Excerpts

The Equal Pay Coalition and member organizations mark Equal Pay Day on Tuesday, 14 April 2026 by calling on the Ontario government to fully fund the province’s child care child system and close the gender pay gap for child care workers.

Front-line workers, parents, trade unions leaders and community groups are coming together to say CARE COUNTS-WAGES MATTER. Women’s equality, both as users of child care and as employees working within the Canada-Wide Early Learning and Child Care (CWELCC) program, depends upon an expanded and a strengthened system.

Under CWELCC, Ontario parents were promised $10-a-day child care, an affordability measure that was never delivered. While other provinces have met these standards, Ontario lags well behind, stuck at $22 a day. In Ontario, child care educators are legally entitled to a pay equity compliant wage grid between $35 and $45 per hour, plus benefits and a pension. Without funding to pay Ontario’s child care workers what they are owed, there is high turnover, resulting in a lack of spots and an inconsistent care experience for the services. Seven other provinces provide educators with a wage grid.

“Child care is the backbone of our economy. Without the care of the workers, the economy doesn’t work,” says Fay Faraday, Co-Chair of the Equal Pay Coalition. “But Ontario’s child care system remains too expensive for parents and it vastly underpays child care workers, driving a staffing shortage in Ontario that causes waitlists to grow.”

...

Child care is the bedrock of our economy. Without care work, no one works. Without care work, our economy does not work. The Ontario government is simply not living up to the promise to deliver on the Canada-Wide Early Learning and Child Care program (“CWELCC”) as an essential public service. The March 2026 budget utterly failed women. It recycled previously announced child care space commitments. It failed to deliver the much-needed expansion of funding to fully support care workers, women and their families. Most critically, the lack of funding meant that child care workers continue to be paid low wages.

In March 2022, Ontario and Canada signed the Canada-Wide Early Learning and Child Care (CWELCC) Agreement, known as the $10-a-day child care program. The program provides direct public funding for child care spaces for children under age six. The program is built on four key principles: affordability, accessibility, inclusion and quality. Bill C-35, the federal Act governing the agreement, is premised on gender equality...

...

The Ontario government’s lack funding is a surprise. CWELCC creates significant economic benefits to the economy as a whole. According to the 2024 report of the Centre on the Future of Work, CWELCC drives significant job creation, expanded participation in the economy by parents, increased employment in the sector, increased earnings, improved consumer spending, GDP growth and improved fiscal benefits to the government through taxation.

...