“Nightmare” looms: Bradford pushes for more places in daycare

Bradford is asking all parents on waiting lists for affordable child care for help.

Earlier this week, council passed a motion calling on the federal and provincial governments to “correct” the “archaic” ratio of 29 per cent for-profit and 71 per cent non-profit institutions funded under the Canada-Wide Early Learning and Child Care (CWELCC) system.

Although the motion does not specify exactly how the council intends to resolve the problem, both Mayor James Leduc and Vice Mayor Raj Sandhu told BradfordToday They would like to see a stronger adjustment of the ratio in favour of profit-oriented providers.

They said there were not enough funds for all for-profit providers interested in joining the system, while funds for nonprofit providers remained unused due to lack of demand.

The mayor suggested that a 40:60 ratio would be more appropriate, while the deputy mayor floated the idea of ​​keeping the ratio variable and allocating any unused funds from nonprofit providers to commercial providers on the waiting list to create more childcare places.

“It's very difficult to get a daycare anywhere in Bradford,” Leduc said during Tuesday's meeting. “It's going to be a nightmare or a crisis in 2025.”

This is probably due to the fact that there are not enough places to meet the demand for affordable childcare.

The Ontario government joined the CWELCC system, launched by the federal government as part of Budget 2021, in March 2022 for a five-year period. The goal is to reduce the average cost of early childhood education and child care for children ages six and under to just $10 per day for those participating in the program by March 2026.

As part of the agreement, the province allocates its own and federal funds to provide child care spaces to upper-tier municipalities like the County of Simcoe through a provincial funding agreement. Through this agreement, the province determines the ratio of for-profit and non-profit spaces that the county can allocate to municipalities like Bradford.

The motion alleges that families are being placed on waiting lists for $10-a-day child care spots because there simply aren't enough spots available.

To solve the problem, Sandhu said the district was able to create more community spaces by using funds from delayed school projects.

“It's just a loan, because next year you have to return it and then you'll be in the same situation,” he said.

A report from Samantha Zuercher, director of child care services, to county council on April 30 explained that on March 7, the province granted the county approval to reallocate spaces and/or funds for late-available child care spaces in schools, provided those spaces would be reserved for schools in future years.

The report did not include information on the number of seats the district had “borrowed” from school programs, and that question was not answered at the time of publication.

“Funding for all school spaces not realized in 2023 was used to support new community-based spaces, and we made sure that in 2024, 2025 and 2026 we have 'reserved' the spaces for the school programs that were deferred to those years,” Zuercher explained via email, adding that school spaces can be operated by either for-profit or nonprofit operators.

According to the report, the province has allocated a total of 3,081 places to the county between 2022 and 2026, of which 590 are earmarked for the establishment of new childcare programs at schools, leaving 2,491 places at the municipal level.

According to Zuercher, Bradford has so far been allocated 236 places for the period 2022-2024, of which 133 are nonprofit and 103 are for-profit.

“Bradford West Gwillimbury has been identified as a high priority community in terms of space and funding for child care expansion,” she said.