Province struggles to create spaces as waitlist grows 

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

February 6, 2025

The federal $10-a-day daycare system has not lived up to its promise in Prince Edward Island, according to a study by non-partisan think tank Cardus, Child Care Funding Update: Prince Edward Island—Years One and Two (2021–22 and 2022–23). The study found:

• PEI’s licensed care waitlist almost tripled between 2021 and 2023 to an estimated 2,000 kids.
• The province created just 459 net new licensed spaces in fiscal years 2021-22 and 2022-23.
• PEI left 70% of its federal funding unspent in Year One and 60% unspent Year Two.
• PEI reduced parent fees in the first two years of the program, but still fell short of its target of a $15-a-day average by December 2022.

“As the provincial government artificially dropped the price of one type of child care, demand for it predictably shot up,” says Peter Jon Mitchell, family program director at Cardus. “No one should be surprised that the waiting list has ballooned as the province struggled to create new spaces despite hiring 12 bureaucrats to administer its program.”

Cardus has previously studied the federal daycare system rollouts in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta, British Columbia, and the Northwest Territories. Every province or territory studied has been unable to spend all its federal funding in the initial year(s) of the program and all have fallen short of their space-creation targets.

“Cardus research has repeatedly shown that most parents with young children do not benefit from the so-called $10-a-day system,” says Mitchell. “The system benefits only a minority of families – and even then, they aren’t necessarily the families that can least afford to pay for child care. Direct funding to parents would help more families afford the type of care that best meets their needs.”

Child Care Funding Update: Prince Edward Island—Years One and Two (2021–22 and 2022–23) is freely available online.

-30-

MEDIA INQUIRIES
Daniel Proussalidis
Cardus – Director of Communications
613-899-5174
media@cardus.ca

Cardus – Imagination toward a thriving society
Cardus is a non-partisan think tank dedicated to clarifying and strengthening, through research and dialogue, the ways in which society’s institutions can work together for the common good.