When Angela Zhu found out she was pregnant, she recognized that securing a daycare spot in Toronto would be a difficult task. To enhance their chances, she and her husband joined 40 different waitlists, believing that this would be enough to find suitable care for their future child.
However, despite their efforts, a year after the birth of their son, they received only one offer for a daycare located 30 minutes away from their home, with a start date nearly a month after she was due to return to work. Zhu took the offer, feeling fortunate to even get a spot, as it was part of the national $10-a-day program designed to lower childcare fees for parents. Remarkably, after enduring 1.5 years of extra commuting for daycare and waiting for over three years since joining the waitlists, she finally secured a place in her neighborhood.
While around half of the provinces in Canada have succeeded in offering average fees of $10 a day, Ontario has not yet met this goal, with fees currently capped at $22 a day. This is still a significant decrease from the previous costs of over $70 for some daycare spots before the province entered the program four years ago. Nevertheless, some parents, along with prominent child-care advocates, are calling on the Ontario government to focus less on further reducing fees and prioritize the expansion of available daycare spaces instead.
The recent increase in demand, largely triggered by the more affordable fees implemented in 2022, has led to a dramatic rise in childcare waitlists. The province had committed to creating 86,000 affordable daycare spaces by this year as part of its agreement with the federal government, but has currently fallen short, managing to establish just under 60,000 spots. According to Ontario’s financial accountability officer, the surge in demand due to lower fees has escalated the need for new spaces to around 220,000.
The situation has grown so critical in certain areas that some daycare centers in Toronto, such as Blossoming Minds, have had to temporarily close their waitlists multiple times due to overwhelming demand. Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, Blossoming Minds typically had a waitlist of 300 to 400 children, but since the introduction of the $10-a-day program, that number has soared past 700. Director Maggie Moser noted that the center only usually turns over about 50 to 60 children each year, indicating that the vast majority of applicants will remain without spots.
A spokesperson for Ontario’s Education Minister, Paul Calandra, assured that the province is dedicated to increasing access to affordable child care. Emma Testani stated, “As lower fees have increased demand, we continue to work with local service system managers and operators to bring more spaces online as well as the federal government to ensure program sustainability.”
In the Region of Waterloo, which has centralized waitlists, around 15,000 children are currently waiting for a daycare spot, marking a 200 percent increase since 2021. Similarly, in Thunder Bay, the number of children awaiting an infant space has more than doubled since 2021, with 1,235 children on the waitlist—one-third of whom need care immediately. Ottawa has reported a staggering 300 percent increase in the number of families seeking child care since 2019, with about 8,500 children on the central waitlist and a need for 7,400 additional spaces to fully meet demand.
Amidst these challenges, Hana Park, a mother of a two-year-old son, found the childcare situation in Ottawa to be so dire that she and her family decided to move to Gatineau, Quebec. Park could not locate any daycare spaces within the program nearby to their former home in Ottawa. Excited by the rollout of the $10-a-day program, which she believed would make having a child feasible while maintaining her job, she expressed her hope. However, she later described her experience as exhausting and overwhelming, likening the search for daycare to a second job, ultimately resulting in her family's cross-province move to secure affordable childcare.
