Excerpts
A new report about child care fees across Canada is warning that half of provinces — including Ontario — may miss the target of $10-a-day child care by next year, unless they step up their game.
Premier Doug Ford has more reason than most to take this wake-up call seriously. Unlike 10 other provinces and territories, Ontario still hasn’t signed an agreement with the federal government to secure federal child-care funding and continue child care savings beyond March 2026.
An agreement-in-principle worth $16.8 billion has been sitting unsigned since March, despite calls from thousands of families for it to be finalized.
Now Education Minister Paul Calandra seems more interested in pointing fingers at the federal government and warning of fee hikes. And yet the province has refused to improve its own child-care funding for years, so that now it contributes only 26 per cent of operating funding into the system, as cited in the recent City of Toronto Early Years and Child Care Service System plan.
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What is truly unfortunate about Ontario’s foot-dragging on child-care is that Ontario families have been benefiting the most from fee reductions. The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives’ annual fee survey has been tracking how much parents pay for child care for a decade.
In the years before the Canada-Wide Early Learning and Child Care Plan, commonly called the $10-a-day plan, started in 2021, the annual report told the story of out-of-control and unaffordable child-care fees in most of Canada. Ontario, and especially Toronto, were always called out as having some of the highest and least affordable child care in the country.
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Thanks to the $10-a-day plan, families in Ontario are starting new jobs, going back to school, buying new homes or growing their families. All things that our economy desperately needs. In fact, a report from the Centre for Future Work found that the $10-a-day plan has unleashed economic benefits that created $32 billion in economic growth and helped Canada avoid a recession in 2023.
The truly transformative potential of this program is only beginning to be understood. Imagine the benefits to Ontario’s children, families, communities and the economy that would be possible if both levels of government did everything that they could to make $10-a-day work.
We could achieve not only fee saving for families, but decent work and pay for educators too. If we solved the workforce shortage in child care, we’d end wait-list stress for families.