founded, as the last two years have demonstrated. The restriction on for-profit ownership has hamstrung the program and the $13.2 billion the feds have promised over six years is unlikely to be enough.
The dysfunction of the $10-a-day program is occurring across the country and it illustrates a fundamental flaw in the plan. Provinces are expected to run the program, but they don’t make the rules. That limits their ability to deliver the promised spaces. Ontario has created less than one-third of the 86,000 spaces there are to be ready by the end of 2026.
Spending billions of dollars but failing to achieve stated goals is standard operating procedure for the federal Liberals. It’s a pity that the Ontario PCs got dragged into the Liberal plan, but it was politically difficult to be the government that stood between parents and their promised entitlement.
The Ford government was right to be skeptical of the Liberal daycare plan, but that offers little consolation now.
Randall Denley is an Ottawa journalist. Contact him at [email protected]