Monday, December 8, 2025

Ms. Whitney Wilson

Whitney Wilson, director of early years. Thank you. The development of the new digital tool is under way. It is a long process to make a tool like this. It is going to be quite transformative for the sector. As of right now, we are doing early work to design and implement the system. The outcomes that we are going to talk about today are really longer term. Once that system is implemented, we will see a much more seamless experience for families. They will be able to go to a single provincial access point to access child care and early years programming. We will see a more equitable experience. Right now, families, when they are accessing child care across the province, depending on where they’re located, may have access to some tools within the municipalities. Others may not have those. They may be dealing with paper-based processes. So we will see something that is much more equitable for families across the province. There will be significantly less burden both for families and for operators. So right now, you can imagine that a parent looking to add their name to a wait-list is going to add their names to multiple wait-lists. Each of those operators might have different processes for adding your name, maintaining your name on the wait-list, then those operators have to maintain those lists when people come into their program or move into a different program and they have to remove them. So the new system is going to do a lot of that automatically and significantly reduce that burden both for families and for operators. It will also reduce and streamline a lot of the reporting that is currently done by operators. As you can imagine, there is reporting that is done to the municipalities; there is reporting that is done to the province. All of this is going to be streamlined within the new digital tool, which will allow those operators to spend that time with children in their centres. It will also increase the amount of data available to the province. So I think, as you’ve seen in the Auditor General report, there are a lot of things that we do not have data on currently, and that really impedes our ability to plan at a local and provincial level. So by implementing the new digital tool, we will be able to get a bigger picture of the full province and the data—in terms of socio-demographic data, planning data—and it will allow us to be a little bit more planful in terms of where we are placing spaces and how we are moving forward with some of the work that we’re doing. In terms of short term, I think we are seeing a lot of input from operators and families. We’ve done extensive consultations so that those parties that are going to be most impacted by the system are informing the design and will ultimately have a better outcome when we implement.

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The Chair (Mr. Tom Rakocevic)

MPP Darouze.

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MPP George Darouze

Chair, through you: Thank you very much to the team for being here to answer our committee’s questions. One thing that stood out for many of us was how different the wait-list information is collected across the regions. People often ask why the numbers look so different depending on where you live. Can you share how the ministry is gathering and interpreting that information in a consistent way and how that will eventually help guide planning for new spaces?

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Ms. Whitney Wilson

Based on the region, there are different ways that data is collected. Some municipalities and service system managers will collect it under a central wait-list for their region. In other regions, there is no centralized wait-list, and different operators maintain their own wait-lists and have their own processes. The demand changes across the province. You have areas with different populations, different demands, so you’re going to see that in the numbers, but there are also going to be different processes for how it’s collected. The way that the new digital tool will improve things is that there will be one single access point in the province to access all wait-lists. It will essentially centralize the wait-lists, so you will be able to see a unique demand. Right now, the province doesn’t have a good sense of how many children are actually on wait-lists because families will put their names on multiple wait-lists, and those wait-lists aren’t cross-referenced with each other. So even if we were to ask every operator in the province to provide us their wait-lists, we would still have no sense of the unique names on those wait-lists. Through the new system, we will have a real, true sense of the demand across the province that will help us plan. It will also help us in conversations with the federal government to share what that demand looks like and what the funding needs to be to accompany that demand.

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Ms. Holly Moran

Hi. I’m Holly Moran, assistant deputy minister, early years and child care division. One thing I wanted to add as well is that it’s part of the complexity of the system. Those wait-lists are not managed provincially; they’re not managed municipally. They’re managed largely at the local level. At the moment, the ministry only has capacity to do a point-in-time evaluation of what a wait-list might look like and only do that through a collection of that information across. So we don’t have that accurate, ongoing sense of what the demand looks like, which the new system will give us.

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MPP George Darouze

Thank you, Chair.

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The Chair (Mr. Tom Rakocevic)

MPP Cooper.

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Mrs. Michelle Cooper

Thank you, Deputy Minister Cole and your entire team for being here today and for your presentation. We hear from municipalities and partners that they work hard to provide accurate information, but every region, as you said, has its own systems. How is the ministry supporting municipalities to move towards more consistent reporting while modernization continues?

