NDP vows to expand $10-a-day child care program

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This article was published 20/08/2023 (748 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Provincial NDP Leader Wab Kinew pledged Sunday to expand the $10-a-day child care program to make more children eligible and more time available.

The current program, funded by the federal and provincial government, offers child care for infant, nursery and preschool programs at $10 a day per child. School-aged children who are attending a child care program while attending classes are eligible for $10-a-day care before school, during lunch or after school.

School-aged kids are not eligible for $10-a-day care during the summer months, holidays, and days off. When school’s out, that care currently costs $18 to just over $20 per day.

Kinew promised that if the NDP take the upcoming provincial election, those gaps would be filled.

“Right now, you might see $10-a-day on a billboard, but when you show up at a child care centre and you drop your kids off during a workday in the summer, or on a (professional development) day at school, or on holiday, it’s not truly $10 a day,” he said at a press conference Sunday morning.

He promised a $10 million annual investment in incentivizing child care centres to be open earlier and later to offer more flexibility to parents who are shift workers.

While the $10-a-day program is a collaboration between the federal and provincial government, Kinew said the province would foot the bill for these expansions.

“We need true $10 a day. And in order for us to deliver that, while we would certainly want to work with the federal government around expanding child-care spaces and other important goals, the contours of that program preclude accessing federal dollars for this investment,” he said.

Manitoba Child Care Association executive director Jodie Kehl said there’s an obvious need for more affordable child care outside of the eight-hour workday, but whichever government is elected Oct. 3 will have to focus on solving the challenges child care centres are already facing.

Waiting lists have “exploded” since the $10-a-day program was put in place in Manitoba, and significant shortages of early childhood educators have exacerbated the issue.

“If I’m having enough challenges staffing my program Monday to Friday, the thought of now opening on the weekends and trying to attract early childhood educators to work — what’s the motivation to do that, right?” she said.

“There (are) increased operating grants already built into the regulations for that, but maybe it’s about looking at premiums for enhanced salaries for early childhood educators that are working outside the traditional hours of care. That might be something that a future government might want to consider, so that it is more lucrative, more incentivizing for facilities and for educators.”

Kehl said parents of school-aged kids who use child care are currently forced to pay higher daily costs around 70 days per year.

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“I think for families, what they’re finding now is that it’s summertime, and so for my four-year-old child, I might be paying $10 a day, but for my eight-year-old child, I’m paying $20.80. So there’s a big discrepancy there,” she said.

Following the NDP announcement, the Progressive Conservative party released a statement drawing attention to the provincial government’s achievements in child care during its tenure.

“Our PC team has already implemented the largest expansion of child care in Manitoba history, with 2,600 new school-age spaces including room for after school, inservice and summertime care,” Families Minister Rochelle Squires said in a statement. “We are already halfway to our goal of 23,000 new spaces by 2026.”

In July, Minister of Education and Early Childhood Learning Wayne Ewasko said the provincial government had added 3,875 new child-care spaces and committed to 7,700 more in total since August 2021, putting it about halfway way to its goal of opening 23,000 new spaces by 2026.”

malak.abas@freepress.mb.ca

Malak Abas
Reporter

Malak Abas is a city reporter at the Free Press. Born and raised in Winnipeg’s North End, she led the campus paper at the University of Manitoba before joining the Free Press in 2020. Read more about Malak.

Every piece of reporting Malak produces is reviewed by an editing team before it is posted online or published in print — part of the Free Press‘s tradition, since 1872, of producing reliable independent journalism. Read more about Free Press’s history and mandate, and learn how our newsroom operates.