Families on wait-list but province on track to meet child-care deal targets, committee told

Officials with the Education and Early Childhood Development Department are adamant about meeting the province’s commitment of providing regulated $10-a-day child care by 2026.

The witnesses appearing before a legislative public accounts committee meeting Wednesday, however, could not provide an accurate number of how many children are on a waitt-list to access childcare in the province or offer a satisfactory response when asked if the 2026 target of 9,500 new child-care spaces should be adjusted to account for projected population growth.

“We are meeting the terms of the agreement that we have with the federal government and we are going to deliver 9,500 net new child-care spaces, 9,500 new spaces from the time we signed the agreement in 2021 and those will be delivered by March of 2026,” Elwin LeRoux, deputy minister of the Education and Early Childhood Development Department, said at Wednesday’s meeting.

The deal referenced is the Canada-wide Early Learning and Child-Care Agreement signed in July 2021 by the then-provincial Liberal government headed by Iain Rankin and the federal Liberal government. 

The agreement, which includes investments of $605 million from the federal government and $40 million from the province, was to reduce the child-care fees by a total of 50 per cent on average by December 2022 and to create the average $10-a-day child-care structure by 2026.

It also mandated 1,500 new early learning and child-care spaces in the province by the end of 2023 and a total of 9,500 new spaces by March 31, 2026.

Space adjustment

The agreement also called for enhanced before- and after-school care options for three- to five-year-olds using schools and school resources.

LeRoux was responding to persistent questioning from committee member Brendan Maguire, the Liberal MLA for Halifax Citadel, who wanted to know why the department has not adjusted the 9,500 agreed-upon spaces to coincide with the unprecedented population growth being experienced and projected by the province, including a push by Premier Tim Houston to double Nova Scotia’s one million population by 2060.

“Our commitment in the Canada-wide agreement is to provide 9,500 additional (child-care) spaces by March of 2026, we are confident that we will meet that number,” LeRoux said.

“We recognize, as you say, that the province intends to double its population (34) years after that. We believe that we would need to continue growing our child-care sector to meet the growth of our population.

“We have to hit 9,500 by 2026 before we aim for 10,000, 11,000, 12,000,” he said. “What we recognize and what you’re asking is that in order to use 9,500 and grow from there, make sure the system you build is a strong system with a strong foundation, with strong principles of the program.”

In his opening remarks, LeRoux said the transformation of early childhood learning in the province is anchored around producing a system that is accessible, affordable, inclusive and high quality. 

The deputy minister said the provincial government, in partnership with its federal counterparts, now invests $277 million annually in early learning and child care, including an increase of $83 million this fiscal year. 

3,800 spaces added

“Prior to starting this work, the existing early learning and child-care system in Nova Scotia lacked cohesion and a unified strategy,” he said. “Individual operators made independent business decisions; families reported significant differences in their experiences.”

The more comprehensive, unified system fueled by the 2021 agreement consists of more than 320 centres and 200 family home providers offering provincially licensed and funded programs for infants, toddlers and preschoolers, he said.

LeRoux said many school sites with providers offer before- and after-school care.

Since entering the agreement in 2021, LeRoux said the province has added more than 3,800 child-care spaces, 40 per cent of the way to meeting the 9,500 target by 2026.

“More than a year ago, child-care fees were reduced by an average of 50 per cent for most families,” LeRoux said. “As of last year, more than 4,000 families received additional support from the child-care subsidy program that helps further reduce costs, resulting in more than 3,000 families accessing child care for free.”

Nova Scotia families will see child-care savings this year and next, he said, culminating in the $10 per day promise by March 2026.

LeRoux said the department heard from people working in the child-care sector that it required a professional overhaul. In response, he said the province established a wage scale for early learning and childhood educators (ECEs), raising wages between 14 per cent and 42 per cent for 95 per cent of the workforce, and a second wage increase of $3.14 to $4.21 for ECEs working in provincially licensed child care, along with the introduction of a group benefits and a pension package for all employees of the licensed sector. 

LeRoux said the province has provided hundreds of people the opportunity to participate in new diploma and up-skilling programs, including accelerated and virtual programs, along with programming for newcomers and French, Africentric and Mi’kmaw learners.

Barriers

In a news release circulated before the meeting, the NDP caucus said parents continue to face serious barriers to finding child care for their children, including being asked for wait-list fees and are now being told many wait-lists are closed. 

“We hear from parents all the time that they are stuck calling a dozen or more child-care centres to find care for their child, only to end up on a wait-list and in the end, still not getting access to the care they need,” NDP finance spokesperson Lisa Lachance, a member of the standing committee, said in the release. 

“If we want to grow our population and have more young people move here, they need to know the government is there to help them find child care when they need it.” 

The demand for child care is much higher than the number of spots available, the NDP says, and families continue to report being asked for wait-list deposits, which the party has called on the government to ban.

LeRoux, who was accompanied at the committee meeting by department colleagues Tracey Crowell, executive director of early childhood development, and Pam Aucoin, executive director of early childhood learning, could not provide a number of families that languish on a wait-list for child care. Nor could the department representatives identify the number of spaces required in the province, the dearth of infant spaces, and the child-care vacuum areas in the province.

Aucoin said the department is funding expansion projects in the infant-care spaces, which come with additional regulatory requirements and a lower ratio of children to educators.

For-profit operators

Crowell said the agreement signed in 2021 provides for continued funding for commercial for-profit daycare operators.

“Right now we are about halfway between a market model of child-care delivery and a publicly funded system,” Crowell said, adding that for-profit operators will continue to have access to the same funding agreement that existed before the deal was inked.

“The agreement is also very clear, however, that future expansion needs to be targeted in the not-for-profit (publicly funded) sector and that is what we are doing. Our new spaces that we are creating will be in the not-for-profit sector.”

Asked by Susan Leblanc, the NDP MLA for Dartmouth North, if there is an ECE shortage for the existing number of child-care spaces in the province, Aucoin replied simply, “we know that we need more ECEs.”

Crowell said the department’s vision of providing all families and children access to affordable and high-quality child care no matter where they live in the province presents a challenge.

“We know that we need spaces pretty much everywhere across the province and there are a number of communities that have lower coverage than others and we have some communities that obviously have a higher population growth than others,” Crowell said. 

“We have very much to date relied on existing service providers, existing not-for-profit organizations to expand their existing early learning and child-care spaces or to set up new locations in other communities. That is serving us well, however, we also recognize that there may be some communities across the province where there aren’t existing operators and we’re not seeing expansion opportunities the same way we are in other communities.”

Crowell said the family home child-care option is a wonderful alternative in some of those communities and new department programming will target those under-served communities.