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Mr. Matthew DesRosiers

I’m Matthew DesRosiers, director of funding. While the SSMs do have a legislative goal in the planning, the funding, the administration and even, in some cases, the operation of child care in Ontario, there really is some benefit to standardizing a lot of the things in a centre that happen. So while we continue to work on all the good things that Whitney and Holly talked about, we’re also trying to standardize the collection of financial information that we’re getting through our new cost-based funding system. As part of the accountability framework for that, we’ve issued pretty extensive guidance out to all of the SSMs on the data that we need them to collect to allow them to do the accountability work that they need to ensure all the costs that are being incurred by the operators are actually eligible. It’s allowing the SSMs to do their accountability checks but also allowing us to gather the same information from all of the operators through those SSMs so that we can also do an evaluation of the program as well. So there’s lots of extensive guidance out to them. We’ve also provided them with reference spreadsheets, for example, that they can use if they need to do that. To that end, the guidance is specifying the data they need to collect from the licensees and various specific details. It’s also what they need to use while reviewing those submissions. We’ve given them guidance on what they need to compile if they’re doing year-end reconciliations and what they have to provide to us as well when they give us regional-level data. I think that, collectively, is really going to help us in the first instance while the digital tool is being built.

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Mrs. Michelle Cooper

Thank you.

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The Chair (Mr. Tom Rakocevic)

Further questions? MPP Rosenberg.

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MPP Bill Rosenberg

Thank you, Deputy, for your presentation and your team for bringing us up to date on all the newest information. When we have spoken with operators and municipal partners, a lot of them have mentioned the one-year extension and the increased federal funding, especially because it reflects Ontario’s long-term position that long-term sustainability needs to be part of these discussions. From the ministry’s perspective, what does this extension make possible in terms of continuing that work and preparing for the longer-term agreement?

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Ms. Whitney Wilson

As you know, the ministry’s collective child care agreements were set to expire on March 31, 2026. There are three child care agreements that that impacted: the Canada-wide Early Learning and Child Care Agreement, the early learning and child care infrastructure agreement and the Early Learning and Child Care Agreement. In February, the federal government sent us an offer letter that fell significantly short of what it would have taken to continue the program and fund it as it currently is, and to simply maintain the terms of the current agreement. From there, as I think the deputy already mentioned, the shortfall—the $10-billion shortfall—was not a surprise. This was something that was communicated—

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The Chair (Mr. Tom Rakocevic)

Ten minutes remaining.

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Ms. Whitney Wilson

—at the beginning of the agreement and throughout, and at program review. So the extension, as it is right now, gives us more stability. It gives us another 12 months of negotiation, it keeps fees at the current average of $19 a day and it allows us to have further conversations with the federal government, prioritizing more spaces, prioritizing further workforce investments and having the conversations that we need to have to ensure that we have a longer-term agreement that allows for a sustainable program.

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Ms. Denise Allyson Cole

I’ll add to that as well. Although the agreement does not expire until March 31, it was really critical that we get the extension from the federal government now because municipalities are on a calendar fiscal year, so as of January 1, they would’ve been out of money. So that was why it was critical for us to get the extension now, even though the agreement does not expire until March 31.

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MPP Bill Rosenberg

Thank you, Deputy.

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The Chair (Mr. Tom Rakocevic)

MPP Smith.

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Mr. David Smith

Thank you, Deputy Cole, for your presentation. It seems like a well-greased machine here. Everybody seems to be stepping in and answering some of the questions. Communities grow in very different ways across Ontario, and we see that some areas can move more quickly than others when it comes to adding new child care space. Could you speak to some of the approaches of partnership that have been especially effective in helping regions bring new space online?

