Canada: Daycare not afforded by vast majority of Toronto parents

Adding new daycare spaces did not carry any significance without any check on the escalating costs of daycares, Toronto city reported.

The full cost of daycare for infants and toddlers amounting to more than $20,000 year is unaffordable to middle class families the most, even though they qualify for fee subsidies.

In the next 15 years Toronto’s child population is expected to rise by almost 23 percent.

“Growth... requires addressing affordability,” the report says. “If policies that significantly reduce costs were implemented,

Toronto would see dramatic increases in the demand for licensed child care and dramatic increases in parental employment.”

Three affordability issues -- offering fee subsidies to every qualifying parent, covering fees at 10 percent of household income and not charging more than $20 per child, per day -- were discussed in the report.

The report revealed that the demand of daycare would rise from 30 percent to 52 percent when child care is affordable. This would result in the rise of mothers with young children working full-time from 47 percent to 60 percent which would improve the local economy.

If the affordability issues were not considered, the report continued. then only 7,300 more spots in Toronto’s current 69,000-space system would be used.

With the expected increase in school-aged care by the following fall, the school boards’ responsibility to offer after-class programming based on demand will also increase.

“There is no demand for unaffordable child care,” said Carolyn Ferns of the Ontario Coalition for Better Child Care. “They are just going to have to tackle the issue of affordability.”

Beaches-East York Councillor Janet Davis said the report confirmed what many Toronto parents already knew years.

“Child care is beyond the reach of most families,” she said. “It demonstrates that if child care was more affordable, the majority of families would want to use it.”

“We run the largest child-care system outside of Quebec,” she said. “We need to use this research to put together a model for the provincial and federal governments and say this is what we need for the families in our city.”

(Reported by Asha Bajaj)