The Decibel - What happened to $10-a-day daycare in Ontario?

Episode Date: September 20, 2022

In March, Ontario became the last jurisdiction in Canada to sign on to the national Early Learning and Child Care Agreement. The $30-billion commitment by the federal government aims at bringing down the cost of daycare to an average of $10 per day by 2026. While all provinces and territories are working out the kinks of their rebate programs, Ontario’s rollout has been particularly plagued by delays and confusion.The Globe’s Dave McGinn has been following the child care agreement and its rollout across the country. He tells us which jurisdictions are doing well according to child care advocates and why Ontario is falling behind. Plus, we hear from parents about their experiences trying to navigate the system.Questions? Comments? Ideas? E-mail us at [e-mail]

Hi, I'm Maina Karaman-Wilms, and you're listening to The Decibel, from The Globe and Mail. $10 a day daycare is rolling out in stages across the country, with many places aiming to reduce fees by 50% by the end of the year. But things aren't on track everywhere. So we put a call out on Twitter to find out what parents are experiencing. I have a son. He's 21 months old. And I emailed a place when he was born, December 2020. And a year later, I got an email from them saying I'm on the wait list

and that it's $100 a day. He's my second child. My first child, it was $50 a day, and I still worked, but with my second child, we decided for me not to work because of the daycare situation. There isn't daycare. And that was one of the big motivating reasons for the rollout of this program is to encourage participation in the workforce, right?

Because daycare helps to allow that in a very big way. That's The Globe's Dave McGinn, who's been keeping tabs on how the $10 a day daycare rollout is going. And so when you hear these stories of people who want to be in the workforce but just can't find affordable daycare, it really brings home a problem in the program and a problem that the program is trying to solve over the next 5 to 10 years. We heard from a lot of people.

At this time, our daycare fees have not been reduced in any way. We're thinking that it'd be helpful just for us as a family, allow us to get some extra income by my wife being able to work, but it's just totally not available. I can't say any of the changes have helped with the process of finding care. But yeah, it's a crisis in this town. And nowhere is this a bigger problem than in Ontario. Dave McGinn will tell us why that is and where in the country things are progressing. Plus, we'll also hear more directly from parents about their experiences. This is The Decibel. Dave, thanks for being here.

Thank you for having me. We actually last had you on the show in March to talk about daycare, and that was right after Ontario signed on to the federal $10- day child care plan. So this is half a year later now. How would you describe how the rebate rollout is going in Ontario? Slow. I would say slow and for many parents and operators, confusing. Okay. And that's Ontario. Is that specific to this province or is this kind of an issue across the country? Well, Ontario was the last jurisdiction in the country to sign the agreement. And therefore, that puts them behind schedule of everyone else. But what's complicating in Ontario is that in Ontario, child care is administered through the municipalities. There are 47 municipalities in the province. So it's a long process. And parents were given the expectation

that rebates would begin rolling out in May, which was highly unlikely to ever happen. And now that it's six months later, I think a lot of parents and operators are wondering, you know, where are my savings at this point? Okay, so I'm getting the picture of why this rebate rollout is so slow and taking so long then in Ontario. Let's just zoom out, I guess, to elsewhere in Canada for a moment. Is there any place that's kind of chugging along in good time here? Any province that is progressing as they said they would? There are several that are doing a really good job. PEI is highlighted frequently by child care advocates as doing a really good job. Now, it is the smallest province in the country, but they've already reduced fees to $25 a day, and there's another discount coming. I think they're set to reduce fees to $20 a day in October. BC already has

about 6,500 $10 a day spots. Most provinces and territories have already begun rolling out savings to parents. So they are ahead on that. Everyone's going to have, there's going to be particular problems. But so far, Ontario seems to be unique in the difficulties it's encountered so far in rolling out the program. Can we put this into perspective a little bit? How much are parents actually paying for daycare in Ontario these days? In Ontario, average daycare prices for infants is about $73 a day. For toddlers, it's $61 a day. And for preschoolers, it's about $53 a day, which is some of the highest costs in the country. I know in Toronto, child care fees are the highest anywhere in the country.

