Brittany Tomlinson, 32, is on the hunt to find early morning child care for her six children, but if she isn’t able to find it in the next few months, she says she may have to quit her job.
Tomlinson’s family grew to six after she took in three of her sister’s children last year. She and her husband, who live in Oxford, N.S., have juggled looking after their kids in the morning since going back to work in September.
When she started her job, she tried tracking down daycare, private home child care and babysitters to help watch her kids before school started.
“I began looking for child care through Facebook mostly and it was really unsuccessful,” she said. “A few months ago, I probably messaged over 40 different people in my town … and no leads.”
While they continue to wait to find morning child care, she said her husband has had to take time off or call into work late.
“So he stays home with the kids in the morning on the days that I work so that I don’t miss work,” she said, adding that this schedule is not sustainable.
“I will probably have to quit,” she said. “And I don’t want to, because I work in a long-term care facility, so there’s people who rely on me,” she said.
Tomlison isn’t alone. With the introduction of $10-a-day child-care programs sweeping across Canada, more parents are able to access daycare as it becomes more affordable. However, a significant hurdle remains: the glaring shortage of available spaces across the country.
That’s according to a report published Tuesday by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA), which found almost half of younger Canadian children (defined as not yet attending kindergarten) live in a child-care desert, meaning a postal code that has more than three children for every licensed space.
“When we look at the big trends in terms of what the new national plan for child care was meant to do, one was to address child-care fees. And it has absolutely been doing that with fees dropping across the country,” said David Macdonald, co-author of the study and senior economist at CCPA.
“The next big challenge is trying to increase the number of spaces so that parents can actually access these lower fees and don’t have to sit on long wait lists.”
In 2023, Canada had around 759,000 full-time licensed spaces for younger children in daycare centres and family child-care homes, the report stated. However, out of the 1.97 million younger children who may need these spaces, 48 per cent per cent live in child-care deserts.
The report called ‘Not done yet: $10-a-day child care requires addressing Canada’s child-care deserts,’ found that small towns, like the one Tomlison lives in, suffer the most from child-care shortages.
The report highlights that rural areas have greater difficulty locating child-care centres or even family daycare homes close to where children live. The main reason for this challenge is the wide dispersion of children in need of child-care services in these communities.
“We have always had a child-care issue in our little town, which is why for years I chose to watch children,” Tomlison said. “Our town only has three child-care facilities, and one is closed. We have zero before-school care, nothing for shift workers or health-care workers.”
The report looked at child-care deserts across all provinces and found that Saskatchewan, Newfoundland and Labrador and Manitoba had among the highest proportion of children living in child-care deserts.
Meanwhile, provinces such as Prince Edward Island, Quebec and New Brunswick have the lowest proportion.
“This means that many more children are living in child-care deserts in Saskatchewan than Quebec, even though Quebec has four times the child population,” the report stated.
In terms of spaces available, the report also found that infant spots were the hardest for parents to find.
Most Canadian cities had coverage rates below 20 per cent, meaning that in those cities, there are at least five infants for every licensed infant space. St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador, the Ontario cities of Barrie, Guelph, Hamilton and Brampton, and Saskatoon had the lowest availability of infant spaces compared to their population of infants. In those cities, there is less than one licensed space for every 10 infants, the report stated.
'A market-driven environment'
The findings of the report come as no surprise to Marni Flaherty, CEO of the Canadian Child Care Federation.
“The country has just started expanding child care in Canada and really we are in the first two years of a five-year plan,” she said. “There have been wait lists for child care for 40 years, we have a lot of work to do.”
In the 2021 federal budget, the government pledged to bring child-care fees down to an average of $10 per day in regulated childcare centres by 2025-26. To make this happen, the feds said they will spend $30 billion over five years, with an annual injection of up to $9.2 billion permanently.
The authors of the report state that although reducing fees was a necessary first step, it also bumped up the demand for child care, meaning the challenges need to be addressed.
The first barrier to a shortage of child care is adequate staffing.
“Child care jobs are low pay, it’s often part-time, the quality of employment isn’t great, even if folks really love working with children and working in a child-care centre, they often don’t stick around,” Macdonald told Global News.
“And so it’s a challenge of training to some degree, but in reality, it’s a challenge of retention that’s going to be required.”
While physical spaces for child care may exist, without offering higher wages and improving the work environment, there will be a shortage of employees to staff these facilities, he added.
A second challenge to expanding the supply of child-care spaces is the services have mostly been treated as a private responsibility in Canada, the authors state. They argue, like the school system, child care should be tackled as a public approach.
“If we just leave it up to the market, you’ll end up with a lot more spaces in big cities. You’ll end up with a lot more spaces in downtown cores, but you’ll retain a situation where smaller centres are largely abandoned,” Macdonald told Global News.
This stands in sharp contrast to the approach taken in the public school system, the authors note. Unlike schools, which are typically located based on the students’ geographical distribution, child-care facilities have traditionally been established without considering the actual needs and convenience of the children, they argue.
Flaherty agreed.
“It’s been a market-driven environment. We wouldn’t plan our school system like that. We wouldn’t plan our hospital system like that,” she said. “So expansion (of child care) requires public management planning and financing.”
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