Ontario advocates call on governments for more non-profit and public child care
Two years after Ontario signed onto the Canada-Wide Early Learning and Child Care (CWELCC) plan, the province’s child care sector remains in crisis due to underfunding and poor implementation.
In his first public statement on child care, new Ontario’s Education Minister Todd Smith requested federal Minister Jenna Sudds further privatization of the CWELCC system by removing limits on the growth of for-profit child care.
The Ontario Coalition for Better Child Care (OCBCC) criticized this request, calling it “unnecessary and risky.”
Ontario is well-positioned to expand public and non-profit child care under the CWELCC plan, with 70% of spaces already operated by these bodies. Meeting expansion targets should have been straightforward.
OCBCC’s Carolyn Ferns and Child Care Now’s Morna Ballantyne explained that expanding for-profit child care will destabilize the sector:
“A more sizable for-profit sector can use their stranglehold over the supply of child care to get public policy changes they need to make more profit including higher parent fees, fewer regulations and rules, and lower minimum wage rates for those who work in child care…If funding is extended to an expanded for-profit sector, the public will be paying for the acquisition of private assets that can be sold off at any time, leaving families in the lurch.”
Instead, the Ford government has a real opportunity to uphold its commitment to expanding public and non-profit child care by implementing a new funding formula to properly compensate operators and establish an adequate wage scale to retain ECEs and child care workers.
To prevent the Ford government from increasing profit-making in child care, the OCBCC urges everyone who cares about child care to sign a petition demanding that Prime Minister Trudeau and Premier Ford fund the expansion of public and non-profit child care, as promised in the CWELCC agreement.
The Ontario Coalition for Better Child Care is Ontario’s central advocacy group for a universal, affordable, high quality, public and non-profit system of early childhood education and care. Formed in 1981, the OCBCC is a member organization comprising child care centres, national and provincial groups and individuals from all across Ontario. Our members are ECEs, child care workers, parents, grandparents, centre directors and trade unionists.