Trudeau and Minister of Finance Chrystia Freeland announced last year that 30 Billion dollars was to be paid out over a five year period to establish a great $10-a-day care program for Canadian children.
Child care is a matter of provincial jurisdiction, but the provincial premiers couldn’t bring themselves to refuse this extravagant bribe offered by Trudeau so they signed on to the deal.
The child care policy was made under the usual cloud of disinformation that pervades all Trudeau’s policy announcements. This included the false notion that this day care program would encourage women to return to the work force after the pandemic, on the fallacy that women had experienced more unemployment than men during the pandemic. Other fallacies are that this program will improve the economy by the employment of thousands of day care workers and by the construction of many new day care centres across the country. The government also believes that a nationally run, not-for-profit day care system will be far more beneficial to children than their family’s preferences, which include home care by a parent, unlicensed home care by a relative, friend, or neighbour, or day care in a home, local church or community. The significant point of the National Child Care program was that the money was to be used only for licensed, not-for-profit child care centres.
This immediately creates a problem in that the overwhelming majority of children (under the age of 6) today receive care from a stay at home parent, an unlicensed care provider such as neighbours, other family members, or from private for-profit day care centres.
In the province of Nova Scotia, about 60% of licenced day care centres are for-profit businesses. In the province of Alberta, the majority of licensed day care spaces are provided by for-profit entities. Accordingly, Alberta, however, will now favor non-profits according to federal-provincial agreement demands. Alberta has promised 42,500 spaces in five years for not-for-profit only child care. Good luck with that! In the province of Ontario 25% of children are cared for in for-profit businesses which will have to be replaced consequently.
To carry out Trudeau’s day care program, there will be a massive disruption in the child care sector, plus a long delay in getting such a program off the ground to fill the gap caused by the loss of for-profit centres.
Quebec Faced This Problem
Quebec faced this problem in 1997 when it established its provincial “universal” child care program. To fill this gap, it was required to create a tax credit system to encourage the for-profit sector in order to provide sufficient child care spaces. Today, for-profit day care in Quebec is growing more spaces than the non-for-profit sector.
With the imposition of the Liberal plan for child care, the for-profit centres are caught between a rock and a hard place since they will be required to sign over control of their businesses to a yet to be created central government body. If they decide to transfer their business, they will only receive a fraction of what their businesses are worth, despite many providers having large bank loans in a lifetime of investment in their business. Alternatively, if the for-profit child care centres choose to continue in operation, they will lose all public funding, including subsidies for low income families. This will require their services to be made more costly to cover this loss of funding. Consequently, they will no longer be competitive with the government licensed, not-for-profit centres.
If they choose to participate in the government program, the central body will manage day to day operations, such as staff recruitment and waitlists, while the owners will become employees.
Even if the government do establish solely licensed, not-for-profit child care centres by the spring of 2026, more than 40% of young children will still not have access to a licensed day care spot because there will not be enough spaces available for them.
Ultimately, families will be the losers if the Liberal’s national day care plan is the provider of child care in Canada.