Below is a brief summary of the 2024 state of the child care sector in Canada.
Tl;Dr: The future of child care in Canada can be characterised as increasingly institutional with tighter integration with public education.
2024 state of child care in Canada
Across Canada, demand for licensed child care spaces often exceeds supply.
Canadian families access licensed child care by enrolling their children in either licensed home daycares or daycare centers.
Licensed home daycares
Licensed home daycares have a number of pros with respect to meeting child care demand. You can rapidly increase the number of licensed home daycares with minimal funding.
Licensed home daycares also tend to be spread out more evenly throughout residential areas in cities resulting in lower daycare commute times and greater ease of parking.
However, licensed home daycares are often transient. Many home daycare providers shut down permanently within 4 years of operation and move on to other careers for various reasons.
Nevertheless, funding the creation of new licensed home daycares is a viable short-term solution to meeting demand.
In recent years, the number of licensed home daycare providers has increased due to government funding initiatives and other incentives.
However, due to the burden of increasing regulation and burn out from long work hours among other issues, licensed home daycare providers are increasingly choosing to close down their daycares after a few years of operation and move on to other careers which contributes to the trend of transient home daycares.
Although exact figures vary by province, home daycares provide roughly 20% of all licensed child care spaces in Canada at the time of writing.
Daycare centers
Daycare centers are costly to fund both in terms of time and money. While multiple home daycares can be licensed to operate in under 6 months, a new daycare center can take 1 to 2 years to become operational.
However, a single daycare center provides many more licensed spots than a home daycare. For instance, depending on local regulations, a single daycare center may provide the same child care capacity as 6 to 12 home daycares.
Additionally, daycare centers add somewhat less administrative burden on government officials since overseeing the operations of one center is arguably easier than overseeing 8 homes.
Daycare centers also provide better staff benefits since they have the ability to meet the necessary staffing minimums required by insurance companies.
A notable observation in recent times has been the government’s increasing focus on funding daycare centers that are additions to Elementary schools.
Conclusion
Hitherto, all public discourse surrounding this excess of demand is focused on creating more licensed child care spaces.
Notably absent from the conversation are strategies to decrease demand through incentivizing alternatives to child care enrollment.
Families that opt for alternatives to child care enrollment (which have the added benefit of decreasing demand for limited licensed spaces) such as stay at home parents have hitherto received no allocation of government funding in both past and future budgets despite the increase in early years-related funding.
Given the above analysis, the future of child care in Canada can be characterised as increasingly institutional with tighter integration with public education.