Trudeau promises $1B in loans for child-care providers to expand care centres
CTV
The federal government is launching a new loan program to help child-care providers in Canada expand their spaces, and will be extending further student loan forgiveness and training options for early childhood educators, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced Thursday.
The federal government is launching a new loan program to help child-care providers in Canada expand their spaces, and will be extending further student loan forgiveness and training options for early childhood educators, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced Thursday.
The prime minister unveiled a trio of child-care-centric commitments that will be included in the upcoming federal budget, with the aim of opening up more $10-a-day child-care spaces across the country, as the Liberals continue to work towards creating 250,000 new spaces by March 2026.
Specifically, the Liberals are vowing to offer $1 billion in low-cost loans and $60 million in non-repayable grants to public and not-for-profit child-care providers, so they can build or renovate their care centres.
This funding will be administered through the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. (CMCH), which Trudeau called "a common sense approach that will help child care be developed alongside housing."
An additional $48 million is being earmarked for the next four years to extend student loan forgiveness — similar to the program offered to rural doctors and nurses — to early childhood educators, in an effort to incentivize more teachers to work in smaller communities.
The federal government is also promising $10 million over the next two years to train more early childhood educators.
The prime minister, speaking in Surrey, B.C., alongside the minister currently leading the file, Jenna Sudds, touted the bilateral child-care agreements in effect across the country for seeing thousands of children placed in affordable spaces. However, in recent months Canadian parents and care providers have sounded alarms about increasingly long daycare waitlists.
