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Ontario has secured a one-year extension with the federal government for the national $10-a-day child-care program, giving parents reassurance their fees won't rise for at least 12 more months, but with much hard work still to be done.
The program that lowers parents' child-care fees — now $19 a day on average in Ontario as an interim step toward $10 — had been set to expire March 31.
Most provinces and territories signed extensions with the federal government before this year's federal election, but Ontario only signed an agreement-in-principle to continue the program.
Ontario Education Minister Paul Calandra had said the federal government needed to address a shortfall of $2 billion per year that would occur if the current funding structure is left in place, and warned that parent fees would rise without additional funding.
The one-year extension for Ontario comes with $695 million in additional funding from Ottawa, which Calandra says means fees won't rise next year for parents but isn't enough for fees to be lowered further toward $10 a day.
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Hajdu said she is focused on high quality, which she said is often found in public and non-profit systems.
"It’s a real key element to a successful national child-care plan, that the care is consistent in quality across the country," she said.
Carolyn Ferns, policy co-ordinator for the Ontario Coalition for Better Child Care, said the promise of the program was $10 a day, not $19 a day, and both governments need to continue working toward that.
"This one-year funding extension cannot be the beginning of breaking the $10-a-day commitment," she wrote in a statement.
"This should be the start of negotiating a stronger and longer agreement, in which both levels of government step up to fully fund a high quality $10-a-day system."
When Ontario signed the child-care deal with the federal government in 2022, it agreed to create 86,000 new spaces within the system by December 2026, which the financial accountability officer has said would still leave the province short of meeting demand for more than 220,000 spots.
The province only achieved about 75 per cent of its interim space creation target at the end of 2024, the auditor general has found.
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