Northern Ontario communities hope to cut daycare wait times with new licensed spaces
CBC
The City of Greater Sudbury says it expects long wait times for licensed daycare spaces to improve as it opens more spots over the next two years.
On average, there's a two-year wait to get a toddler into a licensed daycare in the city.
In 2022, Ontario signed onto the Canada-wide Early Learning and Child Care (CWELCC) system, which is expected to lower daycare costs to $10 a day by 2026.
Only licensed daycares that are part of the CWELCC system qualify for the lower fees. That's led to long wait times across the province for those coveted, and cheaper, spaces.
Miranda Mackie, the City of Greater Sudbury's manager of children services, said licensed daycare wait times have already gone down for infants because more parents are choosing to take extended 18-month parental leave.
And now, the city is working with the province to open up to 489 new licensed daycare spaces by the end of 2026.
Ontario's Ministry of Education, which also manages the early childcare system, said in an email to CBC News that it's already approved 257 new licensed daycare spaces for Sudbury.
"Our government will continue to fight for more affordable child care in this province. We are supporting the creation of 86,000 new licensed child care spaces – the single largest expansion of Ontario's child care system," the statement said, referring to plans for all of Ontario.
Mackie said the city has requested approval from the province for an additional 232 spaces, and is waiting for a response.
A key requirement to get spaces is to have enough early childhood educators (ECEs) in the system to care for more children.
Mackie said a lot of people left those jobs during the COVID-19 pandemic, but the workforce is starting to bounce back.
"Happy to say that we have full cohorts who are in that graduating year at Cambrian College and Collège Boréal," she said.
"In addition, we're hopeful that come January, the federal government has committed or announced that there will be additional workforce recruitment efforts and an investment in the workforce, which we hope equates to an increase in the minimum wage floor for our registered early childhood educators."
Emilia Salhuana, a parent in Sudbury, said more licensed daycare spaces in the city would be welcome news.
WARNING: This story contains references to missing and murdered Indigenous people. Resources can be found at the bottom of this story.
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