Busting Canada’s daycare myths
Is there really a child care shortage? That’s the provocative question asked in a new report from the Institute for Marriage and Family Canada (IMFC). The IMFC studied the vacancy rate in Toronto daycares and the results are eye-opening — or at least should be for the politicians currently wading into the child care debate. From the Conservatives’ family tax credits and monthly benefits, to the NDP’s proposal for $15-a-day daycare, the assumption is generally that child care spaces are rare as hen’s teeth. But as the IMFC report shows, they aren’t — and policy decisions, while well-meaning, often become skewed as a result.
The IMFC starts by defining the terms “early learning” and “child care” in a more holistic way than simply “institutional” or “regulated” care. Statistics claiming there are “regulated spaces” for only 20 per cent of children under six years old assume that all such children should be in regulated care. They ignore the fact that even if these spaces were available, many parents would choose, as they do now, to care for their children in unregulated ways — by themselves, or with the help of relatives, a neighbour or a nanny. In Ontario, full-day kindergarten also provides six hours of daily “care” to all four- and five-year-olds, further reducing the need for “regulated” care.
The IMFC concludes that a more accurate measure is that regulated spaces exist for 50% of Ontario kids under six. However, it’s still not clear that parents of all those kids want them in regulated care, and even if they do, it’s not necessarily full-time. Mothers of children under five who work outside the home put in an average of 16 hours less a week than fathers, and 38 per cent are not in the labour force at all. While proponents of regulated care argue that those mothers would all speed back to work full-time if they only had a place to park their kids, that isn’t true: when asked what child care they prefer, parents name themselves, followed by family members, home daycare, and lastly, centre-based care.
As for the infamous child care waitlists, the IMFC found that they are often the result of parents who do want regulated care signing up their kids on multiple lists, even in utero, out of fear of “not getting a spot.” Names don’t get removed even after a child gets a place, resulting in a false sense of shortage. In some areas, there is more demand than others, resulting in localized “shortages,” but this is often more a shortage of what parents consider to be quality care, not necessarily “regulated” care.
In other words, if you build regulated spaces, children will not necessarily come. The vacancy rate in Toronto bears this out: the IMFC found that “between January 2009 and October 2014, the total number of vacancies among all age groups in Toronto daycare fluctuated from a low of 3.58 per cent to a high of 6.64 per cent.” That translates to between 1,877 and 3666 spots. “By way of comparison,” the report notes, “the rental apartment vacancy rate in Toronto as of October 2014 was 1.6 per cent.”
Funding regulated care preferentially to other types of care is also inequitable. On average, every regulated space in Canada receives $4,070 in government funding. Different types of regu- lated care further receive different allocations, with the highest going to centre-based care. Every unregulated space receives, of course, zero.
The conclusion for policy makers? The laws of supply and demand, equity and parental preference would all point to supporting choice as the most sensible model of child care. In that sense, both the NDP’s and the Conservatives’ plans fall short: the NDP, because it would support the creation of regulated spaces to the exclusion of other forms of care, and the Tories because the financial transfers they created, in the form of the Family Tax Credit and monthly benefits, are inadequate to allow most parents to fully afford the choices they prefer. What the Liberals will come up with remains to be seen, but before they hit the drawing board, they — and all our elected officials — should read this report. If we are going to help families care for their kids, then let’s stop throwing money at the wrong problems — and the wrong solutions.
If you build regulated spaces, children will not necessarily come