After decades of reports, activism, and protests, the grandchildren of Canadian women who began demanding universal child care as a core tenant of feminist policy may finally reap its benefits. 

The 2021 federal budget includes a promise to spend up to $30 billion over the next five years, and $8.3 billion in ongoing funding, to establish a publicly-funded early learning and child care program for Canadians across the country. It would offer regulated, high-quality spaces for an average of $10 a day by 2026 as a way to not only address the lack of affordable child care in Canada, but also boost women’s participation in the workforce at a time when women-dominated sectors are reeling from pandemic-related layoffs. Some women are choosing to quit their jobs altogether and care for their children rather than spending a majority of their income on child care. 

Non-profits and charities could be among the biggest beneficiaries of the plan, considering that 80 percent of that workforce is women, who still statistically take on a larger share of childcare and domestic duties than men do. 

But beyond support for the sector’s own workforce, early childhood education, child care, and women’s empowerment are major priorities for organizations such as the YWCA or the National Association of Friendship Centres. The fiscal firepower offered by the 2021 budget could help non-profit or charitable childcare providers offer more spaces for children across Canada. 

However, experts point out that the new federal budget doesn’t talk much about the physical and mental health needs of children and may not offer enough spaces. Any child care plan inspired by the hardships of the COVID-19 pandemic will need to fill these gaps. 

The inspiration: Quebec’s $5-a-day plan

When the federal government outlined its plan to bring publicly subsidized child care to the masses, it name-dropped Quebec as an inspiration. Starting in 1997, the province began offering publicly-funded child care centre spaces to parents at a flat fee of just $5 per child, per day (currently, the fees are $8.50/day). The system includes a combination of non-profit child care centres, known as centres de la petite enfance (CPEs), mostly for-profit day care centres called garderies, as well as home-based child care. 

It isn’t a perfect system. After 23 years, Quebec’s model has never satisfied demand: private childcare is still the only option for many parents. Some wait years for a spot to open up. Still, its benefits are indisputable. Quebec has one of the highest female workforce participation rates in the world, a fact Sarah Kaplan, director of the Institute for Women and the Economy, credits to Quebec’s system. “We can see what the difference could be if we could get the rest of Canada up to the level of Quebec in terms of women’s economic participation in the workforce,” she says. 

According to a report from Oxfam Canada, Quebec’s child care program doubled the employment rate of single mothers while dropping their poverty rates from 36 percent to 22 percent. Because these women didn’t have to put their careers on hold to care for their children, they could work longer, and earn more money throughout their lifetimes. The existence of the gender pay gap is still a problem, however: according to 2018 Statistics Canada data, the average wages of women in Quebec were only the fifth highest out of Canada’s 10 provinces. (Alberta was at the top). 

Older women are far more likely than older men to live in poverty, Kaplan says, and covering childcare costs from the get-go improves their financial well being. Quebec’s system also has a standardized salary grid for all childcare workers — many of whom are racialized women working long hours. “It didn’t matter what CPE you worked at,” recalls Luisa Iglio, president of the Quebec Association for Preschool Professional Development. “It was based on your education and years of experience.” 

Women who did get access to subsidized child care also experienced a broader cultural shift around gender equity, according to Maya Roy, CEO of YWCA Canada. That’s true in both Quebec and B.C., where a provincial $10 a day public child care program is already in the works. She says men in those provinces are far more likely to share domestic chores with their female partners. The culture around equitable parenting duties also translates into other Quebec government policies, such as a supplemental paid parental leave for fathers that has seen a dramatic increase in the number of dads who take time off after their children are born — and bond more closely as a result. “It’s become part of the culture,” Roy’s colleagues explain to her. 

Why child care is big for Canada’s social impact sector

If the Canada-wide child care plan is fully implemented by 2026, it will be vital for female social impact sector workers from coast to coast to coast. While women are, of course, not required to be the primary caregivers to their children, they are often still expected to do so in Canada’s predominantly patriarchal child-rearing culture. Offering a national plan would better allow women working in the sector to balance their professional and personal lives, especially those in lower-wage positions. 

According to Statistics Canada data from 2017, the non-profit sector’s workers earned an average of $57,000 a year, nearly three thousand dollars less than the national average, while community non-profit workers earned just $42,500 a year. Full-parental leave top-ups for working mothers at non-profits and charitable organizations are somewhat uncommon. According to an Ontario Nonprofit Network report from 2019, just 30 percent of workers surveyed said they had access to an employer top-up. Another 14 percent were unsure. 

