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When then-prime minister Justin Trudeau announced the New Brunswick deal in 2021, he was clear that it would lead to "a 10-dollar-a-day average cost across the province within five years."
That average will result from some families paying the maximum $18 to $21 a day while others with lower incomes receive subsidies that reduce their out-of-pocket cost to zero or close to zero.
"How the people experience that 10 dollars a day will depend on where they are on the income spectrum," Holt said Tuesday.
The average out-of-pocket cost this year is $12.82 a day.
The premier's 2024 election platform did not mention that the $10 rate would be an average.
A Holt Liberal government would "continue implementing $10-a-day child care across the province, making it more accessible," the platform document said.
The speech from the throne last November also skipped any mention of the average, using an almost identical pledge to "continue to implement $10-a-day child care across the province to make it more accessible."
The progress of the federal-provincial child-care agreements was the subject of a recent report, "The Price is Not Right (Yet)," by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, a progressive think-tank.
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The 2021 funding agreement between New Brunswick and Ottawa was also supposed to see 3,400 new spaces created over five years.
According to the 2023-2024 annual report on the agreement, 1,634 new spaces had been created as of March 31, 2024.
An additional 942 designated spaces have been added in 2024-25, said a spokesperson for the Department of Education and Early Childhood Development.
The spokesperson said 4,925 names are on the wait list for spaces — up from 4,572 in March 2024. The new number includes 1,146 children who had not yet been born but whose parents had already registered.
The Holt Liberals promised in last year's election to eliminate that wait list.
In March, most provinces agreed to extensions of their agreements with the federal government for another five years, to 2031.
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