Child-care funding an endless cycle of failure

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 16/07/2024 (418 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It seems no matter what governments do to try to make child care more accessible in Manitoba, wait lists continue to grow.

That has not changed in at least three decades (the period of time I’ve been covering child-care issues as a journalist). Would-be parents have long been warned to put their unborn child on a wait list because it takes “years” to get a spot.

Despite flashy announcements by successive governments about “significant investments” in child care — supposedly to create hundreds, if not thousands, of new spots for families — wait lists appear to be getting longer.

It’s not that governments haven’t increased funding for child care over the years and expanded capacity — they have. But it’s nowhere near keeping up with the growing demand for child-care services. There are simply more families with kids who need child care than there are places for them.

Whatever governments have been doing, even with the best of intentions, has failed miserably.

A recent Free Press investigation into the state of child care in the province has revealed a laundry list of deficiencies in the system, from a lack of openness and transparency by the province in making inspection reports of child-care facilities public to failed attempts at enforcing licensing standards.

Not surprisingly, the Free Press reports confirmed families continue to wait years for child-care placement, if they find a spot at all.

The recent $10 per day child-care policy — paid for by the federal Liberal government and implemented by the provinces — is a laudable goal. But because it applies to all income groups, including high-income families, it has increased the demand for child care further, making wait lists even longer. It’s an unintended outcome policymakers are scrambling to respond to.

Like many politicians before him, Nello Altomare, Manitoba’s minister of early childhood learning, said during a recent interview that his government plans to increase funding for child care and boost wages for early childhood staff. The goal is to create 23,000 new spots by 2025.

But, like many ministers before him, his department has come nowhere near meeting that goal, for all kinds of complicated reasons (not the least of which is that it’s very difficult to recruit qualified staff to the industry at current pay levels).

I have heard more or less the same pledge from previous cabinet ministers for the past three decades. Most have increased funding for child care, boosted wages and opened more child-care spots for families. But all have fallen short of meeting their stated goals of opening thousands of more spots within a prescribed time period. So, the wait lists get longer.

How much more money would governments have to spend to eliminate wait lists, or at least reduce them to manageable levels, so that people wait months instead of years for a placement? No one knows. The federal government has announced billions in new funding for child care, yet the problem appears to be worse today than it was 10 years ago.

At the end of the day, government has no real plan for child care except to increase funding incrementally. The hope is that by doing so, enough new spaces will be created that wait lists will shrink. They never do. And when they don’t, the next government makes the same pronouncements, and the cycle starts all over again.

It didn’t help that the previous Progressive Conservative government froze funding for child-care centres while it was in office from 2016 to 2023. That made the problem worse. The current NDP government has since increased operating grants to child-care centres, but it’s nowhere near enough to meet the growing demand.

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Non-profit child-care facilities that receive operating grants from the province are subject to price controls: government-set child-care fees. If centres want operating grants, they have to play by government’s rules. Because funding for centres has grown only incrementally in recent years, and because fees have remained frozen or declined in many areas, child-care facilities have been starved of revenue. Many don’t have the resources to expand. It’s a flawed system that should be re-examined.

At the same time, subsidies for higher-income families who could afford to pay a larger share of their child-care costs are growing. It’s not sustainable, and it has led to longer wait lists.

Until governments decide to overhaul the child-care system to ensure centres have the revenues they need, including from families that can afford to pay, wait lists will continue to grow. That discussion has to happen.

Tinkering around the edges as governments have for years will change nothing.

tom.brodbeck@freepress.mb.ca

Tom Brodbeck
Columnist

Tom Brodbeck is an award-winning author and columnist with over 30 years experience in print media. He joined the Free Press in 2019. Born and raised in Montreal, Tom graduated from the University of Manitoba in 1993 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in economics and commerce. Read more about Tom.

Tom provides commentary and analysis on political and related issues at the municipal, provincial and federal level. His columns are built on research and coverage of local events. The Free Press’s editing team reviews Tom’s columns before they are 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.