When compared to the exorbitant fees parents often pay for private child care (anywhere from a median of $451 a month in Winnipeg to $1,578 per month in Toronto, per child), workers in the social impact sector— and across the Canadian economy — could see real benefits from a publicly funded system. At the YWCA, the pandemic forced some staff to quit their jobs rather than juggle work and care. “We lost anywhere between 20 percent to a third of our own child care staff because they didn’t have access to affordable child care,” Roy says. 

The publicly-funded plan could be especially helpful for non-profits that run child care and early childhood education programming, such as Friendship Centres, the YWCA, and the YMCA. (Roy says the YWCA hasn’t been asked to get involved in delivering the new plan, but says her organization is ready to help). Under the Quebec model, non-profit organizations and some for-profit centres involved in child care receive government subsidies to offer a high standard of care, and while the details aren’t clear, it appears Ottawa may do the same. This could offer additional funding to non-profits and charities, as well as better pay for Canadian child care workers, many of whom are racialized women who work long hours for low wages. 

Roy says the YWCA is pushing for the government subsidies to benefit these child care workers and early childhood educators (ECEs). She looks to countries like Norway and Sweden where care workers, be they teachers or ECEs, earn comfortable wages for their work. “We know that if we increase the salary for ECEs, not only is that going to impact their ability to access child care, but their work will be valued in the same way that Nordic and Scandanavian countries really value education and early learning,” Roy says. Offering higher wages will also help child care organizations retain good workers, something child care experts described as a perpetual problem in interviews with Future of Good. 

But the benefits wouldn’t stop with child care-focused organizations. Workers who take parental leave at social impact organizations across the sector won’t struggle as much to return to their old jobs after their parental leave is up, and employers won’t have to worry about whether or not their workers can afford to return in the first place. “It’s a positive impact all around, no matter what level you look at,” Kaplan says.

Room for improvement

Some child care advocates say Ottawa’s $30 billion, 5-year funding for a child care plan is an improvement on Quebec’s model. It proposes a cost-sharing program with provincial and territorial governments that will, in theory, reduce average fees for child care spaces in all provinces outside of Quebec by 50 percent by the end of 2022. By the end of 2026, it promises that parents across Canada will only pay an average of $10 a day for regulated child care spaces. And it promises “ongoing annual growth” in the number of child care spaces available across the country. 

The budget also offers specific, targeted investments in providing care to marginalized populations. Crucially, it also offers $29.2 million over two years to help up to 400 child care centres across Canada pay for accessibility improvements like wheelchair ramps, accessible doors, and play structures. Another $2.5 billion over the next five years will go towards child care options in Indigenous communities, including $1.4 billion to ensure more families can access care. “Guided by Indigenous priorities and distinctions-based envelopes, this investment will build Indigenous governance capacity and allow providers to offer more flexible and full-time hours of care, build, train and retain a skilled workforce, and create up to 3,300 new spaces,” the 2021 federal budget reads. 

However, child care advocates point out some notable gaps. Sara Austin, founder of Children First Canada, says the child care plan is a historic achievement for the Canadian government, but says it needs to invest far more money into improving children’s quality of life across the board. A decade ago, Austin says, Canada ranked 10th among OECD countries for children’s overall well-being. By the time the pandemic began, Canada had fallen to 30th place — and the virus’s toll is only exacerbating rates of suicide, self-harm, and eating disorders among children. “There was lots of money put into child care and into other areas like youth employment,” Austin says of the budget. “There was nothing close to what was required for physical and mental health.”

There is also the question of how the $30 billion on offer for the child care plan will be spent across Canada. Each province will work with the federal government to establish their own system paid for by federal dollars, and it isn’t clear whether all of them will follow suit. Two days after the 2021 federal budget was tabled in the House of Commons, Alberta Premier Jason Kenney said he wasn’t interested in a Canada-wide plan, but would happily accept child care money from Ottawa with no strings attached. Wrangling with provincial governments will be a far more difficult challenge for Ottawa than it was for the Quebec government to improve their system in 1997 because of the sheer size of the new system, as well as provincial autonomy — premiers can simply refuse to accept Ottawa’s child care funding if they wish. 

Child care equals freedom

It isn’t yet clear how social impact organizations will get involved. That will likely be determined through exhaustive consultations with provincial and territorial governments, child care experts and, perhaps, the non-profit and charitable sectors themselves. 

Nay-sayers of subsidized child care consider it a waste of taxpayer money that makes parents even more reliant on government handouts. Really, however, a publicly funded child care system represents freedom for mothers (and fathers), working families, and even the employers forced to choose between their children and their careers. 

“It’s going to mean all kinds of choices become available to them,” says Morna Ballentyne, executive director of Child Care Now. “They’ll be able to hopefully choose the child care that they need when they need it — to be in the paid labour force, or to study, or simply be able to have child care support them as mothers in whatever they choose to do.” 

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