It’s time for the federal government to admit the Canada-Wide Early Learning and Child Care program is failing Canadian families. Despite tens of billions of dollars spent since 2021, and an estimated $35-billion by March 2026, the program is falling short in delivering an affordable, accessible, high-quality, and inclusive national system. The government needs to consider other options to support the many families left out of the $10-a-day program.

The program has reduced the cost of licensed care for spaces within it. In prioritizing heavy subsidies for fees, however, the program has driven up demand while falling short of the targeted supply of new spaces.

The Canada-Wide Early Learning and Child Care (CWELCC) is well behind in creating the promised number of 250,000 childcare spaces by March 2026. According to the federal auditor general, at the three-year mark, the program hadn’t even met half that number. And while Employment and Social Development Canada (ESDC) reports provinces and territories created around 112,000 spaces by March 2024, even that number should come with a caveat.

Auditor General Karen Hogan wrote in her report that “the department’s tracking did not offer a consistent and comparable view” of new spaces for children under age six. In one province’s case, she notes, space-creation numbers improperly included hundreds of spaces for older kids. And as Cardus itself has found, the British Columbia and Saskatchewan governments have moved the goalposts, potentially inflating the reported number of spaces created under the program.

That provinces and territories are falling short of space creation targets should come as no surprise. This tracks with 13 previous reports by Cardus on provincial and territorial CWELCC implementation. Space creation was made more difficult by the federal government’s insistence that its funding favour non-profit childcare providers. While this continues to be a contentious debate between some provinces and the federal government, excluding these businesses, which are typically run by women entrepreneurs, has the federal government tripping on its own shoelaces. The government should have known its strategy would be self-defeating. Quebec’s daycare program, upon which the CWELCC is modelled, has long depended on private, for-profit childcare businesses to deliver spaces, and it still has major waitlists.

Worse yet, many CWELCC spaces are either empty, or not operating. Ontario’s auditor general found that almost a third of CWELCC spaces in that province either lay empty, or weren’t in operation in 2023. In fact, more than four in 10 centres in the program operated at or below 80 per cent capacity that year. Despite efforts to grow a qualified workforce, many centres across the country don’t have the staff to operate at capacity. New data from Statistics Canada show that the portion of parents who had difficulty finding care has increased over the course of the CWELCC program.

Meanwhile, most Canadian families with children under age six don’t benefit from CWELCC. Statistics Canada data show that a majority of children under six years old are not in the type of care that would potentially qualify for the CWELCC program. Even among childcare centres, the self-reported participation rate is about 71 per cent nationally. Consider, as well, that the families accessing these heavily subsidized spaces aren’t necessarily the ones most in need of low-cost care. We know in Ontario, for example, that lower-income families’ childcare enrolment has dropped by 31 per cent compared to 2019. Similarly, the federal auditor general found that CWELCC spaces “may also not be equitably accessible to diverse or vulnerable families.”

While ESDC has been collecting annual progress reports from the provinces and territories as part of the agreements, the department has not issued publicly available reports regarding the implementation of the program. Canadians should be informed about the implementation of the program as the April 2026 renewal date approaches, carrying a five-year, $44.5-billion price tag through to March 2031.

CWELCC is at risk of entrenching a program with inequitable access and varying quality. The federal government should reconsider the viability of the underperforming program as the costs continue to balloon.

At the very least, the government needs to address childcare affordability for families who cannot access the program or choose to use options outside it, which work for them. The federal government can begin by enhancing existing benefits like the Canada Child Benefit, or retooling the Child Care Expense Deduction to better serve families with the lowest income and those excluded from the CWELCC system.

• Peter Jon Mitchell is family program director at Cardus