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Ms. Holly Moran

Thank you for the question. I’m happy to take that. When we looked at the opportunity that 86,000 net new child care spaces presented to the province, we wanted to make sure that we were lifting up access in areas of the province that historic market-driven child care had left behind. So we did an extensive review of the access ratios—how many spaces per child—right across the province, and we started out with targets that were stretch targets for many of those most-underserved communities in the province. We pushed them as far as we could to try and lift them up to where they were in other areas. The two examples that I typically use were, at that point in time, Oxford county, at the low end of the spectrum with a 16% access rate, in sharp contrast to other areas of the province like Halton region or York region, where access was closer to 50%. So we took those most underserved communities—we also factored in some socio-economic and socio-demographic factors—and lifted up areas where they were the worst served in the province. They were stretch targets for a number of those areas, and with only a year left to get those spaces on board, we had to transition and do it a bit differently. But maybe, Whitney, I can ask you to fill in some of the other pieces there.

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Ms. Whitney Wilson

Yes, absolutely. The service system managers have their own approaches in terms of how they request bids for proposals for things like spaces and how they consult. They are required, as part of CCEYA, the legislation, to have service system plans, and part of those plans is a requirement to consult on a regular basis, to post their directed growth plan once they actually have done that consultation and they’ve used some of the tools available to them—whether that be early development instruments, census data—to identify areas of need in their neighbourhoods, and they then have to post those plans publicly so they are available and so that operators are able to see where there is going to be prioritization of space creation. From there, when they are allocated spaces, they go through that process. But across the province, those processes would vary based on the region and the request for bids that they have and the process they have for consultation.

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The Chair (Mr. Tom Rakocevic)

MPP Dixon.

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Ms. Jess Dixon

Thank you, all. The AG noted that some of the centres are operating below full capacity, and we know from people in the ridings that sometimes they think that means that there isn’t a demand for it. But we also know that the reasons are actually a lot more complex than that. What are some of the factors that you are seeing that help explain why that capacity looks different from community to community?

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Mr. Matthew DesRosiers

I can take that one. Maybe just to help differentiate a couple of terms here, the operating capacity and utilization are slightly different things. A centre might have a licensed capacity, which is, under regulation, how many spaces they are actually allowed to operate as long as they stay in the terms of the regulation. Let’s say they have a room licensed for 15 toddlers—that 15 toddlers is the licensed capacity. For various reasons, as you alluded to, it may be at a very local level there isn’t sufficient demand. It may also be, though, that the operator, due to the local labour market, isn’t able to go and find sufficient staff or sufficient qualified staff. So if they’re only able to find two staff for that room, then they would only be able to operate with about 10 of those toddler kids. On top of that, not all the kids may be there all the time, so they might have vacancies due to, again, very local demand issues or maybe because kids are moving in between rooms, so they might only have eight children actually in the seats. So we can see a very big difference between operating and utilization, as well as with their licence. Through the pandemic, we saw a very significant drop in the utilization rates. Enrolment went significantly down. We have been recovering since the pandemic. The difference between the operating capacity and that utilization rate has been maintained. What’s happening is that the operators are starting to operate more rooms and they’re starting to get more staff. Part of that can be due to the workforce strategy that has been spoken about, but there are, yes, a lot of potential reasons why. We also see a really big difference in that between the age groups. The spaces for the very young kids have recovered; it’s in that kindergarten space where we see a bigger difference. That could be due to split shifts, where it’s harder to go and actually hire staff who want to work those shifts. Yes, it’s lots of reasons. We don’t have enough data to know for sure, but it is recovering, which is, I think, promising.

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Ms. Holly Moran

I think one of the other things that we need to think about is that, as the price goes down, it also becomes less of a loss for a parent not to bring that kindergarten-aged child. If one parent is able to pick them up early from school, they may do that because they are not losing their space. It’s only $10; it’s not like it was, $100, pre-CWELCC. We would have to enter in and correct for some of those types of behaviours. No child care room, either, is ever fully occupied all of the time. It’s not like a school-based cohort where all of the children age up at the same time. Children, as they age and developmentally mature, often are moving between rooms, so a child care operator will necessarily keep some spaces vacant so that those children can transition in a comfortable way: two days in this room, three days in this room and switch the next week, that kind of thing, to help those children move through the programs properly. As well, those little ones are ill quite frequently. There’s a lot of communicable diseases going on. A little bit of pink eye can wipe out a room on you. There you go.

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Ms. Jess Dixon

Thank you.

