There simply are not enough affordable child-care spaces to meet the demand and Simcoe County officials are hoping the province can step up to help.
The province’s vision for the Canada Wide Early Learning and Child Care (CWELCC) system includes a licensed child-care sector where more families in Ontario have access to high-quality, affordable, flexible and inclusive early learning and child care, regardless of where they live, said Samantha Zuercher, who is the director of children's services with the county.
The child-care space allocation received from the Ministry of Education has not changed from the original approval, however the ministry is allowing for "enhanced flexibility" for how the funding is allocated, Zuercher explained during a presentation to update county council at Tuesday’s committee of the whole meeting.
In December 2022, the ministry released space allocations for "directed growth" between 2022 and 2026, along with Ontario’s Access and Inclusion Framework in draft form. At that time, so-called consolidated municipal service managers, such as the County of Simcoe, were asked to evaluate specific socio-economic factors in order to prioritize municipalities based on growth over the remainder of the five years, according to the staff report.
Locally, the county was allocated 3,081 spaces — 590 spaces were allocated to new child-care programs being created in schools, leaving 2,491 community-based spaces for creation between 2022 and 2026.
“We came to council in October with our initial plan and we’ve had some changes that have occurred within the last few months we thought was important to share with you,” Zuercher said.
Commonly referred to as $10-a-day child care, the program was announced in 2022 and started on April 1, 2024.
In that plan, Zuercher said all licensed child-care programs have the opportunity to opt into the program. To date in the region, she noted that has not quite been achieved.
“It’s not quite at $10-a-day yet. We are roughly at 52 per cent reduction on fees over what families were previously paying in 2022," Zuercher said.
The programs she was updating council on, she pointed out, were not the ones that originally opted in, but rather anything that happened since that time.
At the end of 2022, the ministry announced the space allocations that municipalities could add in licensed child care as part of CWELCC between 2022 and 2026. They also laid out the framework for municipalities and what needed to be done to determine which areas would be prioritized for additional child care, she said.
In October, staff reported to county council in October that eight primary municipalities would be starting programs based on ministry requirements.
In addition to looking at a variety of socio-economic factors, staff also had to look at the provincial access ratio, said Zuercher, noting the provincial goal is to reach a 37 per cent access ratio, which equates to one affordable child-care space for every 2.7 children on average.
Simcoe County currently has an access ratio of approximately 23.4 per cent, which is the equivalent of one space for every 4.3 children, she noted, adding in order for the county to reach that provincial goal it would require 5,295 new child-care spaces.
“When we received our allocation, we received 3,081 spaces for that period of time, so we won’t have enough to reach that goal across the entire county, but this is the direction we are headed," Zuercher said.
Spaces are categorized in two ways: school-based spaces and community-based spaces.
School-based spaces are assigned to capital building projects by the Ministry of Education, meaning any new schools being built or with approved expansions that have a built-in child-care component the county is required to fund.
Community-based space is what is being focused on in the growth plan, said Zuercher.
“One thing that is important to share is that additional child-care programs can continue to open," she added. "We are not preventing child-care centres from being operational, but we only have a specific amount of funding. Funding is tied to spaces … so programs can open, but would be charging market rates not the reduced rates to families.”
In late 2023, staff contacted the ministry to highlight need for additional spaces in order to reach provincial targets, she said, but no additional spaces have yet been approved.
“That is our hope that, over time as they look at other municipalities that may be under-performing, that they may be able to reallocate spaces," Zuercher said.
However, after “numerous conversations with the province,” the county has received approval to review its spaces. Zuercher said this means spaces from the school capacity that was not completed in 2023 could be reissued to community-based spaces when they do become operational between 2024 and 2026.
“Based on those changes, (we were) able to take another look at numbers and it meant that 931 was only an over-achievement of 125 spaces," she said. "We still had to remove those from 2024, but it left us with 651 spaces to approve this year.
"To date, we have confirmed 127 school spaces and 515 community spaces, which brings us to 64 2in total," Zuercher said. "We have nine remaining spaces to allocate.”
The program received more than 30 applications in the first round, which equated to 3,395 spaces — a number which far exceeds the county’s allocation even over the five-year span, she added, and the majority of those applications were from commercial or for-profit centres.
“In the end, we will have 1,532 net new child-care spaces by the end of this year … and 1,928 new CWELCC spaces,” Zuercher said.
“We will continue to work with the Ministry of Education to promote the need for additional child-care spaces in Simcoe County, but we are going to look at our existing funding envelope to determine if there are ways we can advance any of the 2025 spaces using our existing funding," she added.
Bradford West Gwillimbury Coun. Jonathan Scott was curious to know how far the county is from achieving the provincially set goal.
“I never want to criticize when we can make progress, and as you mentioned we are making progress, but we are not going to achieve the goal … with the rapid growth we are seeing," he said.
"The need is critical,” Scott added.
Although the county received the third-highest allocation across the 37 service managers, that still leaves it around 2,000 spaces short of what the provincial average is set by the guideline, said Mina Fayez-Bhagat, the county's general manager of social and community services.
“We are working on a dashboard that hopefully will launch later this year … that will give a breakdown of member municipalities and the two separated cities on how close they are to the provincial average,” he said.
Midland Mayor Bill Gordon said he understands the pressures and the competing interests that exist in communities, but voiced concern that many child-care centres that are trying to open up to provide a top-quality service can only “cater to the folks who have the capacity to pay for their kids to be looked after,” leaving smaller centres in the lurch due to lack of funding.
“That’s not really the demographic that has the most need," he said. "I can understand the pressure we are under … you can only squeeze the province so much.
"I appreciate any effort so if there is anything this house can do… I don’t mind using what little influence I have to try to add a voice to the chorus to get more funding and release it to the smalls in north Simcoe," Gordon added.
