FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

October 1, 2025

“Ontario’s participation in the federal daycare program has failed to give Ontario parents what they need. It is alarming to see that lower-income families’ child care enrollment has dropped by 31 percent compared to 2019. As the auditor general acknowledges, this is because demand for heavily subsidized spaces shot up dramatically, crowding out the families that need the most help and making it more difficult for them to access care. As Cardus reported in 2021, this was a predictable outcome, because ‘driving up demand by slashing prices for one type of care will likely result in supply issues, including long wait lists.’

In falling well short of its child care space-creation targets, Ontario has also followed the same pattern as every other province or territory participating in the federal daycare program. Ontario would need to create 50,000 new child care spaces between January 2025 and December 31, 2026 just to reach its goal of 86,000 new child care spaces by the end of next year. And Ontario has ineffectively managed its child care supply, leaving 80,500 spaces within the program as of December 2023 with no children enrolled or not operational despite its more than $10 billion federal funding allocation.

Funding parents directly, prioritizing families that need the most help, would be far more effective than the bureaucratic and ineffective system that exists today. Ontario should change course and demand flexibility to fund parents directly as it seeks to renew its child care funding agreement with the federal government.”

• Peter Jon Mitchell, Family Program Director at Cardus

MEDIA INQUIRIES
Daniel Proussalidis
Cardus – Director of Media & Public Relations
613-241-4500 x508
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.