Excerpts
While recent child-care investments in Nova Scotia have been welcomed by many, some advocates warn the province risks undermining its progress by extending expansion funds to private daycares.
Minister of Education and Early Childhood Development Brendan Maguire has recently indicated that allowing investment into the private daycare sector — along with additional money from the federal government — would be necessary to meet its goal of delivering $10-a-day child care on average by March 2026.
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This would require renegotiating the 2021 Canada-wide Early Learning and Child Care Agreement — a $605-million bilateral agreement with Ottawa that was signed between former prime minister Justin Trudeau’s government and the former Nova Scotia Liberal government in 2021.
But the idea of channeling public funds toward private operations is something that the Nova Scotia Non-Profit Directors Association — a group that consists of about 30 to 40 daycare directors across the province — starkly opposes.
“The Non-Profit Directors Association believes that child care is a public service, and not a business,” said co-chair Janessa Williams, who is also executive director of Needham Early Learning Centre in Halifax.
This notion was reinforced in the initial agreement, which says that all federal funding given to Nova Scotia must be used to support the not-for-profit child-care sector.
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The provincial government has asked Ottawa to reconsider allowing expansion funds into the private sector before, but this request was denied under the previous federal government.
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Child Care Now Nova Scotia, another advocacy group, believes funding private daycare operators would be a “mistake.”
“I think we have a lot of really positive things going on and we should focus on those, and stick to our commitments in the Canada-wide agreement,” said Tammy Findlay, a member of the organization’s steering committee.
Findlay argues there’s more stability for families within the non-profit sector compared to private daycares, which can ultimately close at any given time, for any reason.
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Provincial expansion grants
Under the current bilateral agreement, Nova Scotia must create 9,500 new daycare spaces by March 2026, and has said it’s on track to do so with 7,363 spots created so far.
In an effort to meet this goal, the province has created three grant programs for not-for-profit providers to build or expand child-care facilities.
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