What America can learn from Canada's new '$10 a day' child care system

Any way you look at it, America's child care system is in crisis. After years of underinvestment and an end to pandemic-era aid, the industry is struggling. Child care teachers have fled for higher-paying jobs; parents face years-long wait lists; and families face insurmountable costs even for mediocre care. 

The last major effort to significantly expand federal funding of child care in the U.S. — a proposal in President Joseph Biden's Build Back Better legislation in 2021 — was dropped from the final version of the act. Legislation introduced in February 2023 that would have provided $10-a-day child care to many American families failed to progress. Although greater investment in child care has some bipartisan support in the U.S., many lawmakers have balked at the cost. Some continue to say the government should have no place in child care, arguing that it is a private responsibility. Others suggest that universal access to child care is a communist policy, or that mothers should always stay home with their children. That's in spite of the fact that America relies on working parents to keep schools and many services open.

In Canada, experts and advocates were "very effective at conveying the idea that child care is an important part of the overall well-being of the province and the nation," Haspel added. "They hammered it home over and over and over again."

The new national system passed Parliament as part of the nation's budget in June 2021 and has been rolling out over the past two years. Participation is voluntary for provinces and territories. But all have signed on to access the federal dollars, which are presently given with no requirement that provinces invest their own money. Eventually, Canadian officials hope to achieve a 50/50 cost share with provinces and territories, but no money was required at the onset of the initiative. (America, in contrast, requires states to match funds for its current federal program aimed at lowering costs for low-income families.)

Each province or territory has control over many of the details of the Canada-wide program, like setting annual goals for expanding child care spots and early educator pay scales, as well as deciding whether for-profit centers are included in their system. Money flows to the provincial governments, which then have their own systems for providing funding directly to the child care programs. By 2026, the country intends for Canada-wide to be universal in fact as well as name — with 250,000 new spots and parents paying no more than an average of $10 a day for care.

While the system's biggest effects likely won't be seen until it expands, there are signs of progress. Nationwide, nearly half of the provinces and territories offer regulated child care for an average of $10 a day, or less. In Newfoundland and Labrador, the federal funds have also supported the creation of a new, full-day, year-round pre-K pilot program. In New Brunswick, the province upped early childhood educator wages. In British Columbia, the federal infusion of funds has bolstered the work the province was already doing to bring more public funding into the child care industry. The province used the federal money it received to pay for 1,271 child care spaces between 2021 and 2022.

Child care programs say there are benefits to having access to more public funds. At Huckleberry, the program Marisol Petersen's son attends in Gibsons, the board of directors saw signing onto the province's $10 a Day plan as an opportunity to lower fees for parents without having to also lower wages for teachers. Huckleberry was also able to get $32,000 in additional funding from the province to hire a program manager to oversee budgets and support daily operations. 

Photo: Lorraine Trulsen, owner of the Heritage Park Child Care Centre, prepares materials for children at her program in British Columbia.

About 68 miles east of Gibsons in Mission, a town of about 39,000 in Canada's bucolic Fraser Valley, child care provider Lorraine Trulsen said $10 a Day has provided much-needed stability. Before joining the provincial initiative, she was begging families to refer others to her program, the Heritage Park Childcare Centre, even offering half off a month of care. Although her tuition, which cost between $650 and $850 a month, was lower than that of centers closer to Vancouver, "it was a struggle to get full," Trulsen said. Five years after becoming a pilot program for $10 a Day, Trulsen has a three-year wait list. Many of her parents cried when Trulsen announced her new, lower rate. Some couples decided they could have more children, she added, knowing they could now afford care. 

The publicly supported initiative in British Columbia, "has given us a feeling of security," Trulsen said. "We've actually never been more financially stable than we are right now."

Despite Canada's progress and growing support for the national, low-cost child care plan, the country's pain points in Canada-wide's rollout show there's no quick way to make child care a public, federally funded service, especially for countries that are late to the game. For example, in Canada, non-licensed, home-based providers have been left out of the system, as have other, more informal kinds of care.

About one-third of Canada's children are cared for by either a relative other than their parent or by a non-relative in a home, for example. Some provinces plan to tweak their versions of Canada-wide to include more forms of child care in the future, but that is not the case across the country. "We are very concerned that the current plan is not equitable," said Andrea Mrozek, a senior fellow with the Ottawa-based think tank, Cardus. "Billions and billions are being poured into a system that really helps the few," she added.

And even some of the programs that have been the biggest beneficiaries of the child care expansion are still struggling with funding. Provinces and territories are financially supporting the budgets of child care programs at levels the programs say are too low. In many cases, the governments subsidize families' costs, but fail to approve enough new money for child care programs that would allow them to raise teacher salaries. For example, earlier this year, British Columbia rejected a request from Huckleberry for a funding increase that would have raised teacher wages and provided employment benefits for the center's small staff of two full-time and two part-time teachers.

The Esprit Daycare Centre near Huckleberry also asked program officials in British Columbia for additional funds so it could raise wages. The request was denied. Last year Esprit lost several staff members to a public early learning program that pays more. "The staffing has been the issue," said Jennifer Braun, manager of Esprit. "Finding enough coverage here is like a unicorn." 

In some provinces, families' costs were cut dramatically long before many programs had the stability and staffing to handle the subsequent enrollment surge. And while some provinces have upped educator wages in an attempt to attract and keep teachers, others have been slower to make progress.

"I feel like the government is doing things in the wrong order," said Trulsen, in Mission. "We're creating spaces and we can't find staff. We can't find staff because we can't offer decent living wages. So round and round you go."

Canadian experts say their country's experience has shown what to do, as well as what not to do, to create transformational change in the child care industry. Some American policymakers have proposed addressing the child care crisis here by sending more money to parents or upping tax benefits, rather than providing direct funding to child care programs. Canadian experts who have seen their system's rollout are wary of such methods. 

"It's absolutely clear that if you want to have a child care system, you can't do it only by giving money to the parents, you have to make sure that you have the supply," said Martha Friendly, executive director of the Canadian-based nonprofit Childcare Resource and Research Unit, who previously worked on child care policy in the United States. "If you look at other countries, that's the way they do it, they fund the operations." Of most importance, said Friendly, is that countries address affordability, workforce, and supply at the same time. "If you want to have a child care system that's stable … You need to do all these things at the same time, because they're interlinked," she said.

In the U.S., some states are likely to balk at the idea of following in the steps of Canada and Scandinavia and setting up a federal "system" of care. Allowing autonomy at a state level is an aspect of Canada's model America might adopt, said Gordon Cleveland, associate professor emeritus at the University of Toronto Scarborough. "But there also has to be a very strong overall concept," he said, such as setting goals for parent rates, program expansion, or educator wages.

Such a system would be costly: one proposal for a universal child care system by Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who has also proposed $10 a day child care, estimated the price at $700 billion over 10 years. In Canada, some child care programs have opted out due, in part, to concern that they won't have as much autonomy over their operations. And because unlicensed, informal care is popular in America, and the majority of the country's young children are in non-center-based care, a system focused on formal programs, like Canada's, could be a point of contention here as well.

Messaging in support of universal child care in the United States will likely need to differ from Canada's. While it might seem counterintuitive, Haspel believes expanded government spending on child care should be tied to giving American families the flexibility to choose and pursue their own destinies. "It's about family freedom," he said. "The number of children you can have, where you choose to live. The time you get to spend with your children should not be determined by the availability or lack thereof of affordable child care, yet for far too many families, it is."

This story was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education, and reviewed and distributed by Stacker Media.