Manitoba called out for slow progress on adding child-care spaces

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This article was published 30/11/2023 (686 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The Manitoba Child Care Association says the government has delivered only 1,535 new child-care spaces despite vowing in 2021 to create 23,000 new spaces by 2026, and $10-a-day child care, as part of a $1.2-billion deal with the federal government.

At a news conference Thursday, advocates called on the new NDP government to properly fund and staff licensed child care.

“Unstaffed spaces are empty spaces,” said association president Lynda Raible. “It’s estimated we are short 1,000 early child educators to meet the needs of the spaces we currently have,” said Raible, the executive director of the Early Grey Children’s Centre.

In its annual report in spring 2021, the year the province signed the deal with Ottawa, Manitoba reported 25,489 preschool childcare spaces.

Two years later, it reported 27,024 pre-school spaces — an increase of 1,535 spots.

A government spokesman said in an email Thursday that, as of Thursday, 1,922 spaces have opened for children under the age of six since 2021.

He said a total of 12,498 “committed or opened” spaces for children age 12 and under have been added in Manitoba, 52 per cent of which are in Winnipeg and 48 per cent in rural Manitoba and First Nations.

The province committed to thousands of additional spaces but parents’ wait to get a spot takes longer than ever, Raible said.

“Many waiting lists are closed as the shortage of trained early child educators prevents programs from expanding or offering extended, flexible care hours of operation,” said Raible. “We cannot achieve this until we can staff the current spaces we have.”

Raible said 46 per cent of centres surveyed in Manitoba this year are operating with provisional licences because they don’t meet the minimum requirement of having 66 per cent of staff who are qualified early child educators.

A decade ago, the auditor general reported that 30 per cent of Manitoba childcare centres were operating with a provisional licence.

The sector struggles to recruit and retain qualified staff, said Jodie Kehl, executive director of the child care association. She said the target wage for an early child educator with a two-year diploma is $27.80 an hour.

“We’re not even close to that,” said Kehl, who noted the pay is $20.73 an hour. She said regular operating grants to centres have increased by just two per cent since 2016 while the consumer price index rose by nearly 23 per cent, as per the Bank of Canada.

The province graduates about 140 early child educators a year, said University of Manitoba Prof. Susan Prentice. A $5,000 tuition rebate was offered to Manitoba students this fall, but the government was unable to say Thursday how many had applied for it, or if it boosted enrollment.

Lori Isber, a parent who chairs the board of Fort Rouge Child Care, said the $10-a-day fee helps, but only if a space is available and, for too many, one isn’t. She said centres filled up quickly with the lower childcare fees and the wait list for a space grew by the hundreds.

“At a certain point, a wait list becomes useless,” Isber said. “Children grow and age out of child care,” she said. “I hope the current government understands the urgency and importance of prioritizing child care.”

Premier Wab Kinew said Thursday his government plans to announce support for child-care providers “very soon.”

“Our government recognizes that there’s been a lot of challenges for the local child-care operators in this transition towards $10-a-day child care in Manitoba,” Kinew said at an unrelated press conference in Brandon.

“Having child care is really important for communities right across Manitoba. It allows parents to go to work and very importantly, it helps young minds to develop so that our next generation can reach their full potential.”

The province is nowhere close to reaching the targeted 23,000 new spaces by 2026, said Prentice.

“What we need and do not yet have is an active public role in creating and delivering child-care spaces,” she said.

Nearly 95 per cent of centres in Manitoba are non-profits that rely on volunteer boards . “We have no publicly owned and operated facilities… even though we now know how important and essential child care is to economic and social infrastructure,” Prentice said.

“These would be smart investments,” Prentice said, pointing to Quebec’s experience.

That province launched universal, affordable child care in 1997 to encourage women to join the labour force. In 10 years, its GDP rose by nearly two per cent and generated $1.75 in returns for every $1 invested, the Tamarack Institute has reported.

— with files from Danielle Da Silva

carol.sanders@freepress.mb.ca