Shruti Iyer and her son Ansh take a break after playing at a Toronto park. Iyer is awaiting the implementation of $10-a-day child care in Ontario, but in the meantime her monthly child-care costs have risen dramatically.Shruti Iyer and her son Ansh take a break after playing at a Toronto park. Iyer is awaiting the implementation of -a-day child care in Ontario, but in the meantime her monthly child-care costs have risen dramatically.

The success and progress of the programs varies but in some provinces, many parents haven’t seen the promise of more affordable daycare materialize.

By Jeremy NuttallStaff Reporter

Sun., Aug. 14, 20229 min. read

Shruti Iyer has heard child care will soon become more affordable.

She just wonders when it will actually happen.

So far, her family’s costs have only gone up.

Around the time Ontario started its push to bring in $10-a-day child care with the backing of the federal government, Iyer’s City of Toronto child-care subsidy ended. The change has added another $500 a month to her expenses to drop off her three-year-old son sporting his camouflage Star Wars cap at child care each day.

She’s been told that if her daycare signs on to the provincial program, her costs could go back down.

That “if” has been lingering.

“We’ve just been kept in the dark,” Iyer says. “We really don’t have much information on if the daycare is opting in or opting out.”

She says the situation feels all the more disappointing when she looks at other provinces that are enjoying the same federal support to establish or revamp child-care systems.

Across Canada, provincial and territorial governments are working to implement subsidized daycare programs with the help of a cash injection from the federal government. Justin Trudeau’s Liberals struck similar deals with governments all over Canada starting last year, spending $30 billion to jump-start early childhood education and child-care programs. B.C. signed an initial agreement with Ottawa in 2017.

The success and progress of the programs varies across the country with some places, such as Yukon, already enjoying a functional $10-a-day system.

Ottawa committed $13.2 billion in funding for child care over six years to help Ontario reach an average of $10-a-day child care. Negotiations weren’t easy for the deal, with the Ontario becoming the last province to strike one with the federal government.

The province says it has created 15,000 new spaces so far and that it aims to have 27,000 by the end of the year. Once the agreement with Ottawa ends, the goal is to have created 86,000 spaces.

The provincial government did not provide numbers for all of Ontario, but the City of Toronto says that of its 1,042 licensed programs, 560 have opted in ahead of the Sept. 1 deadline to do so.

Another 31 have formally opted out.

That leaves hundreds more on the outside, looking in.

As a result, many parents haven’t seen the promise of more affordable daycare materialize.

Iyer, for one, is paying hundreds more a month to keep her three-year-old son in child care at what she describes as an average daycare. She says she’s heard similar stories across Toronto via friends and community forums for mothers.

Iyer is a freelance marketing professional and, if need be, she says she can keep her son at home. It’s not the best option, in her mind.

“I’m on back-to-back calls,” she says. “What is he going to do to kill time?”

A head-start on the West Coast

On the West Coast, British Columbia started its own push for such a child-care program in 2018 and had a head-start on most provinces, aside from Quebec, which has had a system in place since the 1990s starting at $5-a-day and since increasing to about $8.70.

In 2018, B.C. started with 2,500 spaces priced at $10-per-day. Now, the province is closing in on 12,500 spaces in the $10-a-day program.

First signing an agreement with Ottawa in 2017, more than $250 million from the arrangement has already helped fund the implementation of the plan with many millions more to come. The province has invested $2.7 billion on the plan since 2018.

Its stated aim is to have 70,000 new child-care spaces by 2028.

Sharon Gregson, spokesperson for B.C.’s $10aDay child-care campaign, says the goal includes having as many parents as possible pay that rate. Gregson says not having income-testing, or the province’s historical method of funding people depending on their earnings, is the most desirable model.

“At this point, B.C. is moving in the right direction by moving to a fee cap of $10 a day, where families don’t have to be income-tested,” Gregson says. “We don’t income-test families before they go to elementary school, for example, and so we want the same for a child-care system.”

Four years after the province started its child-care plan rollout, there is now a long list of providers applying to be $10-a-day sites, she says.

There are some holdouts, she adds, as some providers are still waiting for more information to come out from the province before they commit.

Still, the program has been “like winning the lottery” for parents in the province, says Ana Valle Rivera, a mother in metro Vancouver.

Her son was in a two-hour preschool program three days a week when a spot at a $10-a-day daycare opened up for him. Soon, Valle Rivera was paying the same costs to have her son in full-time care as she had been for the six hours a week of preschool.

It opened things up for her, enabling her to start a business related to early childhood education and to pursue a master’s degree, among other projects.

“The only reason I’ve been able to do any of the things that I’ve done in the last two or three years is because of having $10-a-day child care,” Valle Rivera says. “If I didn’t … I guarantee you I would not have started this business, I would not be doing this master’s.”

Back in Ontario, the results have been different.

Growing pains in Ontario

Ontario has given child-care providers until September to opt in to the system.

Advocates say many providers have been reluctant because of the way the province’s plan is structured.

Andrea Hannen, executive director of the Association of Daycare Operators of Ontario, says the way the provincial government is rolling out the child-care plan makes it difficult for operators to get on board.

With funding from Ontario, municipalities will administer the money and work out how much they’ll fund each daycare individually. Operations will be subject to financial oversight from local officials, Hannen says.

