Ontario has secured a one-year extension with the federal government for the national $10-a-day child-care program, giving parents reassurance their fees won’t rise for at least 12 more months, but with much hard work still to be done.
The program that lowers parents’ child-care fees — now $19 a day on average in Ontario as an interim step toward $10 — had been set to expire March 31.
Most provinces and territories signed extensions with the federal government before this year’s federal election, but Ontario only signed an agreement-in-principle to continue the program.
Ontario Education Minister Paul Calandra had said the federal government needed to address a shortfall of $2 billion per year that would occur if the current funding structure is left in place, and warned that parent fees would rise without additional funding.
The one-year extension for Ontario comes with $695 million in additional funding from Ottawa, which Calandra says means fees won’t rise next year for parents but isn’t enough for fees to be lowered further toward $10 a day.
Calandra says that it’s a great start, and a recognition from the federal government that more needed to be done.
“This is an acknowledgment from them that an additional $695 million is required each and every year just to maintain the $19,” he said in an interview.
“This doesn’t bring us down to $10 on average. It maintains us at $19 on average over the next year and then we’ll continue to work on how we can bring it down together.”
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Negotiations on an extension did not start in earnest until recently, making some parents, operators and advocates nervous about what would happen to fees starting April 1, but Calandra said once talks started they didn’t stop and the two sides had a good working relationship.
Federal Jobs and Families Minister Patty Hajdu said she is optimistic about talks with Ontario to get a deal for future years.
“I think without a question there is desire by all levels of government to extend and protect child care,” she said in an interview. “This is a key element of affordability for many Canadian families.”
With the program secured in Ontario for another year, Calandra said his focus — along with negotiations for a longer-term deal — will be the ratio of non-profit and for-profit providers in the system.
The province has said that a limit on the percentage of for-profit spaces in its deal with the federal government is hampering growth, with Peel Region alone having to turn down more than 2,000 potential spaces under the $10-a-day program because the operators were for-profit.
The federal government now seems more open to discussing it, Calandra said.
“At least they’re now willing to look at that with us over the next little bit, which is light years ahead of where we were in the past,” he said. “I’m quite optimistic, going ahead.”
Hajdu said she is focused on high quality, which she said is often found in public and non-profit systems.
“It’s a real key element to a successful national child-care plan, that the care is consistent in quality across the country,” she said.
When Ontario signed the child-care deal with the federal government in 2022, it agreed to create 86,000 new spaces within the system by December 2026, which the financial accountability officer has said would still leave the province short of meeting demand for more than 220,000 spots.
The province only achieved about 75 per cent of its interim space creation target at the end of 2024, the auditor general has found.
As well, while the number of registered early childhood educators in the system has increased, it’s still below the province’s target, and while the government estimated in 2022 that it would need 8,500 more ECEs by 2026, the auditor said that has now risen to 10,000.
Child-care operators have said one of the biggest challenges in creating new spaces and maintaining existing ones is staff shortages. Ontario has introduced a wage floor for ECEs, but workers, advocates and some operators have called for improved compensation including a wage grid in order to improve recruitment and retention.
Ontario officials have previously said the province cannot fund a wage grid on its own, and Hajdu said Monday that she is interested in working with Ontario to find “what inputs are needed that are realistic and achievable to stabilize the entire sector.”
“I think we all agree that in order to have a strong and stable sector we have to pay and compensate fairly and that ECE workers have to have a desire to stay,” she said.
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