Excerpts

Manitoba has created a fraction of the 23,000 spaces promised under the $10-a-day national child-care program announced in 2021.

Just 3,408 spaces have been created for infants and preschoolers since 2022, a new national study by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives found.

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[David Macdonald's] report, titled Cash Cow: Assessing Child Care Space Creation, calls on governments to act quickly and create more spaces. It urges help for non-profit providers to expand so that public funding doesn’t end up enriching for-profit centres.

“Non-profit expansion is important, as it keeps the money spent directly on child-care costs,” said Molly McCracken, Manitoba director of the CCPA.

The two main expenses in child care are labour and rent, she said.

“If a profit is made, it is at the expense of either of these,” she said.

In Manitoba, nearly 95 per cent of child-care centres operate as non-profit.

“When new spaces are created in the non-profit sector, the public $10-a-day funding goes to better wages and higher-quality child care,” she said.

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In May, the province and federal government announced a new wage grid for the local early learning and child-care sector with historic raises amounting to as much as $5 more per hour. McCracken said the new study didn’t examine the impact of Manitoba’s pay bump on addressing staffing shortages at child-care centres.

“The pay increase was a crucial step for labour-force recruitment and retention, as well as staffing newly created child-care spaces,” she said.