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The Chair (Mr. Tom Rakocevic)

Okay. We have one minute and 30 seconds remaining. MPP Firin.

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MPP Mohamed Firin

The new financial reporting template is expected to give a clearer picture of how costs actually work on the ground. What benefits do you expect it will bring in terms of supporting consistent oversight and helping identify what drives costs across the regions?

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Mr. Matthew DesRosiers

Yes, I’ll take that one. I think, again, as we were saying, standardizing things is going be very helpful, especially in this regard. Again, as part of that accountability framework that we’ve set up, we do have this new standardized financial report. It is going to give us a lot of information. Cost-based funding, which is the new funding approach, is still in its first year, and I think as good public servants we want to make sure that we’re continuing to monitor, through that collection of good data, both the financial and the operating data. We want to make sure that we can continue to look at the parameters of that program and make sure that they are still appropriate. So, in the cost-based funding program, we have benchmark allocations, and they’re largely built up of relatively broad categories of costs. We have program staffing, supervisors, operations and accommodation all totalled into a global budget—

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The Chair (Mr. Tom Rakocevic)

Oh, sorry. We’re out of time. We now move on to the third party. MPP Fairclough, you have the floor: 20 minutes.

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Ms. Lee Fairclough

Thank you all for being here. Deputy Cole, it’s good to see you, and I can sense the care for this program that all of you have, actually, in your responses. I’ve got a few different topics that I hope to cover, but I am going to start with the cost and the program funding overall. In the most recent announcement about the extension of the federal funding, the government indicated that additional funding was provided to the province in order to maintain the fees at $19 per day, and this is just for one year. You’ve talked about the urgency around this. I guess my first question is, has the province abandoned the goal of $10-a-day daycare, or is that what we’re still working towards?

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Ms. Denise Allyson Cole

I think it’s fair to say that it’s an aspirational goal, but we’ve been very clear to the federal government that if we are going to meet that goal, they need to come to the table with more money.

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Ms. Lee Fairclough

Okay. I guess, if that’s the case—you know, I look at the provincial contribution in figure 10: The federal government is contributing 58% of the $4.99 billion. If I’m doing my math correctly, the province is contributing to 2.6%, and then there’s the shortfall, which presumably is going to land with parents. Has there been, at any time in this, where the province has considered contributing a little bit more to make this more manageable for families? Maybe I’ll start with that question, and then I have a follow-up.

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Ms. Holly Moran

Sure. I’m happy to take that. On the broader funding arrangement and where the shortfall comes from, maybe I can back up just a little bit. I think all of the members are aware that we didn’t sign this first agreement until almost the very end of the first year. So, what that did for the province was take that full year of revenue and push it into the next four years. Effectively, the government was able to make the agreement work, because we were taking five years’ worth of revenue and spending it in four, which increases the annual spending power that you have. The second thing that the government did was amortize our space creation. I’m imagining that you’re going to have some questions later about 41,000 out of 86,000 spaces coming on board. The sooner those spaces come on board, the longer have to pay for them. So that funding shortfall was such that we had to amortize those spaces, so the majority of the spaces come on in the last year of the agreement, because that gives you the shortest period of time to spend on them. Those are the two ways that we made the current funding work. When you renew that agreement, it’s a fiscal cliff for both agreements. We both knew, walking in, that there was going to be a $2-billion-per-year gap to achieve the goals of the agreement—just sustain, no more growth, no more wage increases for our ECEs, nothing else new, just to sustain. So, when we get there, the other thing I want to talk about in terms of the spending in the space: As Whitney mentioned at the front end, there are currently three federal agreements in this space. There’s the ELCC agreement, there’s the CWELCC and there’s an infrastructure agreement. In addition, there’s a significant amount of provincial spending that operates outside of those three programs. So, when you think about early learning and child care at the global or even pan-Canadian level, it’s about that zero-to-six space before publicly funded school becomes mandatory for families, and that early learning and what everything does. Our province is one of only three that spends for full, two-year, publicly funded kindergarten for every family who needs it. When you think about that, if those children also required full-day care under CWELCC, as they do in some other provinces, the gap would be significantly larger. So there’s a massive provincial contribution there in that space. The other thing that Ontario does is we prioritize schools first as a setting for child care programs. We continue to build purpose-built child care into every new school in the province, which is a big investment for us. We’ve also harmonized our licensing regulations so that those classrooms that the children are in from 9 a.m. until 3 p.m. can be used for the before- and after-school programs as well. All of those physical site requirements are the same.

