Cap on for-profit centres hampering growth of $10-a-day child-care system in Ontario

Ontario municipalities have been forced to turn down thousands of child-care spaces in the $10-a-day system because of a limit on the percentage of for-profit spaces.

Ontario municipalities have been forced to turn down thousands of child-care spaces in the $10-a-day system because of a limit on the percentage of for-profit spaces in the province’s deal with the federal government, the provincial government says.

The province has so far created less than a third of the new spaces it committed to by 2026 and Ontario Education Minister Todd Smith and the association representing the province’s municipalities have sent a letter to federal Minister Jenna Sudds, asking her to lift the cap on for-profit spaces.

“While Ontario recognizes the important role that not-for-profit providers play in the child care system, these operators cannot fill the capacity alone,” Smith and the Association of Municipalities of Ontario wrote.

“With waitlists so high, parents and guardians across the province are seeking quality child care for their children in their local community regardless of whether they be for-profit, not-for-profit, or home based.”

In the deal with the federal government, Ontario committed — grudgingly, the letter suggests — to maintaining a ratio in the $10-a-day system of 70 per cent non-profit spaces and 30 per cent for-profit spaces. But that ratio has been artificially hampering growth of the national child-care system in Ontario, the province and its municipalities say.

Peel Region has been identified by the province as needing the most new child-care spaces, but has had to turn down more than 2,000 potential spaces under the $10-a-day program because the operators were for-profit, the letter says.

Meanwhile, waitlists have ballooned since the introduction of the program, which has already seen fees cut in half for parents at participating child-care centres and they are set to be lowered further to an average of $10 a day.

In Kawartha Lakes, children are set to spend an average of 6.4 years waiting for licensed child care, up from an average of 3.7 years before Ontario joined the program. In the Region of Waterloo, there has been a 115 per cent increase in the number of children on the waitlist, with 9,200 kids now in the queue. Ottawa’s waitlist has increased more than 41 per cent.