Myth: The idea of $10/day child care is great, but it seems like there are still so many families that can’t access a child care space. This is never going to work.
Truth: Families’ frustration in not being able to access a child care space is understandable. But parents should not be deterred because a universal child care system that ensures every family that wants a space has access to one is achievable.
Consider Sweden’s and Iceland’s ‘Gold Standard’ Child Care Systems
There are some great examples from Europe, including from countries like Sweden and Iceland, which both offer what is considered a ‘gold standard’ child care system that is accessible and affordable.
Consider that in Sweden, 85.4 percent of children from the age of 1-5 years were enrolled in early childhood education as of 2019. This high participation rate is a consequence of the Swedish government making child care a legal entitlement. This means that the government has an obligation to provide child care as a right to children. As part of this obligation, the Swedish government has mandated that children from the age of one year are entitled to publicly subsidized child care, and children from the age of three years are entitled to free child care for at least 15 hours per week.
Families also do not need to struggle to find a child care space in Iceland. 95 percent of children from the age of 2-3 years were enrolled in early childhood education as of 2019. Iceland has been able to achieve this high level of accessibility by legally requiring that all children under school age have a right to a place in a municipal early childhood education setting, either in a licensed center or in family daycare. It’s important to note that Iceland did not sacrifice quality to achieve these high child care participation rates. In fact, UNICEF ranked Iceland as number one in the world for child care quality.
Lessons from Europe on Achieving Universal Child Care Access
Canada can learn important lessons from Sweden, Iceland, and other European countries that have created accessible, affordable, and high-quality child care systems. This includes:
- Long-term investment: Achieving universal access requires decades of dedicated funding. Building a national child care system is a marathon, not a sprint!
- Make child care a legal entitlement: Legally enshrining children’s right to access early childhood education helps support sustained government commitment to supporting child care expansion.
- Local accountability: Municipal governments need to be empowered to plan for and build child care spaces where they are needed with sufficient levels of funding.
- Limit for-profit expansion: We already know that for-profit operators are less likely to build child care spaces where they are needed most. Government needs to support the expansion of public and not-for-profit operators in high-need communities.
Like any new system, $10/day child care is experiencing growing pains. There are real solutions to ensuring we build CWELCC as a truly universal system all families can access.
Myth: $10/day child care is too expensive. Replacing $10/day child care with direct funding to parents is a better use of taxpayers’ money and will give me more flexibility to find the child care that works for my family.
Truth:
Direct Funding Would be More Expensive
The federal government already gives families direct support for child care expenses through the Canada Child Benefit and the Child Care Expense Deduction. Provinces and territories also provide tax and cash benefits to households with children. For example, Ontario provides the CARE Tax credit, Alberta provides the Child and Family Benefit, and New Brunswick provides the New Brunswick Child Tax Benefit to eligible households.
While it may initially seem like a better idea to just give parents more cash to spend on whatever type of child care they can find, the Prosperity Project found that moving funds away from $10/day child care would be more costly to taxpayers.
In fact, if government replaced $10/day child care with a family allowance style program that gave money directly to parents, it would need to give at least $12,800 for each preschool child to cover the costs of child care for families. Funding would need to be even higher for infants. Otherwise, families would be worse off and have to pay higher costs for child care than they would under $10/day child care.
Replacing $10/day child care with sufficient direct money to parents would also cost the federal government over $28.5 billion annually, while $10/day child care will cost just over $9 billion per year from 2025-2026.
Families Would be Left to Foot the Bill
It’s also highly unlikely that any government would provide families with the direct funds needed to cover the full costs of child care. What’s more likely is the government would provide a very modest tax or cash benefit that would only cover a small portion of the price of child care, leaving families to foot the rest of the bill.
Recall that in 2006 former Conservative Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, replaced former Liberal Prime Minister, Paul Martin’s, fledgling child care system with a $100-per-month taxable benefit that did not significantly help households pay for any child care service. The result was significant out-of-pocket costs for families who still struggled to find high-quality licensed child care in their communities.
Direct Funding Does Not Ensure Quality or Accessible Child Care
Further consider that direct funding to parents does not necessarily produce new high-quality licensed child care spaces where they are needed most. Simply giving cash to parents may very modestly help parents afford whatever child care is available, but it does not solve the problem of insufficient child care supply.
When government limits itself to only providing cash and tax benefits to support households’ access to child care, nothing prevents child care operators from raising the price of child care. This means that child care operators could easily raise their prices in response to the government providing families with a cash benefit. Direct funding to parents also does not prevent operators from funnelling fees towards profits instead of reinvesting it back into the center to improve the quality of care for kids.
By committing to building a publicly funded national child care system, governments can reduce total costs families pay on child care while ensuring public money is used to support accessibility and quality in early learning settings.
Myth: Child care quality is suffering under $10/day child care. My operator doesn’t have the flexibility to use funds to support a high-quality learning environment anymore.
Truth:
According to The Parent Quality Information Project, the factors most strongly associated with high-quality in child care centers include:
- Regulations: Regulations ensure that child care centers have key minimum requirements in place. In Ontario, the Ontario’s Child Care and Early Years Act, 2014, establishes rules that licensed and unlicensed child care providers must adhere to.
- Qualified Staff: Staff training in early childhood education is one of the most important predictors of quality in child care. Research shows that there is a strong relationship between high quality and staff with postsecondary training in early childhood education.
- Good Wages and Working Conditions: Higher wages and good working conditions
- Small Staff-Child Ratios and Group Size: Small group sizes and high staff-child ratios contribute to higher quality in child care. The appropriate ratio depends on the ages of the children, with younger children needing a higher staff to child ratio.
- Strong Pedagogical Approach: High-quality programs will have a clear educational philosophy grounded in play-based learning. This pedagogical approach should be supported by staff that have the knowledge to create and apply the program to fit the specific situation. Such programs will produce higher-quality programming than centers that use a pre-packaged early childhood curriculum.
- Non-Profit or Public Provision: Who owns the child care program matters. Research shows that public and non-profit child care is significantly more likely to be better quality than for-profit child care, even when public funding is the same.
Knowing that these are the key factors associated with high-quality in child care, more flexibility will not necessarily allow operators to achieve higher-quality outcomes. This is especially the case if provincial and territorial governments have already established an operational funding model. An operational funding model provides funding based on the projected costs of running a child care center and requires centers to document how they are using public funding, providing needed accountability.
Flexibility Endangers Quality
In reality, flexibility can be a real danger to achieving consistently high-quality outcomes across child care centers by allowing centers to direct funds away from quality provisioning and towards other ends, including profit. When this happens, staff are the most likely to suffer as centers suppress their wages and deny staff benefits to divert funds elsewhere. This is a concern for quality because qualified staff are the most important factor to ensure quality in child care centers. Consider that a center that compensates workers properly is more likely to retain qualified staff for the long-term. This supports a high-quality pedagogical approach in centers while also ensuring children have better consistency in care.
We also know that for-profit centers are spending less of their operating budget on employee wages. Whereas multi-site not-for-profit centers spent 74% of their operating budgets on staff wages, for-profit multi-centres spent only 65%, according to a 2024 Statistics Canada Report. This explains, in part, why for-profit centers tend to be of lower quality.
Knowing this, do we really want to give centers more flexibility to divert public funds away from supporting quality care and towards profit-making?
Instead of more flexibility, operators need more robust funding provided through an operational funding model that truly reflects the real costs of running a high-quality child care center. This must include funding to pay staff a fair wage in accordance with a wage grid based on education and experience, alongside benefits, including a defined benefit pension plan.