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Home | Press Releases | Canada’s National Child Care Program: Families with Young Children Deserve Better, Report Claims

Canada’s National Child Care Program: Families with Young Children Deserve Better, Report Claims

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

25 March, 2026

Because the federal government has not yet produced a detailed report to Canadians on the performance of its Canada-Wide Early Learning and Child Care Program (CWELCC, or “$10-a-day child care”), Canadians remain in the dark as to the program’s overall performance.

To bridge this gap, Cardus is today publishing its own report summarizing the available data about the program’s performance. The report is titled “Ten-Dollar Delay: How Canada’s Child Care Program Locked Provinces In and Left Most Families Out.”

“Soon after this program was announced in 2021, Cardus undertook an extensive examination of the government’s plan at that time. Our resulting report raised serious concerns about the feasibility of the program and how well it would meet the needs of Canadian families,” said Peter Jon Mitchell, the report’s author and the family program director at Cardus.

“Cardus has subsequently produced a series of reports that summarize commitments, expenditures, and progress made in each province or territory in program years one through three. This latest report pulls together our findings based on this extensive work,” he added.

Mitchell’s paper reviews the first three years of implementation, including the progress toward lowering the fees parents pay for licensed child care within the program. Drawing on various aspects of the program’s operations, the report shares a series of lessons for policy-makers, child care providers, and families:

  • The program does not serve the majority of Canadian families. Estimates of the number of children who benefit from it are wide-ranging, but only a minority of children under age six benefit from the over $30-billion program.
  • The federal government’s approach toward for-profit providers is a disservice to all. The federal government wavers between an ideological commitment to a public system and its practical need to work with all licensed child care providers, resulting in an inconsistent funding approach toward the sector.
  • Poor transparency and lack of accountability plague the program. Despite commitments to transparency, the federal government and many provincial/territorial governments have not adequately informed the public on the implementation of the program.
  • Provinces and territories have a “golden handcuff” problem. Provincial/territorial governments are now dependent on federal funding to sustain the child care sector.
  • Governments have knowledge deficits. The federal and provincial/territorial governments entered into agreements without understanding the true cost and complexity of implementation.
  • The long-term effectiveness of workforce strategies remains unknown. Workforce shortages existed in many parts of the country prior to the agreements, and remain a substantial challenge.

“Ten-Dollar Delay: How Canada’s Child Care Program Locked Provinces In and Left Most Families Out” is freely available on the Cardus website. Past Cardus studies examining aspects of the national child care program can be found here.

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Note to reporters and editors: A high-resolution headshot of report author Peter Jon Mitchell is available on the Cardus website.

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