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Ms. Lee Fairclough

I understand the argument, which is that you’re saying there is a certain amount of this that is funded for junior and senior kindergarten and, currently, you’re not using any other federal transfer money for early learning to offset any of those costs. Is that right?

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Ms. Holly Moran

Exactly, yes.

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Ms. Lee Fairclough

Okay. And then, in other provinces where they have been able to make the $10 a day work, can you just talk to me about what you know about why they’ve been able to achieve that and why we have not been able to? Have you exchanged ideas with them on that?

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Ms. Holly Moran

I think that was one of the points in the Auditor General’s report, to continue to work with the federal government to understand what leads Ontario to be one of the highest-cost provinces and what other provinces have done to be able to make that work. That’s an area where we have continued to participate at the federal-provincial-territorial tables to try to understand what is behind it. It’s not an area where the federal government has shared a lot of information, and PTs tend to be a little bit hesitant about that as well. Whitney, I don’t know if you have anything to add in that area.

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Ms. Lee Fairclough

I think it’s okay, if that’s okay. I guess my next question, then, is in those other jurisdictions, if they don’t have junior and senior kindergarten, are they using this program to cover the year that those kids would be in junior kindergarten?

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Ms. Holly Moran

Yes. If they don’t have full-day kindergarten, this is the program that they would have access to.

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Ms. Lee Fairclough

Okay. That’s interesting, actually. That kind of leads to some other questions.

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Mr. Matthew DesRosiers

I might just add something as well. While we don’t necessarily know the cost details of the private businesses outside of our own jurisdiction in the other provinces and territories, we can see from, say, Statistics Canada data that, prior to CWELCC, fees in Ontario were by far the highest. They were about 30% to 40% above the national average, so we had a lot more distance to go in terms of getting down to the federal targets. That’s going to be true for some of the other provinces and territories that haven’t reached $10 a day. They were already higher. So the ones that were closer to $10 to begin with can use that money for other things that we just don’t have the capacity to do here.

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Ms. Holly Moran

I think the last piece that I would just add is, the federal approach to funding doesn’t take into account cost of living in the province. Ontario receives the same dollar per child as Newfoundland, Prince Edward Island and other provinces get, and it disregards that differential in the costs, differential in leases, differential in wages, differential in cost of food—all of those things.

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Ms. Lee Fairclough

Do they do that because of scale? Recognizing you’ve got smaller populations in lots of areas in Newfoundland, that’s going to cost more as well per kid. So does it kind of balance out when you’ve got the super-high density that exists in Toronto that gives you some level of efficiency to open those daycares?

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Ms. Holly Moran

I don’t know that it actually creates any efficiency. I think it’s a long-standing federal policy across social programs that they demographically allocate the funding. They do a base allocation which would advantage those where costs are more efficient, and then it’s a per capita allocation on top of that.

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Mr. Matthew DesRosiers

I might just say on top of that too that that makes sense if you’re not also setting a target at the end of the day. So if the goal is just to make things cheaper, then there could be an argument that it’s fair to do it this way, but if you’re trying to say, “But here’s the target that everyone has to hit,” then you start to have to take into account where we are starting from, and the feds didn’t do that for this agreement.

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Ms. Lee Fairclough

Okay. But you couldn’t comment on—proportionately, relative to other provinces, do you think we as a province are contributing our fair share in a similar way to this program? As we said, the total program is $4.99 billion. In other provinces, my sense is that they are taking on more of a share, recognizing the kindergarten part. But just overall, do you feel Ontario is contributing a similar amount to the goals that we’re trying to achieve in this program than other jurisdictions would be?

