Some independent child-care providers will close Thursday in protest

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Some of Ottawa’s independent child-care providers are set to close Thursday to protest the way the national $10-a-day daycare plan has been implemented.

As of Wednesday afternoon, 67 Ottawa child-care locations were planning to close their doors, said Chantal Thomas, owner Findlay Creek Tiny Hoppers, a south-end daycare.

“The only way our voices will be heard is if we go out there and do something,” said Thomas, who will be joining the protest.

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At issue is the Canada-wide Early Learning and Child Care program, which has reduced parent fees by more than 50 per cent since it was introduced in 2022, according to provincial figures.

But child-care operators say they are awash in bureaucratic red tape and their fees have been frozen, hamstringing those who want to increase staffing or to improve their facilities.

Thomas, who signed on with the program in 2022, said the program did not respect the fact that expenses might vary from one location to another. She has 55 spots in her program with 16 staff members. She pays $13,000 a month in rent.

“Not everyone’s rent is the same. We have to go to the government if we want to buy a new refrigerator,” she said. “They’re trying to take our businesses away.”

Zoë Prassoulis, a child-care operator from Woodbridge, Ont., and one of the protest organizers, said 800 people took part in a similar protest at Queen’s Park in Toronto on Tuesday, part of a rolling series of cross-Canada protests organized by the Alberta Association of Childcare Entrepreneurs (AACE).

AACE is calling for a “no strings-attached envelope funding, empowering provinces to create child-care solutions that ensure affordability, accessibility and quality” and a “funding follows the family” approach on the provincial level to ensure that funding moves with families to their chosen daycare centres, whether they’re private, non-profit or licensed home daycares.

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According to AACE figures, there are 45,366 child-care operators across Canada in three categories: child-care centres; licensed home-based daycare; and unlicensed home daycares. More than 820,000 children, the vast majority, were enrolled in child-care centres.

The system means daycare operators are limited in terms of how they run their businesses, Prassoulis said.

“A sector like ours has heavy investments in staff. This isn’t covered under the funding formula,” Prassoulis said. “We have a government that is using a one-size-fits-all model.”

In August, Ontario announced it would be moving away from a revenue-replacement model to a cost-based funding formula and parent fees would be capped at $22 per day for children under the age of six as of Jan.1. 

The problem is that everyone pays $22 a day, whether they earn $250,000 a year or $50,000, said Thomas, who has a waiting list of 500.

“The whole point of the program was to allow women to get back into the workforce. Now, because of the waiting lists, they can’t do that,” she said. “We’re filled until 2027. Every daycare in Ontario is filled.”

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Earlier this week, the Association of Day Care Operators of Ontario, which was not involved in organizing the protests, released a joint statement with the Canadian Council of Montessori Administrators and the Ontario Federation of Independent Schools discouraging service disruptions for families.

“We worried that closing centres for the day would create undue hardships for parents who might not have a back-up plan for care,” said Andrea Hannen, executive director of the Association of Day Care Operators of Ontario, which represents independent licensed child-care centres not run by public-sector entities such as municipalities or school boards.

However, many child-care centres, both commercial and not-for-profit, have concerns about the program, she said. The program has artificially limited Canada’s supply of licensed child care and suppressed compensation for qualified educators and could close thousands of woman-owned small businesses as well as destabilizing the childcare system and create chaos for families. To be a fully public system would mean replacing the existing system with new facilities funded by taxpayers, a process that would be costly and would take decades.

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One of the problems is that funding has not kept up with inflation, Hannen said. “The program needs to be sustainable for owner-operators.”

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