We put a call out on Twitter, our producer Cheryl put a call out on Twitter to find out if parents had seen any money yet. And a number of people in Ontario responded, got back to us and said that they haven't seen any money yet. I have a daughter, just started daycare. She's 21 months old and we're paying $51 a day at a for-profit centre that we're very happy with, but have no indication of when the $10 daycare may come in or not. We had high hopes and expectations from government commitments that at this time we would actually see some reduction and some rebates. But our latest invoice is still the same fees that we were paying earlier this year and

last year, which is $55.62 per day for the toddler program. When Ontario signed up in March, Dave, said they would give these rebates to parents, did they have a plan for actually getting the money out to people? I think they did. I think they just weren't as clear as they could have been about how long the actual process would take. I think it might have been technically possible for parents to begin seeing money as early as May, but that announcement was made on March 28th. And so, again, when we think about the process where municipalities would have to review the agreement, municipalities would have to come up with service contracts to send to providers, providers would have to review those contracts to opt in, then be vetted. It's very unlikely that that was going to happen between March 28th and May. And so I think if the province had been a little bit more clear,

and I think frankly, if us in the media had been more clear about what this process was likely going to require, if there was a bit more transparency and parents had been told, you know what, this is happening, but you likely won't get your money until October or November, that would be a lot less frustrating than having the expectation that you're going to see 25% knocked off the top of your child care bills by May with your payment retroactive to April. We'll be back in a minute. So in Ontario, both for-profit and non-profit daycare centers are eligible to opt into the $10 a day plan. But we heard from a number of people on Twitter that said their daycares are reluctant to sign up or just are not signing up.

I just want to read a couple of responses that we got, Dave. One person wrote, quote, we received an email from our child care center that they won't be taking part because of a lack of transparency from the Ford government, end quote. And another person said, quote, our daycare sent out a note to all parents saying there was basically no real incentive for them to join the program. As a parent, it's so disappointing. But I also understand that my private daycare is a business and I feel for the owners, end quote. So, Dave, do we have a sense of how many daycares have actually signed up so far? So in Toronto, the city has received

591 responses from child care operators as of last month out of just over a thousand of them. Of those, 560 have said they intend to opt into the program, 464 of them are not-for-profits and 96 of them are for-profit. So that shows you the difference in interest, it would seem, between the not-for-profit sector and the for-profit sector. Yeah. So there's a lot less in the for-profit sector. A lot less in the for-profit sector, yeah. Even so far, Ontario pushed back the deadline to apply for the program for funding for this year from September 1st to November 1st, in part because not enough centers were opting in. And so think about the parents out there who are hoping to see their childcare bills drop by half by the end of this

year, hoping to see $10 a day by 2025, and they find out that their child care provider has decided to opt out of the program. That's going to be a real painful situation to deal with. This may be a basic question, but I think I'm going to ask this anyways. Why wouldn't for-profit daycares want to sign up here in the first place? A big sticking point for them is there was language in the deal originally around, quote-unquote, undue profits that then required the municipalities to put a profit cap on how much for-profit centers could make. So when we talk about undue profits, what exactly is this language referring to? So I know that in some jurisdictions, it put a profit cap at 10%. That gave a lot of for-profit operators pause. And there was also language in the deal around eligible expenses. And so I think

a lot of for-profit operators worried about bureaucratic interference in the running of their business such that, you know, would even if they went out and bought new toys, would they then have to first get permission from one of someone in the municipality to go and do that? They weren't really clear as to just what level of what they would call bureaucratic interference that would involve. Why exactly does Ontario need for-profit daycares to be a part of this? For-profit care represents about a third of child care providers in the province. So it's a pretty sizable number. And again, you know, if you're looking to create the most amount of spaces under this program, it's probably a lot easier to take the spaces that already

exist in licensed child care and convert them into the program rather than have to build new spaces. What is Ontario doing to address this reluctance of daycares to sign up? They have changed the language of the agreement. They've taken out the clause about undue profits, which you will have many childhood advocates say that's maybe not the greatest idea. But there's still a lot of just unknowns about what funding will look like in 2023 and 2024 that gives a lot of operators pause about joining the program. And I think understandably. I want to go back to something you said there about the undue profits clause and people maybe having an issue with that. Why would people maybe think twice about that idea of removing those profit caps for those for-profit centers?

