Kim Yeaman of Innisfil, Ont., has been running her daycare at a deficit since joining the national child-care program about two years ago. Government control has made it impossible to run her business effectively, she says.
“There has been no consideration at all for even looking at people’s actual costs, of what it’s taking to run the child care,” she told The Epoch Times.
Before joining the Canada-Wide Early Learning and Child Care (CWELCC) program, she usually had a modest surplus that allowed her to hold year-end barbecues for families, or to pay for major repairs and maintenance. But she’s now going into debt just for daily operations.
She joined CWELCC to help her families; the program has the federal government cover a large portion of fees for each child and aims to have parents pay only $10 per day by 2026. But the restrictions the government has placed on her fees is crippling, she said.
Day cares in the program have received an increase in compensation from the government of just over 2 percent annually, but that doesn’t cover higher costs due to inflation, Ms. Yeaman said.
“My food costs have gone up 35 percent. My mortgage went up $4,000,” she said, adding that she has audited financial statements to prove it and she has become the “crazy spreadsheet lady” trying to show the government her costs are far beyond her compensation.
Ms. Yeaman, along with many other providers, froze her fees during the pandemic to help struggling families. But CWELCC unexpectedly set what she calls an “arbitrary date” of March 27, 2022, beyond which any fee increases are prohibited. She’s now stuck with fees at 2020 levels.
“Our fees need to be 20 percent higher to cover our costs,” she said. “We’re not talking about child care billionaires anywhere here,” Ms. Yeaman said, adding that it’s not a big money-making industry. “We basically now have absolutely no control over our businesses, because the government is controlling every dime that’s coming in.”
CWELCC was first announced in 2021, and the impacts can now be seen rippling through the child-care industry.
The program seeks to create new spaces, but it may wipe out others at the same time. It has contributed to a surge in demand, as intended—it was meant to get parents back to work and increase Canada’s productivity. But at the same time, wait lists are bursting, preventing some parents from working.
It has cut costs for many families, but those families may see themselves scrambling if Ms. Yeaman and others like her withdraw from the program, or close altogether. In that case, parents may have to quickly adjust their finances to pay the full rate again, or face the struggle of finding a new day care—many of which have long wait lists.
But it’s the long-term goals of CWELCC that are perhaps most concerning, said Andrea Hannen, executive director of the Association of Day Care Operators of Ontario.
Move Toward a Public System, Federal Encroachment
CWELCC seems on a trajectory toward an all-public system, Ms. Hannen told The Epoch Times. She cited a Senate committee report on the program that recommends future agreements under the program focus on funding a “public early learning and child-care system.”“In Ontario, this means that about a third of the potential centres that could expand to offer new licensed spaces are excluded from this opportunity,” she said. “In other provinces, Alberta for instance, the percentage of centres that stand to be excluded is much higher.”
“The idea that childcare is one-size-fits-all and the government can produce a sort of cookie cutter approach is a blow to parental choice. It would mean a loss of diversity in the educational approaches available,” Ms. Hannen said.
The child-care program is working for some of Ms. Hannen’s members, which are all independent, licensed operators. A lot of factors are at play in determining the impacts to an operator—the size and location of the centre, how many locations they have, and how much they raised their fees before CWELCC froze them, for example.
Ms. Yeaman’s Simcoe Childcare Services offers bus transportation to and from school for her older children. It’s an offering unique to her business model, and an expense not considered by CWELCC.
The province has promised a new funding formula that Ms. Yeaman hopes will take into consideration her actual costs, but it has not yet materialized.
Ms. Hannan criticized a lack of transparency around funding formulas and said she’s not sure a new formula will fix the problems.
“Who knows if this new funding formula is going to do all the things that people are hoping,” she said. “The lack of transparency is really striking and it’s hard to say how that’s going to go.”
CWELCC involves five-year agreements between Ottawa and individual provinces. Three layers of government are involved in the program’s rollout in Ontario, as 47 municipalities are responsible for administering the program.
And each layer of government has pointed the finger at the others for the program’s shortcomings.
Ms. Yeaman has called the municipality so many times township employees answer “Hi Kim,” she said. “They recognize my cellphone number.”
She feels they’re doing all they can to help her, but they tell her their hands are tied by the provincial government. Ontario’s education ministry, which is responsible for the program at the provincial level, did not reply to Epoch Times inquiries prior to publication.
“We are determined to build affordable child care, but we shared the concern of child care operators since the day we signed this deal with the federal government, which is that we need more flexibility in funding in order to support our operators,” he said.
Similarly, Ottawa has, on multiple occasions, blamed the provinces for how they’re rolling out the program. Most recently, Mr. Trudeau told reporters in Vancouver March 28 that some provinces are “slow walking” expansions.
Mr. Lecce defended Ontario’s decision to not spend all federal funds immediately.
“We’re moving some of those dollars year-over-year to where they’re needed,” he told CityNews. “We started low, and we’re ... scaling up.”
Philip Cross, a former chief economic analyst with Statistics Canada, says these multi-level government collaborations are often problematic.
Programs jointly administered produce a “hyphenated federalism” that operates with little accountability, he said, citing Donald Savoie, a leading Canadian expert on public administration.
Mr. Cross criticized Ottawa for encroaching upon provincial jurisdiction.
‘Take the Government Out of My Business’
Ms. Yeaman’s experience illustrates the struggle many providers are facing under CWELCC.She provides 205 spaces in the small city of Innisfil, which has a population of about 36,000. Her wait list is currently more than 500; it has increased “exponentially” in the past couple of years, she said. She has been in the business for 35 years, running her own centre for 22 years, and the industry was already facing challenges that have now been aggravated by CWELCC, she said.
Ontario started a full-day kindergarten program in 2010 that brought early childhood educators (ECEs) into the public school system, draining staff away from child-care centres, Ms. Yeaman and Ms. Hannen both said. But, Ms. Hannen said, there’s also a shortage of ECEs across the country—it’s not just Ontario.
Ms. Yeaman said many factors are contributing to an ECE shortage. For example, she sees far more special-needs children coming in and “staff are expected to be experts in everything.” Also, during the pandemic, there were so many restrictions in the business and day-care providers didn’t get the pay boost other front-line workers received from the province, she said.
“People were like, ‘You know what, I am done. I’m out.’ And they’re going to work at Starbucks and they’re going to work at Costco.”
“It’s a very difficult job; it’s a very rewarding job,” she said. “People have to have a really strong passion for what they’re doing to be in this field.”
The province has promised a raise for ECEs, but that hasn’t come, Ms. Yeaman said. And it also won’t help all the other support staff involved in child care who aren’t ECEs.
Two new centres are planned for Innisfil, she said, but she doesn’t know how the small city is going to staff them.
On March 28, Mr. Trudeau also announced $10 million to help train ECEs. However, Ms. Hannen said it could take several years before such a program produces qualified workers.
“This is really the kind of thing that should have been undertaken either concurrent to the initial roll-out of the CWELCC, or better yet, in advance of it,” she said. “As it stands, staff shortages across the country are keeping many licensed centres from running at full capacity, making expansion for these centres out of the question.”
Ms. Yeaman said the government should give the CWELCC money directly to parents.
“If parents submit invoices and receive the money back from the government that way, it’s going to take the government out of my business,” she said. “Right now, I am on the precipice of leaving the program.”
