Demand for child care in Ottawa soars 300 per cent, new report finds

As the cost of child care in Ontario has fallen to a maximum of $22 a day for children under the age of six, demand in Ottawa has soared, according to the city.

The city is responsible for managing the child-care system locally and says licenced providers are only meeting about three-quarters of the need. 

Since the Canada-wide program started rolling out in Ontario in 2022, the shortage of affordable spots has become especially acute for Francophones and infants under 18 months, as well as at Indigenous-led centres, a new city report says.

Overall, the number of children five years and younger who are on the city's registry and waiting for a spot within the next six months or more has jumped by 300 per cent since 2019, that report says.

"There's a rush of people wanting services," said Michel Laflamme, executive director of Aladin Child Care Services, which runs four centres and has programs for babies and children who speak French. "Our wait lists are full. We have hundreds of people on them."

There have always been wait lists for child care, acknowledges Laflamme, but they used to be more manageable.

Laflamme is glad to see child care become affordable to more families, as many couldn't afford to pay the old rates of $90 a day.

Parents are rejoining the work force or going back to school, he said.

But at Aladin's centre on Russell Road alone, parents are calling all the time and 500 children are waiting for a spot. That's up from a list of 100 before the national program, said Laflamme.

7,000 children still need spots

At that Aladin location in Elmvale Acres, Laflamme is renovating a room to add spots for 24 more pre-schoolers.

They are among the 2,903 new spaces that have been allocated to Ottawa over the first five years of the new national child-care program, bringing the total spaces for children under the age of six to more than 26,000 locally. 

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The City of Ottawa, which manages child care for the province, has collected lots of data about the needs of children and  neighbourhoods and has been trying to make sure those affordable spaces fill gaps in the most under-served areas.

Those include Indigenous-led and French-speaking centres, as well as centres for children who have special needs, are from diverse communities or are from lower income families.

Demand has far outpaced the new spaces, however.

Many people mistakenly think the $10-a-day national system is universal and there will definitely be a spot for them, said Jason Sabourin, director of children's services at the City of Ottawa.

But funding the system so every child is served would be a decision to be made by the Ontario government and not the city, he said.

"We're covering about 70 per cent of the demand in Ottawa, so on average there's about 7,000 children still not able to access the system at a point in time," Sabourin said.

Given that the window when a child needs care can sometimes be only a year or two, some children might never get spots and simply age into the school system, he said.

The City of Ottawa's new five-year plan for child care — to be discussed at the April 22 meeting of the city's community services committee — is focused on improving the registry and making it easier for parents to navigate a complicated system.

But there's only so much that falls under city control, Sabourin said.

Recruiting educators a longstanding problem

To meet demand and offer care at affordable rates for all children, Sabourin said the province would need to increase funding.

As it stands, the cost of available affordable child-care spaces will fall to $12 a day in Ontario by 2026. The advertised $10 per day is reached only when factoring in families who are fully subsidized and pay nothing for child care, Sabourin clarified.

Laflamme points to other obstacles. He says the province also needs to keep tackling wages and benefits for early childhood educators, and needs to ensure new centres are built.

"The system has a lot of parts and you've got to take care of all of them, not just bring down parent fees," said Laflamme.

Recruitment and retention of staff has been a longstanding problem and is particularly tough for Francophone child care, he added. Often, staff stay only a few years, he said, or are attracted to the pension and higher wages in Gatineau, Que.

After this story was published, the office of Ontario's minister of education sent CBC News a statement saying some communities aren't able to provide enough affordable child care spaces because of limited federal funding.

"This is why the province continues to call on the federal government to come to the table and provide Ontario with sufficient funding to support the Canada-wide Early Learning and Child Care system," wrote a spokesperson for Minister Paul Calandra.

Both Sabourin and Laflamme agree the long-awaited public child care system will take time, and it's still early days. 

Parents are already able to choose to return to work or not face child-care fees that can rival the size of a mortgage payment, said Laflamme.

"We've been fighting for this for 50 years," Laflamme said. "And to see the day that we are actually doing this, people are so happy."