Commentary
The government of Ontario recently announced its revamp of funding for licensed centres covered by the
Canada-Wide Early Learning and Child Care program (CWELCC)—also known as the $10-a-day system. In an interview with CP24 on Aug. 15,
former Education Minister Todd Smith said the new funding scheme would provide child-care operators with certainty and stability, that it was simple and easy to administer, and that it would set centres up to grow more spaces.
What the then-minister didn’t mention was that the scheme cuts provincial funding to child-care centres that are not part of the CWELCC. The cut will impact between 8 percent and 10 percent of all of the licensed centres in Ontario. That’s some 500 centres that are now at high risk of closure. Most are woman-owned. Some had applied to be part of the CWELCC but were rejected—typically because they were either too new or were run as “for-profits,” i.e., small businesses.
The funding cut means that low- and middle-income families who qualify for provincial fee subsidies will no longer be able to access these centres, although those currently enrolled may be grandfathered for a period of time. Additionally, the staff at these centres will no longer be covered under provincial programs that contribute significantly to their wages. This will force many of the impacted centres to close their doors or dramatically raise their fees.
The decision to defund non-CWLECC centres is a clear indicator that the provincial government is capitulating to the federal government’s plan to nationalize the child-care sector. “I don’t believe we want to see a two-tier system in which we have private centres operating outside of the Canada-wide system,” Jenna Sudds, federal minister of families, children and social development, told the
Globe and Mail in an interview published Aug. 3. “I think it is in the best interest of our province and of families and children to build this public system.”
Except that this public system is better at creating child-care bureaucracy than it is at creating child-care spaces. Especially in Ontario, where municipal bureaucracies are tasked by the provincial bureaucracy to administer the taxpayer funding allocated by the federal child-care bureaucracy. The “simple and easy-to-administer system” touted by the former education minister still requires child-care centres to negotiate many aspects of their budgets annually with their local municipality. This includes any plans for growth, which, whether within the $10-a-day system or not, must also be negotiated with the provincial child-care bureaucracy.
When Ontario signed onto the CWELCC in 2022, it committed to creating 86,000 new licensed spaces for children under the age of five. So far, it has created about 51,000 spaces, and only about half of them are within the $10-a-day system. This is due in part to the cap on “for-profit” participation Ontario agreed to. The federal agreement limits the
number of spaces in centres run as small businesses participating in Ontario’s $10-a-day system to no more than 30 percent of the provincial total. It envisions the rest as being public sector or not-for-profit entities, both of which typically rely on taxpayer dollars for expansion.
Six other provinces have renegotiated their
CWELCC agreements, while Ontario has chosen to double down on the federal government’s access control system for child care. Ontario’s new funding scheme means that this January, the minority of families lucky enough to have a CWELCC space will pay marginally less than they currently do.
Everyone else will continue to face growing waitlists and limited access to licensed child care, not only within the $10-per-day system, but increasingly, outside of it.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
