Roadmap to Universal Child Care in Ontario

Goal: Child care programs are directly and sufficiently publicly funded.

Publicly funding child care programs’ operating costs both directly and sufficiently is the key to addressing both affordability for parents and decent pay for educators. While Ontario’s cost-based funding formula has brought more predictability to child care funding, issues still remain, as outlined above. A full and sufficient public funding approach must harmonize all grants into simpler streams of operating funding that cover child care programs’ full costs. An updated cost-based funding formula should be based on a fair and effective provincial wage grid to address ongoing wage inequity across programs. 

Given that we are moving toward a set fee rather than a market fee system, it no longer makes sense for child care programs to administer and collect these fees from families. It would lessen administrative burden for child care programs for local Service System Managers (SSMs) collect the fees from families, and this revenue to simply be made part of centres’ funding. As we discussed in System Building, school-age child care should be brought into the CWELCC system and covered by the same cost-based funding formula.  

Although licensed child care has been part of the Ministry of Education since 2010, much more must be done to break down barriers between the ELCC system and the public education system. Even with the implementation of the new cost-based funding formula, rents and accommodation fees continue to be a major expense, and one that is often variable and outside of programs’ control. Even when co-located in schools and public facilities, rent costs may be above what is funded through the funding formula. The issue of heat stress in school-based child care in Summer 2025 made clear that our school spaces must be made safe for child care programs year-round. As a matter of priority to building a publicly-funded system, it is essential that there is collaboration between programs, school boards, SSMs, and the province in order to best use public dollars to build quality spaces.

It is time that we finally treat early learning and child care as an equal partner and integral part of the education system.

Recommended policy interventions

6. Harmonize and enhance the child care funding formula to provide full and sufficient operating funding that meets the true costs of child care programs and regulated home child care providers and agencies.

7. Maintain caps on profit-making and embed further guardrails to protect public investments; ensure surplus earnings are reinvested in continuous program improvements and public dollars are invested in quality care and education for children.

8. Collect child care fees centrally by SSMs and Indigenous governments and governance organizations, relieving child care programs of this administrative task.

9. Change the education funding formula to include child care facilities in school space funding and ensure integration into the school community. Eliminate rent for child care programs in schools.

10. Tri-lateral collaboration is required to ensure transparent, just, and equitable funding for First Nations, Metis, Inuit and Urban Indigenous child care programs. Funding through Jordan’s Principle, Indigenous Early Learning and Child Care agreements, CWELCC agreements, and provincial allocations should all contribute to service the needs of Indigenous children where they reside and ensure access to Indigenous-led programs across Ontario. No federal funds should displace provincial funding commitments or responsibilities.

Goal: Licensed child care is affordable for every family.

As we move to a ELCC system that is fully and sufficiently publicly funded, child care will become more affordable for many families. This should include a clear set fee of a maximum of $10-a-day per family.

We must ensure that our new system is affordable to all and does not leave behind low-income children and families. In the short-term, work and study criteria for fee subsidy should be immediately removed and waitlists for subsidy should be cleared. Next, Ontario’s current low-income parent fee subsidy system should be redesigned into a geared-to-income sliding fee scale down to $0, which ensures that child care is affordable for every family. As discussed above, this should include school-age child care, which should be brought into the CWELCC system. 

Recommended policy interventions

11. Cap child care fees at a maximum of $10-a-day per family.

12. Ontario should work to replace the current subsidy system with a barrier-free sliding fee scale down to $0. In the short-term, while this is being developed, increase access to the current subsidy system and remove work and study criteria.

Goal: A system that truly values the early childhood workforce with decent work and pay and where educators can build a lifelong career.

Early Childhood Educators, early years staff, and child care providers are the heart of our early learning and child care system. Their pedagogical, caring work with young children creates possibilities for communities, our collective well-being, and for a better world. It is the responsibility of a child care system to value those whose work underpins this hopeful vision.

