OPINION: Ontario needs to find new child care solutions

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By PETER JON MITCHELL and ANDREAE SENNYAH

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With Ontario’s election done and a strengthened majority government in place, it’s time to take care of some unfinished business: fixing the province’s broken child care system.

Ontario signed up for the federal $10-a-day child care system that was supposed to be an economic program with social benefits. But we’ve ended up with a federal boondoggle – a take-it-or-leave-it program that funds only one type of care.

Frankly, it could never even hope to meet the diverse needs of families around the province. Plagued by inequitable access, worker shortages, and governments’ inability to create the targeted number of new spaces, the $27 billion dollar program (with $10.2 billion going to Ontario) is a failure.

Ontario’s additional $11.8 billion in funding over the life of its five-year agreement with the federal government still hasn’t been enough to prevent waitlists from growing. A recently opened daycare in Sudbury started its operations with an 18-month waitlist.

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Given the economic uncertainty Ontario is facing from possible American tariffs, the government should stop propping up an expensive and poorly performing child care program.

Aside from poor performance, the child care program is especially inefficient in Ontario. Unlike other provinces, Ontario distributes its child care funding through municipalities. This adds another layer of government bureaucracy to the system.

Artificially reducing the true cost of child care is no easy task. Just examine Ontario’s cost control framework announced in August 2024. Supposedly meant to help child care centres operating at a loss due to capped fees, the 74-page rulebook details how bureaucrats will determine which costs are eligible under the program. In one example, the province states the purchase of a new refrigerator might be eligible if it is “a cost reasonably expected to be incurred by an ordinary prudent person in the operation of a comparable child care centre providing food to children, and necessary to providing safe and healthy food, as part of the base fee.”

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In other words, participating in $10-a-day child care means operators need a bureaucrat’s okay to buy a fridge.

Unfortunately, this expensive, inefficient system serves only a minority of children under age six in the province. As of March 2024, there were just over 317,000 spaces funded under the program in Ontario. That’s enough for an estimated 36% of children under age six.

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As the program only provides reduced parent fees for licensed home and centre-based care where providers have chosen to opt into the system, many families see no benefit because they cannot access a space, or because a different form of care better meets their needs.

Ontario’s re-elected government should be demanding the federal government provide a more efficient and equitable way to reduce the cost of care: giving provinces maximum flexibility to give the funds to parents.

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Our study on child care funding found that if the $10-a-day money was allocated to children instead of spaces, each child could be eligible for almost $3,900 per year. Instead of prescribing cost controls, governments would then be providing equitable support to all families. In the immediate term, the province could reform the provincial Childcare Access and Relief from Expenses (CARE) credit by indexing it to inflation and increasing the clawback to target the most help to lower-income families.

The failure of the federal government’s child care program in Ontario is an opportunity to look for new solutions and ways to better deliver for the province’s families. Ontario’s new provincial government should commit to renegotiating the failed child care agreement.

In a time of economic uncertainty, with Donald Trump’s threats never far from the headlines, we should focus on giving direct support to families for the real costs of child care, instead of creating bureaucracy and leaving families in the lurch with growing child care waitlists.

– Peter Jon Mitchell is family program director at non-partisan think tank Cardus and Andreae Sennyah is policy director at Cardus

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