Bradford is seeking help for all those parents on waitlists for affordable child care.
Earlier this week, council passed a motion asking the federal and provincial governments to “fix” the “archaic” ratio of 29 per cent for-profit to 71 per cent not-for-profit spaces funded as part of the Canada-Wide Early Learning and Child Care (CWELCC) system.
While the motion doesn’t specify exactly how council wants the issue fixed, both Mayor James Leduc and Deputy Mayor Raj Sandhu explained to BradfordToday they would like to see the ratio adjusted more in favour of for-profit providers.
They said there isn’t enough funding for all the for-profit providers interested in joining the system while funding for not-for-profit providers is going unused due to lack of demand.
The mayor suggested a 40:60 ratio might be more appropriate, while the deputy mayor floated the idea of keeping the ratio variable and allocating any unused funding from not-for-profit providers to any waitlisted for-profit providers as a way of creating more child-care spaces.
“It’s very difficult to get daycare anywhere in Bradford,” Leduc said during Tuesday's meeting. “It’s going to become a nightmare, or a crisis coming into 2025.”
That’s expected to be the result of too few spaces to meet the demand for affordable child care.
Launched by the federal government as part of the 2021 budget, the Ontario government signed onto the CWELCC system for five years in March 2022, which is intended to reduce the average cost of early learning and child care for kids aged six and younger to just $10 a day for those enrolled in the program by March 2026.
As part of the agreement, the province allocates funding from itself and the federal government for child-care spaces to upper-tier municipalities like the County of Simcoe through a provincial-municipal funding agreement, through which the province mandates the ratio of for-profit and not-for-profit spaces the county can assign to municipalities like Bradford.
The motion claims families are being forced on to waitlists for $10-a-day child care as there just aren’t enough spaces available.
To address the issue, Sandhu said the county was able to create more community spaces by using allocations from delayed school projects.
“That’s just borrowing it, because next year you’ll have to give those back, and you’re in the same situation,” he said.
A report from Samantha Zuercher, director of children’s services, to county council on April 30 explained the province provided approval on March 7 for the county to reallocate spaces and/or funding from delayed child-care spaces in schools, provided those spaces were reserved for schools in future years.
The report didn’t include the number of spaces the county “borrowed” from school programs, nor was that question answered in time for publication.
“The funding for any school spaces that were not realized in 2023, supported new community-based spaces, and we have ensured that in 2024, 2025, 2026 that we have the spaces ‘reserved’ for the school programs that were delayed to those years,” Zuercher explained via email, adding school spaces can be run by either for-profit or not-for-profit operators.
According to the report, the province allocated the county a total 3,081 spaces for creation between 2022 and 2026, of which 590 spaces were for new child-care programs being created in schools, leaving 2,491 community-based spaces.
So far, 236 spaces have been allocated to Bradford between 2022-2024, of which 133 are not-for-profit and 103 are for-profit, according to Zuercher.
“Bradford West Gwillimbury has been identified as a high priority community in relation to spaces and funding for child-care growth,” she said.
