‘Astounding’: New report highlights exponential increase in care community job vacancy rates

The job vacancy rate has skyrocketed to 173 per cent for some careers that work on the front lines of caring for Canada’s most vulnerable populations, according to a new report.

‘Making the Case for the Care Economy’ from United Way Centraide Canada (UWCC) combines data from more than a dozen sources on the workers who serve children, older adults, people with disabilities, newcomers, people experiencing poverty and homelessness, and others who rely on community-based supports.

“Even we were surprised by how much worse the issues are than what we expected,” said Anita Khanna, vice president of government relations and public policy for UWCC, adding the increase in vacancies in community-care roles was “astounding.”

According to the report, the above-mentioned job roles have seen a 140 per cent rise in job vacancies since 2015, with vacancies in health occupations rising even faster at 173 per cent.

Vacancies in the rest of the labour market grew just four per cent in the same time period.

Social services positions face acute retention risks, with 26 per cent of workers indicating they are likely to leave their job in the next six months. With the steep increase in job vacancies and retention risks, nearly 45 per cent of non-profit care occupations are forecast to face strong worker shortage risks by 2033.

Other statistics provide some insight into what might be causing the high level of vacancies in non-profit community care jobs. Workers earn 31 per cent less than the economy-wide average, and their wages grew 11 percentage points slower than offered wages across the rest of the labour market from 2015 to 2025.

With low wages come high levels of burnout, financial strain and food insecurity.

While employment in the sector is growing, rising 10 per cent from 2019 to 2024, so are expenditures and the demand for services.

“This report rings the alarm bells on the challenges faced by the workers who make those services possible and quite literally save lives and enable success for community members,” said Khanna.

“We can’t sustain our sector and the vital role it plays in our communities and in strengthening our economy with the status quo.”

The report was prepared as part of UWCC’s effort to develop a national labour force strategy for the non-profit care economy in order to improve working conditions in the sector, with funding from the McConnell Foundation.

Similar labour force strategies have been created by industry coalitions for the agriculture and manufacturing sectors in Canada, and the adult social care sector in England, to provide a more complete picture of those workforces and advocate for specific policies.

The first step in creating a labour force strategy is establishing a strong evidence base that shows where the challenges, pressure points and opportunities for improvement are. Khanna said that she and her colleagues hear about the issues that workers in non-profit community services face all the time, but they need data to back up those experiences.

Anita Khanna is the Vice President of Government Relations and Public Policy for United Way Centraide Canada. (UWCC/Supplied)

While it’s often said that the non-profit sector faces a data deficit, report author Steven Ayer of Common Good Strategies argues that there is in fact a “fragmented abundance” of data scattered across different systems that can be brought together to produce a “much deeper, more credible, and more policy-relevant picture of the non-profit workforce than is usually presented.”

The report draws on data from Statistics Canada labour market datasets, sector surveys, research partnerships, and administrative filings such as tax forms and job postings.

Among the datasets used is Future of Good’s Changemaker Wellbeing Index, a research survey on the wellbeing of non-profit workers created with Common Good Strategies and Environics Research.

The 2025 Wellbeing Index found that 70 per cent of non-profit workers feel burned out and exhausted at least occasionally, with nearly 40 per cent of workers reporting that their salaries rarely or never allow them to save money.

Not all of the workers captured in the data the report is based on work in the non-profit space, but the authors argue that by focusing on community care professions, the scale of labour shortages in the sector can be made clear.

“While we cannot perfectly isolate non-profit workers, we can clearly demonstrate—using the same data government relies on—that Canada faces a significant labour shortage in the roles most central to community wellbeing,” the report reads.

Additionally, some of the datasets used in ‘Making the Case for the Care Economy’ are aging. The Human Resources Module, commonly called the HR Module, draws on administrative and survey data to estimate non-profit employment and workforce composition. The report notes that the HR Module was last updated in 2021 and published in 2023, “with no public indication since then of whether or when it will be updated again.”

Khanna said that while further investment in better data on the non-profit community-care workforce is needed, working on this report reinforced the need for greater capacity to analyze the data that’s already available and use it effectively.

“It really showed us and underlined that there’s no need to wait for more data to act to sustain the labor force that delivers community services,” said Khanna.

Feds’ focus on care community productivity

Earlier this year, the federal government announced the creation of six Workforce Alliances, bringing together industry leaders, workers, unions and training institutions to address “productivity and competitiveness” in six key industries—one of which was the care economy.

The announcement referred to the economic value of caregiving work as “immense,” with caregivers contributing $97.1 billion to the economy, which is equal to 4.2 per cent of Canada’s gross domestic product, in 2022.

Khanna said it’s a good sign that the government included the care economy in their Workforce Alliance initiative. She hopes the data in ‘Making a Case for the Care Economy’ can contribute to the alliance’s work.

“We’re extremely hopeful that this work and this research can be leveraged by that alliance in order to quickly understand some of the dynamics in the sector, and help them propel action to support the sector and its workers,” said Khanna.

She said investments in the care economy not only result in better wages and working conditions for caregivers, but also improve the services those caregivers offer, which strengthens the communities that depend on those services.

“All of us, at some point or another, have relied on non-profit services, whether we know it or not.”