Why a shortage of workers threatens $10/day child care

Agencies that run daycares say they're so short of early childhood educators that they doubt the national program of $10-a-day child care can be delivered to all the kids who will need a spot. 

Stories abound of daycare centres running at half capacity, asking parents to take their kids out of care for a day or two a week, or even shutting down operations entirely, all for lack of staff. 

The Trudeau government is promising to give all families in Canada access to high quality child care at an average price of $10 per day. Its plan calls for creating 250,000 new child-care spots by 2026. 

But the shortage of people willing to work in the system is putting that plan in significant jeopardy, says Carolyn Ferns, policy coordinator at the Ontario Coalition for Better Child Care.

"It's the worst workforce crisis child care has ever faced," said Ferns in an interview. 

"We've had recruitment and retention issues in child care for years before the pandemic, but it's just gotten so much worse."

While pandemic disruption of the labour market is a factor, child-care advocates say the root causes involve poor wages and benefits, giving workers little incentive to stay in the sector. 

For parents, the staffing crisis threatens to make the already long wait for a daycare spot even longer. 

"What we're going to see is huge wait lists, ballooning wait lists, because child-care programs can't staff," said Ferns. 

The biggest provider of child care in the Toronto region, the YMCA, has so few staff that it currently has just 16,000 kids enrolled in its 35,000 licensed spaces. 

"That means 19,000 kids and families that don't get access to care," said Jamison Steeve, chief strategy officer for the YMCA of Greater Toronto. "Our wait lists, it's not a point of lack of spaces, lack of capital, it's lack of people to provide the care." 

The YMCA needs about 1,400 workers to get back to its pre-pandemic capacity in child care, said Steeve, and would need hundreds more staff beyond that to expand to meet the expected increase in demand for the $10-a-day program. 

Steeve won't go so far as to say the worker shortage jeopardizes the national daycare program, but does say it threatens the vision of making affordable, high quality daycare accessible to all parents. 

"We will be able to provide $10-a-day child care, but not to the numbers that the plan currently calls for," he said.