After years of missed targets, today’s announcement of a four-year extension of the Canada-Ontario Early Learning and Child Care Agreement is a relief for families and the child care sector in Ontario - but falls short of the ambition needed to build the affordable, accessible and high-quality system Ontario families were promised.
Families across Ontario are still waiting for $10-a-day child care, tens of thousands of promised spaces have yet to be created, and a longstanding workforce crisis continues to undermine access to care across the province. Today’s announcement will bring stability to the existing program but does not show the urgency or ambition needed to fix the problems holding it back. The agreement is silent on improving or even maintaining existing wage rates for child care workers, which is sorely needed in order to recruit enough educators to deliver care to every family who needs it. It says nothing about introducing pension plans, a critical retention tool for the child care workforce.
The agreement provides $12 billion in new federal funding for Ontario through 2031, which will maintain eligible parent fees at an average of $19 a day, to a maximum of $22, until June 2027 – roughly double the original $10-a-day target. It also pushes the province’s deadline for creating 86,000 new spaces to March 2027 – another missed goal.
CUPE welcomes the continuation of the requirement that at least 70% of new spaces be created in the public and non-profit sectors, an important safeguard against the Ford government’s goal of unfettered for-profit expansion. The province must focus on building a public and not-for-profit system that supports children, families, and the workforce.
Child care: public good, not private profit!
Today’s announcement keeps the system in neutral. What Ontario needs is a plan to move it forward, building child care as a public good with decent work as its foundation.
CUPE is calling on the federal and Ontario governments to back this agreement with better funding and a real strategy to raise wages, improve pensions and benefits, and create the decent working conditions that we already know are essential to making CWELCC a long-term success for Ontario.