Compensation

Addressing compensation is essential to support educators, stabilize the child care system, and expand spaces to meet the needs of more children and families. As Child Care Now’s National ELCC Workforce Policy Table reports, many provinces and territories across Canada have made significant strides to better support the ELCC workforce, including the introduction of, or commitment to develop, wage grids, new health benefits programs, and pension programs. Alberta and Ontario are the only provinces that have not committed to developing and implementing a wage grid. We must ensure early childhood education is a viable life-long career that respects educators, their work, and their knowledge. This starts with appropriate compensation.

We envision an early learning and child care system where educators benefit from:

• A wage grid that reflects the value of the work;
• Annual and predictable increases aligned with cost-of-living increases;
• Mechanisms to address long-standing wage inequities and value alternative qualifications, culturally relevant languages, skills and knowledges that are developed in consultation with relevant communities;
• Extended health benefits;
• Defined benefit pension programs;
• Opportunities for career advancement accompanied by wage increases that value further education and expertise; and
• Fair and equitable compensation for home child care providers.

Working conditions

Addressing ELCC working conditions requires addressing complex and interconnected elements including funding structures, qualifications, staffing models and job roles, regulatory requirements, post-secondary education, and qualification pathways. While the challenges reported by educators are consistent across the sector, unique solutions may be required to address workplace conditions in different workplace contexts. For example, licensed home child care settings may require different strategies than centre-based programs. In order to improve working conditions while moving towards a robust, well-supported, qualified workforce, these complex policy issues must be taken up in collaboration with the sector.

We envision an early learning and child care system where all educators benefit from:

• Enhanced staff to child ratios and qualified staffing levels;
• Reduced group sizes where appropriate to facilitate meaningful inclusion of children with disabilities;
• Consistent and predictable access to professionals, like resource consultants, occupational therapists, nurses, and speech and language pathologists, in program to support children with disabilities;
• Pedagogical security and autonomy in responding to the needs of children, families and communities;
• The provision of daily, collaborative, on-site paid planning time for centre-based programs;
• A community-driven model to connect and support licensed home child care providers;
• Permanent paid sick and emergency leave days;
• Engagement in mentorship opportunities, like communities of practice and mentoring programs, as part of the paid work environment;
• Non-contact time to access meaningful professional learning opportunities;
• A career lattice that will strengthen program quality while formally recognizing the value of credentials, experience, and traditional knowledges;
• Well-resourced, culturally safe, and healthy work environments; and
• Democratic processes that enable staff to contribute to shaping their work environments.

Policy solutions to Ontario’s ELCC workforce challenges must be democratically developed through a Workforce Advisory Committee that centres the voices of the early years and child care workforce, including Black, Indigenous, francophone, and racialized educators and child care providers, and includes provincial organizations and sector stakeholders. Public reporting and accountability measures are essential to ensure transparency for the sector and that progress is tracked. It is essential that workforce policy is threaded through system-building and supported through consistent and predictable funding to programs and SSMs. This would enable locally and contextually responsive program development and delivery.

The following priority policy interventions will help to recalibrate the current system and set a foundation for the future.

Recommended policy interventions

13. Develop, implement, and fund a wage grid starting at $35-45 per hour for RECEs and $28 per hour for early years staff, and ensure annual increases. There should be a corresponding daily rate plan for licensed home child care providers.

14. Develop, implement, and fund an extended health benefits package and a defined benefits pension plan.

15. Create a Workforce Advisory Committee to address challenging working conditions. The Committee must work alongside the Ministry of Education to develop a consultation and reporting plan, and establish clear goals, data points, and impact deliverables for Ontario’s ELCC workforce strategy.

16. Reimagine and enhance pathways to acquiring and upgrading qualifications, which responds to the needs, and reflects the strengths and skills, of rural, remote, equity-deserving, and culturally and linguistically distinct communities.

Goal: Enough public and non-profit early learning and child care spaces for all.

As Ontario has moved from unplanned growth to “directed growth”, the next step should be to realize intentional, planned, system building with the goal of full access to a stable, inclusive system.

