Ontario Liberals promise 100,000 new child care spaces by 2022 — four years after their mandate ends

NationalPost.ca
Sept. 13, 2016
By Ashley Csanady

The Ontario Liberals announced a massive investment in child care on Monday - one so big they’d need their mandate extended to 2022 to implement it.

The pledge would create 100,000 new spaces, invest billions over the next five years and hope to reap the benefits of poverty reduction and more women in the workforce.

It’s the kind of move that would usually be heralded as a game changer, and precisely what the province’s task force on the gender wage gap was created to encourage. The problem? The concept, while big in aspiration, is short on details - and would run four years beyond the Liberals current mandate.

Beyond the bare bones announced in the throne speech itself, here’s what we do know: over five years, starting in 2017, the province would support the creation of 100,000 child-care spaces. That takes us to 2022 - or about four years after Ontario’s next general election, expected in the late spring of 2018.

The plan would provide a mix of spaces, some in non-profits, some in ci - run centres, some in homes - but all licensed, said minister Indira Naidoo-Harris, who is the province’s first minister specifically tasked with early years and child care policy.

Once the plan is up and running, the government would spend between $600 and $750 million a year “to support fee subsidies for qualified families,” the minister of education said. Who those families are, and what would qualify them, is also TBD. As the Ontario Coalition for Better Child Care notes, the intentions sound great - but it’s hard to say what that means for families’ bottom lines.

“At the same time, we know that there is more policy work to be done. While today’s commitment is substantial, to make the most of it there needs to be a plan to address affordability for parents and decent work for educators. Today’s announcement doesn’t address affordability directly,” Carolyn Ferns, OCBCC’s Public Policy Coordinator, said.

The government is also willing to spend $1 billion to $3 billion on child-care infrastructure, depending on what the needs are.

It’s kind of like their 12-year plan to spend $160 billion on infrastructure. As much as cities need to plan when to repair roads and bridges, they also need to include child-care needs in new subdivisions and condo towers, so there’s some logic behind this kind of long-term planning even for a fixed-term government.

However, for a party that’s been in power 13 years, there’s also something ballsy about announcing a new policy in a throne speech that amounts to, essentially, a campaign promise. As PC leader Patrick Brown put it, just as with infrastructure, when it comes to child care, “I think they’re becoming very comfortable at making promises they’re not going to be accountable for.”

It would be different if the Liberals weren’t now addressing a shortage exacerbated by their own polices: When full-day kindergarten started to roll out, child-care providers warned it would drive up costs for infant to preschool care (because there would be fewer older kids in care who require fewer hands to watch them, therefore offsetting the cost of the littlest ones).

It would also be different if they had a real plan to increase those spaces and access before their mandate runs out, as opposed to lofty promises to create 100,000 spaces by some magical time beyond their current power. Why not simply pledge to get say, 15 or 20,000 new spaces by the end of the next fiscal year? Because it doesn’t sound as splashy as a six-figure pipe dream?

This government has made some necessary reforms to how daycares are regulated in Ontario, such as lower child-to-care-provider ratios and more frequent inspections, and offered much-needed pay increases to early-education workers. They banned wait-list fees for child care and have already increased pre- and post-school coverage. Wynne and her ministers seem to get the importance of this file.

If only they would make promises they can keep, as opposed to ones they can hope to run on.