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Ms. Holly Moran

My comment would be that Ontario is contributing more when you’re looking at the zero to six space. Over the same time period as the current CWELCC agreement—so 2021-22 to 2025-26—Ontario is investing about $28.5 billion in high-quality early learning and child care. This includes $18.4 billion in full-day kindergarten for four-year-olds and five-year-olds and $10.1 billion in provincial early years and child care investments. That includes the Ontario Child Care Tax Credit, which puts more money in the pockets of families, allowing them to claim up to 75% of their eligible child care expenses, including services provided by child care centres, homes and camps. So that total investment of $28.5 billion over that same period of time significantly exceeds the federal investment in this case.

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Ms. Lee Fairclough

The majority of that is junior/senior kindergarten, and presumably every province has kindergarten—one year of kindergarten. I think that’s what you just said. Anyway, I won’t get into the details of the numbers, but I feel like we’re putting a lot of weight on the kindergarten investment versus these early year investments and what the provincial government is actually contributing to the earlier years.

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Ms. Holly Moran

So full-day kindergarten is an early years investment.

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Ms. Lee Fairclough

Full day, yes.

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The Chair (Mr. Tom Rakocevic)

Under 10 minutes.

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Ms. Lee Fairclough

Okay. Thank you. I’ll move on. My next question will go to the—actually, I’d like to maybe talk a little bit about the new spaces, how we’re allocating where those new spaces go and the steps that we’re actually taking to make sure that the access rate in higher-need areas is still met. It’s my understanding there was a change in policy to make sure that we tried to hit the targets, but we didn’t necessarily consider some of the equity needs as well. Could you just maybe clarify that for us?

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Ms. Holly Moran

Sure, absolutely. When the agreement was signed in 2022, we did take a look at what the access rates looked like, and I mentioned in response to an earlier question that we were dealing with quite variant access rates, from as low as 16% in Oxford county to a high of 51%, 52% in York region. What we did was, we looked at the historic patterns of growth: What does it look like in that area of the province, that region? How quickly have they been able to grow in the past? We looked at socio-economic factors—like how many single-parent families there are, what the francophone population was, what the Indigenous population was, how many low-income caseloads were in that particular region—and we made adjustments to boost for those vulnerabilities within that area. So access was a primary; the secondary was a boost around the vulnerabilities. We left those targets—

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Ms. Lee Fairclough

But that’s been sustained; that hasn’t changed.

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Ms. Holly Moran

The vulnerabilities have been sustained—

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Ms. Lee Fairclough

If we go back to the francophone access etc., none of that has changed?

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Ms. Holly Moran

Absolutely. It’s all still in place.

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Ms. Lee Fairclough

Okay.

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Ms. Holly Moran

At the point in time last—when did we do recalibration? In May?

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Mr. Matthew DesRosiers

It got updated at the end of 2024, and then we did recalibration in March.

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Ms. Holly Moran

We recast the targets in March with about a year left to go in the agreement because, at that point in time, we didn’t have an interest in leaving any federal money for new spaces on the table. We wanted to make sure that we were capitalizing on capacity to grow. So if you were in a lower-access community and you failed to hit your stretch target, then those spaces were reallocated. We did ask every municipality, every service system manager, “What have you committed? What is available? What is actually real?” at that point, and we gave them those spaces. Where there hadn’t been commitments related to space creation against those targets, those were redistributed. It was a fairly small redistribution in the province, with most receiving what they had asked for. I would say there’s still an access problem in the province. We don’t have sufficient demand. If you look at the Quebec system, which has been in place for 30 years, demand has levelled out at about 59% for the access rate. Provincially, we’re much lower than that. Even in York region, where they have the best access, 50%, it’s below 60%. There is still an access problem that is being met through these spaces. I think it was our own Financial Accountability Officer who identified we would have had to have 200,000 more spaces in order to reach the demands of the province.

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Ms. Whitney Wilson

Maybe I can add on top of that: Before and after recalibration, all of those spaces were still subject to the directed growth plans. So even though the spaces maybe had some additional census data on the front end to make sure that they were targeted to low-access-rate areas, both before and after, they still had to be aligned with those directed growth plans that were targeting those vulnerable populations.

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Ms. Lee Fairclough

Okay. And just to really confirm: It’s still a principle of the ministry that you’re ensuring new spaces are added in the areas of highest need? Need is a major factor?