In their paper, Moving from Private to Public Processes in Child Care in Canada, Friendly et al. (2020) call for, “a more proactive, publicly managed, planned, intentional and integrated approach based on greater public responsibility for the availability, characteristics and distribution of regulated child care” (p. 2). This is grounded in, “the evidence-based supposition that more public responsibility for creating child care services would be more reliable and could more easily ‘steer’ access to child care services than can Canada’s current market approach. This would contribute to the accessibility element of building an inclusive, equitable child care system for all” (p. 39). The authors describe and list public management resources in the areas of planning, municipal role, public delivery, building critical mass in the non-profit sector, and assessing needs and forecasting demand. Our policy interventions are grounded in this same approach. 

Ontario has yet to lean into one of the strongest assets that we have for a publicly managed, planned and intentional system – our unique system of local service system management by regions, municipalities, and districts. These local SSMs have a key role in the “steering” of child care and regularly develop child care service plans. Since the implementation of CWELCC, many SSMs have embraced the opportunity to better plan and coordinate the ELCC system, including collaboration with other regions, with city planners, and economic development tables. Some have demonstrated a growing interest in expanding directly-operated child care. SSMs should be mandated, better supported, and resourced to expand this planning role in consultation and collaboration with the ELCC community.   

Recent calls from the Ontario government to allow unlimited for-profit expansion are completely unnecessary to meet access goals. All countries that have developed robust, universal systems have done so using public and non-profit expansion. Some, like Norway, have now actively worked to decommodify child care by deprivatizing programs and bringing them under municipal operation. In these systems, regulations strictly limit excessive profit-making in child care. Predominantly public and non-profit expansion is an important pillar of CWELCC and we have seen that other provinces are successfully expanding ELCC in these sectors. We believe that not only is Ontario well positioned to act similarly, but that this approach would enable the province to better meet the needs of ELCC staff, children, and families. 

Ontario should develop a bold plan for expansion that is exclusively in the public and non-profit sectors. We need a permanent moratorium on licensing new for-profit child care businesses. We also need to strengthen and expand both municipal planning and operation as well as provide more resources to better support the non-profit sector in scaling up and expanding. Both the Ontario and municipal governments should develop inventories of available public buildings and lands for the development of non-profit and public child care. Sufficient capital funding should support publicly planned expansion rather than ad-hoc grants. These measures to place Ontario’s child care system firmly in the public and non-profit sector not only ensure long-term sustainability of programs, but also contribute to an ethical system that does not seek to profit on the care of young children.

To build a stable system, we need to ensure that, wherever possible, facilities built using public child care funds remain public child care assets. Child care facilities that are built with public capital dollars must, wherever possible, be maintained as child care programs to grow a stable system. An asset lock – a legal clause that prevents an organization’s assets from being used for private benefit – would ensure that new child care facilities created with public start-up grants and infrastructure funds remain child care facilities into the future. 

Ontario should develop specific expansion plans to meet the needs of both rural families and those needing non-standard hours child care. 

The Ontario Federation of Indigenous Friendship Centres (OFIFC) reports that at least 10,000 Urban Indigenous child care spaces are required to meet the needs of Urban Indigenous families. Yet there is no plan to expand Indigenous-led child care as part of CWELCC expansion strategies. This must change to ensure that Indigenous families in Ontario have access to affordable, culturally safe, and relevant child care where they reside that is truly Indigenous-led and defined.

Recommended policy interventions

17. Place a permanent moratorium on licensing new for-profit child care.

18. Introduce an asset lock to require that all new child care facilities remain public child care assets to ensure efficient use of public child care dollars and a system that is here for many generations of children.

19. Create an inventory of available public lands for child care development. Mandate and support municipalities to publicly plan expansion with explicit targets for creation of new public and non-profit programs in both official languages. Strengthen and support the non-profit sector’s capacity to scale up, ensuring new child care programs remain child care assets whenever possible.

20. Prioritize expansion in underserved communities and populations, including non-standard hours, rural and remote child care, home child care, emergency, and respite child care, in both official languages. Explore innovative infrastructure opportunities for expansion, like modular builds, and ensure inter-ministerial alignment to facilitate expansion in all public projects like community developments.

21. Establish technical tables and engagement avenues with First Nations, Inuit, Métis and Urban Indigenous governments, communities and organizations to co-develop a strategy to expand access to Indigenous-led child care where a majority of children reside that is self-determined by the Indigenous community.