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PARENT-ONLY CARE AND CHILD CARE ATTENDANCE BY CHILD’S AGE

56% of children 0-5 years of age across Canada use some form of non-parental child care on a regular basis. This is the finding of a large parent survey – Statistics Canada’s 2023 Canadian Survey on Early Learning and Child Care. However, nearly 980,000  or 44% – are cared for exclusively by their parents. This seems surprising to many, and apparently contrary to the notion that families need child care when their children are young.  However, when the data are looked at more closely, some of the reasons become clear.  In the first year, or sometimes the first eighteen months …

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HOW MANY CHILDREN ARE USING LICENSED CHILD CARE?

According to recent data, 938,200 children are regularly attending licensed or regulated child care services across Canada (not including the Territories).  That is about 42% of Canada’s children 0-5 years of age who used licensed child care as their main care arrangement in 2023.  A much smaller proportion of these young children (6.8% and 7.4%) respectively) are using unlicensed child care provided by a non-relative or care by a relative as their main arrangement. The data comes from Statistics Canada ‘s Canadian Survey of Early Learning and Child Care, which collected data about child care arrangements from nearly 30,000 parents …

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How is CWELCC Doing? A Response to Peter Jon Mitchell

This week in the Hill Times, Peter Jon Mitchell says he wants to get rid of the $10 a day federal child care program.  But too many families now love it and depend on the increased child care affordability that has made their lives better.  So instead Peter Jon argues that the Canada Child Benefit or the Child Care Expense Deduction should be amended to provide child care assistance to those who can’t find child care.  But neither solution would be much help.  The Canada Child Benefit goes to nearly every family independent of whether they want to use any …

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    8 things to know about $10-a-day child care

By Martha Friendly, Executive Director, Childcare Resource and Research Unit, and Gordon Cleveland, Associate Professor of Economics Emeritus, University of Toronto Scarborough In 2023, 177,900 more 0-5 year olds were reported by Statistics Canada to be in child care centres than at the end of 2020 just before the $10-a-day program began.  938,000 children are using licensed child care that is eligible for the $10 a day program, according to 2023 Statistics Canada. If we add four and five year olds in kindergarten, and children at home with parents on parental leave, a total of 1.5 million young children are …

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Does Tax Credit Funding Work for Child Care?:  Lessons from Australia

Many Canadians do not seem to realize that funding child care with tax credits would mean having no control over child care fees.  Plus, there would be no financial accountability by operators for the public money they receive.  Right now, child care fees are controlled in Canada – in eight of Canada’s thirteen jurisdictions, the fee is $10 a day.  By April 2026, parent fees will be limited to $10 a day across the country.  If we switched to tax credits (as the Conservative Party recommended in the last election), there would be no limitation on parent fees and no …

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Is Minister Jones Going To Take Away Your Affordable Child Care?

It’s Family Day in Alberta today (February 17th).  And Matt Jones, Minister responsible for child care in Alberta,  apparently wants to celebrate by making plans to leave the child care agreement  that will bring $15 a day child care to the province on April 1st.  And he wants to blame the federal government while he does it.  But the truth is, most decisions about child care in Alberta are entirely in the hands of the provincial government. Take the cancellation January 30th of Alberta’s child care subsidy program that helps low-income families.  Matt Jones cancelled it, as part of the …

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A NEW STATISTICS CANADA REPORT ON CANADA’S CHILD CARE WORKFORCE

One of the main barriers to expansion of child care supply is a widespread shortage of qualified educators.  This is mostly due to wages and benefits that are insufficiently high to attract and retain staff.  As a result, there are long waiting lists to get into licensed child care (115,000 children with mothers whose main activity is paid work).  We do not have much good current data on our child care workforce, but Statistics Canada is attempting to begin to fill that hole.   Towards the end of December last year, Leanne Findlay and Thomas Charters from Statistics Canada published a …

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A Fact-Based Response to Cardus’ Odd Assertions

Since its beginning, Canada’s plan to build a system of child early learning and child care – the “$10 a day plan” –  has been panned by a handful of players. These include spokespeople for some political parties, some child care centre owners, right-wing “pundits”, and social and economic conservatives, all with their own agendas. Relying on misrepresentation of research literature, misinterpretation of public opinion polls and Statistics Canada surveys, the common agenda is to paint the $10 a day plan as a “failure” and “disaster” rather than the first largely successful phase of a Canada-wide project to build a …

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ONTARIO’S NEW FUNDING FORMULA – AN EVALUATION

Ontario’s new funding formula is, of course, new. To be implemented in January 2025.  So, everyone is feeling around it like the proverbial seven blind men around the elephant.  There are different opinions depending upon which part you are touching. What we do know for sure is that this is a cost-based funding formula, seeking to take into account the different cost situations facing different child care centres.  It will replace the revenue-replacement model which began in March 2022, which was based only on what parent fees were charged by a centre, not on their costs.  For many centres, the …

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HALLELUJAH!  ONTARIO FINALLY HAS A NEW FUNDING FORMULA

Hallelujah!  As of August 14th, 2024, there finally is a funding formula to provide some revenue-certainty for child care providers in Ontario. Not a moment too soon, in fact, a year or two too late. As of January 2025, this formula for the provision of operational funding to providers will be implemented to replace the inequitable revenue-replacement model that has existed since April 2022. As the new funding guidelines admit “[w]hile a revenue replacement approach is transparent and simple to implement, it is not responsive to the true cost of providing child care in Ontario.” (p. 7).  Revenue replacement was …

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