Well, I think in very broad terms, the for-profit operators would tell you, who are you to tell me how much profit I'm allowed to make as a business owner? And I think childcare advocates would tell you, well, if you're taking public funds, surely we should be able to put some limits on how much of those public funds you take home at the end of the day, right? I mean, if we were funding an education system and we wanted private schools to be part of it, and then private schools said, okay, but there's going to be no cap on how much money we make at the end of the day, I think that might give some people pause. So it is a certainly thorny issue. And I still don't know how much for-profit operators will be taking home at the end of the day, but it was a major sticking point for them.

I want to ask you about Quebec, because Quebec launched subsidized daycare a while ago, back in 1997. And parents with kids in these centers pay about $8.70 a day. What can Ontario and the rest of Canada, I guess, learn from the Quebec model? I think there's lots to learn from Quebec. The affordability of it is going very well. So anyone who applies for the program and is accepted into it pays the same rate regardless of how much they make. But one caution there is to be learned from Quebec is that while it's always heralded as the model we should all be following, it's important to remember that Quebec has never served more than about 30% of children five and under. And there has always been massive wait lists to get into the program.

30% of children, like only a third of kids then? Only a third of kids age zero to five. And so when we look to applying or modeling that system across the rest of the country, we really have to look to the next step of the federal deal, which is expansion. Because right now, if we're focused on affordability, if we're looking to nationalize some version of the Quebec model, we have to wonder about how many kids we're actually going to be able to accommodate. Let's talk about access here because it seems like spaces is a big factor in Quebec there. You mentioned it. It's one thing to reduce the cost of daycare, but then a lot of families,

if you're not able to find a space, a spot in a daycare center, it doesn't actually help you in the first place. Ontario is also anticipating that this is going to be a problem, the space issue. And in Ontario's deal with Ottawa, there's a promise to create 86,000 more spots. What's the progress on that? That is the next big hurdle for the program. Right now, every province, including Ontario, seems very much focused on affordability. So that means in Ontario, bringing fees down by about 50% by the end of this year. Now, the next big hurdle, of course, is going to be expansion. Early childhood educators are obviously a huge part of any expansion plan because you can build all the daycares you want,

but if nobody wants to work in them, there's really no point. And so I think a big part of any expansion plan will be incentivizing people to pursue that career and stay in that career. There's a huge amount of attrition in that job sector so far. So getting more ECEs into the profession will be a big one. But again, you have to remember, to be fair to the provinces, this is a multi-year plan. And so while they're very much focused on affordability, I should hope that behind closed doors and with people in the sector there have meetings about what is the way forward to create all of these spaces. Because even before the rollout of this program, there were huge waitlists for child care in many parts of Ontario, if not all throughout Ontario.

And just lastly here, Dave, all provinces and territories have now signed on to the federal child care deal. And we've been talking about a lot of frustrations. But I do want to share a positive note that we got from Jessie in Nova Scotia. She told us that her bills went down almost $200 a month, and it's, quote, a huge help to us. So some parents are actually seeing a difference here. I guess, how long will it take for this to be a reality for parents across the country? For all of them, who knows? It's going to be a long slog. I know that in Toronto, coming in October, about 500 licensed child care centers have been approved and the

money is going to flow to them. I know that in Peel region, something like close to 40 centers. So again, it's not many, but one would hope that as time goes on, more and more centers join this program. There is an expansion plan that comes into play. And as frustrating as the rollout of it can be to some parents and operators, I do think we have to remember that this is a multi-year program. Dave, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today. Thank you for having me. That's it for today. Thanks to all the parents who answered our call out.

Hi, this is Liz from Kingston. Hi, my name is Moritz Schmidt. I live in Carlton Place, just west of Ottawa. Hello, my name is Lauren from Toronto. Hi there, it's Steve from Sudbury. Hello, my name is Catherine Carrington. I live in Squamish, British Columbia. I'm Mainika Raman-Wellms. Our producers are Madeline White, Cheryl Sutherland, and Rachel Levy-McLaughlin.

David Crosby edits the show. Kasia Mihailovic is our senior producer, and Angela Pachenza is our executive editor. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll talk to you tomorrow.