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Ms. Holly Moran

Yes.

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Ms. Lee Fairclough

Yes? Okay. Thank you. So, then, the next thing is really about the vacant spaces. There were some numbers that were included in the report around the 43% that remain vacant, if I’ve got that right. Let me just bring it up—yes. So 43% of all centres are operating below their licensed capacity of 80%, and 80,500 spaces weren’t utilized. My big question on that is really—I mean, you commented earlier that we used the funds. We only had four years to use the funding we got, and then we used it up a year faster, and then we still had a number—like, 27% of spaces—that weren’t utilized in that time. So I’m still trying to understand how we used up the money so quickly, and how we used it up early when we still had so much not being utilized.

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Mr. Matthew DesRosiers

So again, I think, on the utilization: Part of it is vacancies; part of it is just that the kids aren’t there.

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Ms. Lee Fairclough

We still pay? There is still money given even if those spaces aren’t filled?

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Mr. Matthew DesRosiers

Yes. If you think about the fact—under a cost-based approach, which is how we now fund, if I have to go back to my toddler room and I have 15 licensed spaces, if two kids don’t show up, I still have to pay for the staff person to cover the other three kids out of their five. I still have to pay for the rent. I still have to pay for the heat to be on, and the food and all of those things. To stop that, I have to then say to that staff person, “Go home,” and now three other kids have to go home and they can’t receive the care. So we’re still covering the costs that are associated with providing care, but if the space is vacant, the operator is still incurring those costs.

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Ms. Lee Fairclough

But if we then go back to this whole question of—we know demand is way more than what we have access for. I mean, I hear this in my constituency office all the time, actually. It’s a very, very common issue in Etobicoke–Lakeshore. I’m still puzzled how we can’t fill those spaces. Maybe somebody can just talk to that.

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Mr. Matthew DesRosiers

Go ahead, if you want to jump in.

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Ms. Denise Allyson Cole

Actually, I’ll come to you in a minute. Part of it is the workforce challenge. That is really driving some of the vacancies that we’re seeing across the province. The workers just are not there in the numbers that we need. Ontario is the only jurisdiction that has the college, so registered early childhood educators. So that’s one of the biggest drivers we’re seeing.

Official source

Ms. Holly Moran

I think you might also remember an article a year or two ago around the YMCA in the GTA who had closed an infant room. This really underlines for me what the issue was with the workforce at the time. An infant room has a staffing ratio of three to one, so one adult for every three infants in the room. If you have a staffing shortage and you can serve 15 toddlers with two staff or—I can’t remember the ratio for preschool, but 26 kindergarten with two staff. They closed that infant room to free up the staff that they had available to serve more children in other rooms. So that can also be part of what was happening as we see those workforce numbers increasing.

Official source

The Chair (Mr. Tom Rakocevic)

Two minutes remaining.

Official source

Mr. Matthew DesRosiers

The other thing I just want to say, and that I think we sometimes forget: System-wide demand far outpaces supply, but it’s not a monolith system delivered by one; it’s thousands of businesses in 6,000 sites. In very hyper-local places, these markets, you might not have the demand. A very rural, remote area might not get the same demand, especially for a specific age group. So yes, it is true that, overall, the demand is very high; it is possible that specific centres just don’t have the demand for the spaces that they’re licensed for.

Official source

Ms. Lee Fairclough

But you did say you’re allocating based on need, right?

Official source

Ms. Holly Moran

Yes.

Official source

Ms. Lee Fairclough

Which presumably would match what you know about that, right?

Official source

Mr. Matthew DesRosiers

Right.

Official source

Ms. Holly Moran

There are two things in terms of—if you back the clock up, when we first signed the agreement, what we did was, we wanted stability. So, of those centres that were there based on market trends in the past, all of them were invited to enrol in the system—

Official source

Ms. Lee Fairclough

Right.

Official source

Ms. Holly Moran

—and 92% of them said yes. So wherever they were and whoever they were serving, they were enrolled in the system. The growth spaces have been allocated based on that more government-driven need for program vulnerability and access rates in the area. So these municipalities will target those needs—

Official source

Ms. Lee Fairclough

Those areas.

