It is worthwhile to revisit the dark days of Canadian child care under Harper in light of increased operator-led activism against the $10-a-day model.
In 2022, the federal government launched the Canada-Wide Early Learning and Child Care (CWELCC) program, aiming to provide nation-wide $10 a day daycare by 2025-2026. While not without its flaws, the program has significantly reduced childcare fees, offering transformative relief for many parents.
Currently, for-profit operator lobbies are publicly opposing CWELCC, calling it an unfair system that does not give parents enough choice. As part of their campaign against CWELCC, the recently formed ACE National Coalition of Childcare Entrepreneurs (ACE National) are advocating for a “funding follows the family” approach in place of CWELCC.
ACE National’s proposal is aligned with a Conservative approach to funding childcare, which prioritizes modest tax and cash benefits for parents over directly funding not-for-profit and public childcare. This includes former Conservative Prime Minister, Stephen Harper’s Universal Child Care Benefit (UCCB), which supported the expansion of lower-quality for-profit operators while undermining the former Liberal government’s plans to expand access to quality licensed child care for all families. It is worth examining the impacts of the Conservatives’ UCCB approach to child care and its impacts on families.
UCCB and the illusion of choice
In 2005, former Liberal Prime Minister, Paul Martin, established bilateral agreements with provinces and territories to build a childcare system that would eventually cap daycare fees at $10-a-day. However, this progress was derailed after the election of Stephen Harper’s Conservative government in 2006. Despite calls from thousands of parents– to preserve the agreements, Harper’s Conservatives scrapped them, and replaced them with the UCCB. The UCCB provided direct monthly $100 payments to families – irrespective of income – that ultimately failed to address childcare access and affordability.
The Harper government framed the UCCB as providing Canadians with “choice” in child care, but because the benefit was so modest, it did not appreciably help households pay for any form of childcare on the market.
Impacts on daycare access and quality
Because the government was not providing direct funding to centres or imposing price caps on child care fees, fees remained deeply unaffordable, limiting access to mostly higher-income households. In 2011, the average Ontario household paid $677 per month for licensed child care. The UCCB subsidy barely dented these costs. By 2014, the costs of toddler care averaged between $800-$1,000 monthly (the equivalent of $1,067-$1,333 in today’s dollars) across most Canadian cities. As a result, childcare costs consumed nearly 40 percent of an average worker’s salary in 2014.
By 2019, a few years before the implementation of CWELCC, Toronto households were paying, on average, $1,675 per month for childcare, while costs in Calgary and Vancouver exceeded $1,000 per month.
Because households could spend the UCCB as they wished, including on for-profit and unregulated care, Harper’s decision to replace Martin’s national childcare system with a cash benefit also encouraged the expansion of lower-quality for-profit operators. For-profits operated 30 percent of Canadian childcare centres in 2012, and their presence in the childcare sector has increased since then, constituting the majority of childcare operators in some provinces and territories.
This is a concern because non-profit and public childcare centres provide higher-quality care than for-profits, particularly in infant, toddler, and pre-school groups. Despite providing lower-quality care, for-profits also charged fees that were on average 10 to 60 percent higher than non-profits. This is because for-profit childcare operators often increase their profit margins by hiring staff with fewer qualifications while paying staff lower wages than public and non-profit operators, resulting in lower quality care for children. For-profit operators are also less likely to provide staff training and devote additional resources to support quality in centers.
The UCCB was also unfair, directing money away from the households that needed it most. To pay for the UCCB, Harper redirected money from the young child supplement money for low and modest-income families from the adjusted-for-income Canada Child Tax Benefit to fund the UCCB. His government then gave the UCCB to all households, including high-income households, who did not need the benefit. The UCCB also provided a higher benefit to single-earner two parent households, those that most closely resembled the traditional nuclear family, than to dual income or single parent households. As a result, the UCCB shifted funds away from racialized households who were and are more likely to be low-income or single parent households.
In reality, the $100 benefit did not help families pay for childcare and families were faced with the options of: paying exorbitant daycare fees out-of-pocket; relying on more affordable, but potentially lower quality and less safe, informal childcare from relatives or friends; or limiting their workforce participation to provide unpaid care at home, which was a decision typically made by women.
An exception to these trends was Quebec, where provincial investment resulted in daycare fees being capped at $7 a day. Quebec’s program was and remains wildly popular and a major contributor to both child well-being and women’s workforce participation
CWELCC must be strengthened
The Harper years revealed the consequences of dismantling a national childcare system to provide families with more “choice.” Simply giving money to families does not facilitate access to affordable and high-quality daycare. Government needs to provide direct investments to non-profit and public childcare centers while applying a cap on childcare fees to facilitate access to childcare for all households.
Any critiques of the CWELCC program that call for its dismantlement are often led by and serve the interests of those who benefit from profit-driven models of child care. When childcare is made into a commodity, rather than a public good, children and families suffer while businesses reap a profit.
When politicians promise more affordable and accessible childcare by replacing the CWELCC with a tax or cash benefit, it is important to remember that the Canada Child Benefit has been providing families with subsidies since 2016 – often at a much higher rate than was provided by the UCCB – yet childcare fees remained high until the implementation of CWELCC.
In the face of upcoming provincial and federal elections, it is imperative that parents get organized to dispel the myths propagated by the right and advocate for an expanded CWELCC program that achieves its $10 a day target. A recent victory in the GTA demonstrates how parents can achieve results against daycare operators when they are mobilized.
Join Parents for Child Care’s movement to support $10 a day daycare and strengthen the CWELCC: https://www.childcareontario.org/parents
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