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The national child-care program that promised to reduce fees to about $10 a day by this spring is expected to be approximately 90,000 spaces short of its target, and most of the licensed spots that have opened are in the for-profit sector, according to a Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives report.
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While a handful of provinces are on track to meet their space-creation goals, several others are not, and many of them will fall short by a wide margin, the report said.
Perhaps most troubling for supporters of a public, non-profit child-care system, the report found 57 per cent of all new spaces have been created in for-profit centres.
“This has been an overwhelmingly for-profit expansion,” said David Macdonald, the CCPA senior economist who authored the report.
For example, in Alberta, the for-profit sector has created 29,000 new child-care spaces since 2022, while only 3,700 new spaces have opened in public, non-profit centres, Mr. Macdonald said.
With provincial and territorial ministers responsible for child care across the country set to gather in Ottawa later this week, the report highlights the struggles of the national program.
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Advocates of public and non-profit child care say governments must do more to help the sector create new spaces.
“The not-for-profit sector depends much more on capital funding from governments, and there just has been insufficient public money for capital expansion. That’s a big problem,” said Morna Ballantyne, executive director of Child Care Now, a national advocacy organization.
Without more help from governments, the number of for-profit spaces outside of CWELCC agreements with no caps on the fees parents are charged will continue to grow, she said.
That would leave wealthier families better able to access care, while less economically advantaged parents struggle to find licensed, affordable child care.
“We really risk (creating) a two-tier system,” Ms. Ballantyne said.
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The expansion of for-profit child care also means the likelihood of creating “huge inefficiencies,” said Gordon Cleveland, an associate professor, emeritus, of economics at University of Toronto Scarborough, and a member of National Advisory Council on Early Learning and Child Care.
“You end up with too many spaces in places where you don’t need them, and you end up with too few spaces in places where you do need them, and you have oversupply and businesses failing,” he said.
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