Prime Minister Mark Carney's apparent indifference to his predecessor's $10-a-day child-care program poses a big problem for the Ontario government. In Carney's spring budget update, he offered no new money for the program and will let the capital fund that covered child-care expansion costs expire next year.
Carney's moves will leave the child-care plan well short of its objectives in Ontario without any real hope for improvement, barring an unlikely provincial decision to pour billions of dollars into Justin Trudeau's day-care daydream.
Ontario caught between two visions
Ontario is caught awkwardly between former prime minister Trudeau's underfunded child-care ambitions and Carney's child-care thrift, and the issue has some urgency. While every other province except Alberta has a long-term child-care deal, Ontario does not. Federal operating dollars are only guaranteed until the end of March next year because the two sides have been unable to agree on money for a longer agreement.
Ontario says it needs a deal in place by the beginning of September so child-care providers can plan. If an extension is not worked out, the whole child-care sector in Ontario could be thrown into chaos, dependent as it is on federal money to subsidize the actual costs of the program. If that happens, angry parents will be looking for someone to blame. It is more likely to be Premier Doug Ford than the super-popular Carney. It will be easy for Carney to point to relative success in other provinces, talk about the billions of dollars the government has spent, and blame the Ontario government.
Trudeau's plan designed to fail?
That blame would be unjustified. From the outset, the Trudeau child-care plan was designed to fail. Unless the goal was solely to get votes, in which case it was a huge success. The last thing the deficit-ridden Trudeau government should have considered was a new entitlement program, especially one that sat squarely in an area of provincial jurisdiction and in a sector with limited capacity to increase supply.
Predictably, the issues that Ontario faces now are a mismatch between demand and supply and insufficient federal money to meet the goal of $10-a-day average cost. The demand surge was no surprise. Naturally, child care at bargain prices would boost demand from parents eager to get themselves a good deal. There was an unfortunate unintended consequence. As parents who had been paying full child-care costs rushed to join the new system, lower-income parents who had been using licensed child care got pushed out. Enrolment from that group dropped by 31 per cent compared to 2019, Ontario's auditor general found.
Staffing shortages compound problems
The imagined success of the federal program relied on Ontario's ability to quickly produce thousands of early childhood educators (ECEs) to staff the expanded system. That has not worked out. An analysis from the C.D. Howe Institute says that in Ontario more than 40 per cent of ECEs do not work in child care. Many prefer jobs at school boards, which pay more. Turnover in the sector is high. At the end of 2023, there were more than 80,000 approved child-care spaces unstaffed because of shortages. More recent figures were unavailable.
Ontario is now left in a precarious position, with the federal government pulling back and the province unable to bridge the gap without significant new investment. The blame game has already begun, but the real losers are families who depend on affordable child care.