“That adds an extra layer of complication to the process,” she says.

Providers that have been operating for years would have to speak to municipal officials about how they run their business, she says, which has them skeptical about signing on.

Hannen says they worry that everything from when toys are replaced to the costs of fixing a furnace could suddenly be open to scrutiny and interference as municipal officials decide what can be included to calculate the funding they are granted.

“All of those decisions now have to be negotiated line by line with a municipal bureaucrat who may or may not have any experience actually running a licensed child-care centre,” she says.

“Suddenly, you can’t guarantee the same level of quality you’ve always provided parents. You’re having to negotiate with somebody who really is looking at it only from a set of financial formulas.”

The office of Education Minister Stephen Lecce says it is meeting with providers and advocates to solve issues. In a statement to the Star, it said it is working toward a “seamless” implementation of the system. The office would not say how many providers have signed on thus far.

Naila Saeed, the CEO of EYES Child Care, says for-profit daycares have qualms about signing on because of a profit cap of 10 per cent for those opting in to the government's program.

In Concord, Ont., the CEO of EYES Child Care, Naila Saeed, says for-profit daycares also have qualms about signing on because of a profit cap of 10 per cent for daycares opting in to the government’s program.

Saeed, who sits on a Canada-Wide Early Learning and Child Care Plan advisory board, says the 10-per-cent cap has been put forward in meetings with government officials. Ontario did not address the figure in a response to the Star’s query about it.

After construction and other start-up costs, it can run between $800,000 to $1 million to start a franchise in her company. Those costs make such a profit margin a tough prospect, Saeed says, especially when also trying to maintain the quality of the daycare.

“How can they get this investment out if there is a cap on their profit margin and there will be so much regulation in terms of the charges?” she says.

Adding to the financial strains is operators who took on debt to stay open during COVID-19, she says. The cap will make it more difficult for them to recover.

Needed: More spaces — and more staff

In B.C., Gregson says the province didn’t have the same municipal layer as Ontario, which was part of the reason it had an easier time getting daycares to sign up. When applications were first opened, there were more daycares applying than there were spots for $10-a-day facilities, she says.

Ontario isn’t the only province where parents and providers have complaints. In Winnipeg, Lori Isber sits on the Fort Rouge Child Care board, which is responsible for about 150 children.

Isber says there are about 500 such boards in Manitoba and the provincial government doesn’t have a plan in place to fuse them into one cohesive system. As well, she says, it has only taken the federal money — $1.2 billion over five years — and added it to the existing system.

The result is people are still relying on a means-tested system that Isber says stigmatizes some parents. It also comes with a stack of frustrating paperwork, which deters some from even trying to apply for subsidies.

“Its subsidy system is ancient and difficult to get through,” she says. “It’s actually doing the opposite of what it wants to do, which is make sure the lowest-income families can have access to subsidy.”

Isber says her board is sitting on about $175,000 meant to help subsidize parents and they can’t get it to parents because most at the centre have incomes above the subsidy threshold.

Morna Ballantyne of Child Care Now, a national advocacy group, says Manitoba is an outlier in its handling of the money from the federal government and its approach to child care, because it is using a means-tested system to bring fees down. Ballantyne says the approach runs counter to the principle of lower costs for everyone.

In a statement, Manitoba’s department of Education and Early Childhood Learning said the province has the second-lowest fees in Canada and that expanding the current subsidy system is an “initial step” with more plans on the way.

“Our longer term plans are focused on reaching the goal of average out-of-pocket parent fees of $10 per day,” it read.

For the most part, she says, provinces are on track to reduce fees, but one of the bigger questions is how to create spaces and attract staff. Historically, low wages have slowed the progress of creating spaces because there isn’t enough staff to accommodate them.

Many more daycare workers are needed to help create the thousands of spaces for which provinces are aiming, she says.

“That is not going to happen unless the very poor working conditions and very low wages of early childhood educators are addressed,” she says.

On top of the staffing issue, physical infrastructure also must be tackled.

“All governments need to be working much more closely together,” she says.

A territorial success story

One place where the $10-a-day systems are already up and running is Yukon. The territory, while it does have a much smaller population than most jurisdictions, still gave itself a tight deadline of April 1 last year to have its universal system operational.

Minister of Health and Social Services Tracy-Anne McPhee told the Star the deadline was the most difficult part of implementing the plan. Focusing on culturally sensitive education and starting at the core of the community were two key approaches to get support for the program, McPhee says.

She says the territorial government’s size makes it more nimble, so it was easier for different government departments to work together.

“We have a small cabinet of (seven) people,” she says. “So we’re in constant conversation about this.”

But, she adds, the Yukon’s push to reach its goals could be replicated at scale in larger provinces.

The territory has folded in pre-existing daycares and managed to increase wages for workers in the sector. McPhee says wages went from $16-19 an hour to more than $30.

“One of our key goals was to make daycare affordable, accessible and of high quality,” she says. “It’s a significant financial support for Yukon families if they have children in daycare.”

As Yukon and other jurisdictions find their way, hearing of their success frustrates parents such as Iyer.

The cost of living in Toronto is already so much higher than most of Canada. But making things sting a little more is the prospect of how the situation can permanently affect her family.

“I’m pretty sure I’m not going to have another kid considering how things are right now in this province,” she says. “It’s really heartbreaking.”

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