Official source

Ms. Holly Moran

—that have been underserved.

Official source

Ms. Lee Fairclough

What do you think is the best incentive in this whole program to make sure those spots are filled?

Official source

Mr. Matthew DesRosiers

Yes. There’s probably a couple of things—

Official source

Ms. Lee Fairclough

Because they get paid either way, right, from what I’m hearing?

Official source

Mr. Matthew DesRosiers

Yes.

Official source

Ms. Lee Fairclough

That’s what I thought—

Official source

Mr. Matthew DesRosiers

We may have to come back to this and spend a lot more time on it—

Official source

Ms. Lee Fairclough

Yes.

Official source

Mr. Matthew DesRosiers

There are a couple. There is the additional workforce strategy to try and get these spaces operating in the first place. There’s also a number of things on the growth side. Under the cost-based funding approach, there are growth top-ups that understand that the costs are different in each of the different SSMs and are there to act as a multiplier to create a better incentive for—

Official source

The Chair (Mr. Tom Rakocevic)

Okay, thank you. We’re out of time.

Official source

Mr. Matthew DesRosiers

—places to expand.

Official source

Ms. Lee Fairclough

We can come back in the next round. Thank you for that.

Official source

The Chair (Mr. Tom Rakocevic)

Okay. We now move to the official opposition. MPP Armstrong, you have 20 minutes.

Official source

Ms. Teresa J. Armstrong

Thank you very much. Earlier today, a very wise woman said that what gets measured gets managed, and that was the Auditor General who said that. The reason I think that I’m having a lot of questions about this program is because a lot of things weren’t measured, to your own admission, right? My first question is—and I want to thank you, by the way, for the work that you do because I’m sure it’s not an easy file to navigate. So, thank you for what you do and what you have done so far. The report reveals that child care enrolment for lower-income families receiving the subsidies has decreased by 31% compared to 2019, and I just want to ask what the government is doing to address the reasons for this decline and to ensure subsidized families are not being left behind. Can you share what families are reporting with regard to the challenges to accessing the subsidized spaces due to the increased demand for child care?

Official source

Mr. Matthew DesRosiers

I’ll jump in on this one a bit. I think this is one of those areas where gathering additional data is one of the things that we really do need to do. I think there’s been a little bit of confusion on this topic, in the press at least. There are many reasons why the pure enrolment number of fee subsidy recipients might have increased, some of which are good. It is an income-tested program where the thresholds haven’t changed and so it’s possible just that people’s incomes are going up and they no longer qualify for the program or qualify for less. Another part of it is that, as prices have come down, thanks to CWELCC, that income-tested parental contribution that determines eligibility will have become tighter as well. That means less families by the parameters of the program now need a fee subsidy. That’s true even though the parental contribution was cut by 50% as well through CWELCC to try and make it easier, so that people on fee subsidy also received the benefit of the CWELCC agreement. Given prices have come down—I think as the deputy said earlier—it could also be that the incentive to apply isn’t as strong anymore, right? Because the fees themselves, without going through all the paperwork—in some ways, invasive, and you have to go and show what your income is—you can just go and pay the lower fee. That’s also a good reason. Also, as prices have come down for children aged zero to five, it could be that some SSMs have turned around and said, “Well, now, let’s go and support, with more subsidies, the kids who are six to 12 who also need support on their fees.” I think the last reason that I can think of, and which was I believe mentioned in the Auditor General’s report, is that as demand has increased, it might just be more difficult in general for people to get access, and that’s why we’re seeing much longer wait-lists in some areas. So lots of potential reasons, and we don’t have sufficient data at this point to give a solid answer to that question. Part of that is because we don’t deliver the fee subsidies—the SSMs do—we don’t have that relationship with the families.

Official source

Ms. Holly Moran

That might be an area to explore a lot more. In particular, we have heard that wait-lists are burgeoning across the province. We have not heard from our service system managers who manage the fee subsidy program that the wait-list for fee subsidies is burgeoning across the province. Durham region, which I was speaking to last week, for example, has shared that they have eliminated their wait-list, so it’s—

Official source

Ms. Teresa J. Armstrong

For subsidies?

Official source