In Alberta's radical remake of child care, costs are way down but the heavy lifting lies ahead

With inflation so high these days, it may seem like the price of everything is up. But there is one massive exception: child care.

Albertans with young children have seen dramatic — even life-changing — reductions in the cost of care since the provincial and federal governments signed an agreement just over two years ago aimed at bringing the average price down to $10 per day by 2026.

Before the agreement, parents in Alberta were often paying $70 per day, sometimes as much as $100. For many households, monthly child-care fees were larger than their mortgage payments. Some families had to weigh the cost of child care against the potential income of one parent returning to work.

Now, that calculation is much simpler. Since the agreement was signed, labour force participation among women aged 30 to 40, in particular, has surged to record levels in Alberta, boosting the province's GDP and income-tax rolls at the same time.

With $3.8-billion in federal funding commitments, the program has also helped create thousands of new child-care spaces and topped up the wages of the early-childhood educators who work at participating facilities.

And yet, the operators of some facilities are now balking at the next phase of the agreement, with some even considering opting out of the program altogether because of what they see as onerous restrictions that threaten the viability of their businesses. On Tuesday, more than a dozen facilities closed their doors for the day as a form of protest.

Some parents, meanwhile, have complained the actual fees they are paying are still higher than they were initially led to believe. And finding child care remains a challenge for many, with demand for new spaces — and workers — continuing to outpace supply.

These are the mixed results of a massive overhaul that's still underway, one that the Alberta government initially viewed with skepticism but has since embraced.

"This has actually been one of the greatest success stories of collaboration between the provincial government and the federal government," Searle Turton, Alberta's minister of children and family services, said in an interview.

The fundamental changes now being made are creating a more public role for what was once seen as the private affair of raising young children. Policy experts see these as the first steps in remaking the child-care system more in the vein of K-12 education. While there have been early successes, especially in terms of driving down costs for parents, these analysts say major challenges remain in continuing to grow the system while ensuring quality is maintained and, ideally, improved.

With such a major transformation, some growing pains are expected. But potential pitfalls lie ahead and the stakes of getting things right are higher than many people might realize. This tectonic shift in the way we care for and educate the youngest among us will have long-lasting implications, not just for the children and their parents, but society at large.

For a long time, child care was left to individual families — primarily moms — to manage. Reliance on daycare facilities was sometimes derided as "a low-status, inferior substitute for home care."

The late 20th and early 21st centuries saw a shift in approach and attitude, however, with a growing focus on creating high-quality and accessible early-childhood education, similar to what exists for older children from kindergarten onward. At various levels of government and in civil society, frameworks were established, visions articulated and goals set.

Of course, actually achieving those goals is the tricky part — especially in a system like Canada's where responsibilities are split between the federal government and 13 provinces and territories.