Excerpts
...
Across Canada:
- 24% of children younger than two years of age are in licensed child care. In this age bracket, 62% are in parent-only care, with many of these parents on maternity or parental leave.
- 55% of all children in Canada who are two or three years of age currently use licensed care.
- 68% of all four- and five-year-olds who are not yet in kindergarten currently use licensed care.
- But, when those four- and five-year-olds reach kindergarten, the use of licensed child care drops to 33%.
...
Cardus does not really want financial support for licensed child care at all.
Instead, Cardus wants us to return to some version of Stephen Harper’s Universal Child Care Benefit. They estimate that if the federal spending on the $10 a day child care program was divided equally amongst families instead of going directly to day care centres to lower fees, each family would receive $3,869 per child, per year. But, right now, families using low fee child care are receiving $5,000 – $15,000 in child care fee reductions. With the end of direct funding of child care, child care fees would soar and nearly a million families would be much worse off than they are currently. Child care would be unaffordable once again, and mothers would be squeezed out of employment by high fees. How is that a sensible and affordable child care policy? No wonder 75% of Canadians think that a Conservative government, if elected, shouldn’t end the $10 a day child care program.
There Is still a lot of work to do to build a $10 a day child care program for all the families that want to use it – especially in expanding the qualified workforce and the supply of services. But already many Canadian children and families are much better off than they were in 2021. The priority now is to finish the job of providing affordable, accessible, quality child