To Cure Ontario’s Child-Care Woes, Fund Families Directly

In Ontario, the Canada-Wide Early Learning and Child Care program (CWELCC), marketed to voters as $10-a-day child care, has resulted in long waiting lists and lack of access for families, suppression of wages for child-care staff, and crushing levels of government red tape.
Given the red tape that has characterized Ontario’s child-care system for nearly three decades, however, it is naive to imagine that these moves alone would result in more access to licensed child care for Ontario families.
Granted, the CWELCC program’s implementation in Ontario is uniquely complicated. The federal funding flows to the province and must be deployed as per the terms and conditions laid out in the Canada–Ontario CWELCC funding agreement. A portion of the federal funding then flows from the province to 47 municipalities and must be deployed as per the terms and conditions laid out in the Ontario Ministry of Education’s guidelines for service system managers. The final portion of the funding then flows from each of Ontario’s 47 municipalities to the licensed child-care centres each has selected to participate in the program, and must be deployed as per the terms and conditions the municipality has laid out in the local implementation documents it has issued.
Since 2022, this has amounted to roughly 4,000 pages annually of government memos, spreadsheets, and guidelines that Ontario’s child-care operators must review. For a small business owner or a volunteer board of directors trying to run a centre and provide a high standard of care, it’s a struggle just to keep up. The mandatory reporting requirements constantly change and when questions arise, it’s difficult to get answers.
Ultimately, the same provincial and municipal bureaucrats who designed the current system would be involved in deploying the federal transfer. There’s no evidence they’re willing to relinquish any of the control they currently exercise over Ontario’s licensed child-care sector or the billions of taxpayer dollars that fund it. There’s even less that any provincial politician would have the temerity to insist that they do.
The best hope for the tens of thousands of Ontario families who are stuck on child-care waiting lists is to have federal funding sent directly to them, where more of it can actually be used for child care.