Opinion: Child care should serve kids and families, not ideology

The CUPE narrative treats child care as a system to be protected rather than a service to be delivered, writes Krystal Churcher. Photo by Darryl Dyck/The Canadian Press files

Article content

A recent CUPE op-ed urged the federal government to “stay strong” in restricting for-profit child care, claiming that only public or not-for-profit centres deserve public support. It’s a strong political message, but it is not evidence-based and it risks causing real harm. The heart of child care is not ownership structures, capital models or ideological purity. It is safety, relationships, stability and accessibility. It is the ability for every family to choose the program that best meets their child’s developmental, cultural and practical needs.

Article content

Article content

The CUPE narrative treats child care as a system to be protected rather than a service to be delivered. Instead of focusing on children, it focuses on institutions. Instead of acknowledging Canada’s diversity, it insists all families fit into one type of care. Instead of evaluating quality based on evidence, it relies on the unsubstantiated assumption that for-profit care is inherently worse.

Article content

Article content

Article content

In reality, no one ownership model consistently delivers better quality than another. In every province, for-profit and not-for-profit centres operate under the same licensing, ratios, inspections and safety regulations. Quality is driven by leadership, educator training, stability and program culture, not tax status. The blanket claim that for-profit care must be lower quality care is not supported by provincial inspection data or national research.

Article content

Ideology becomes even more damaging when it tries to restrict funding to non-profit providers. Ottawa’s $10-a-day program is not an operator subsidy: it is a fee reduction. Parents in for-profit and not-for-profit centres alike rely on it to be able to afford care. Withholding it from families because of the type of provider they choose is discriminatory and punitive and undermines the affordability the federal system was created to provide.

Article content

Article content

The potential impact on access is of even greater concern. Across Canada, private and family-owned programs provide the majority of rural and small-town child care. Not-for-profit boards often either don’t exist or can’t shoulder the financial risk of opening new programs. Restricting expansion to not-for-profits doesn’t create capacity, it shrinks it. Families in rural or remote regions already face shortages; removing an entire class of provider will turn these shortages into deserts.

Article content

Article content

British Columbia provides a clear example of the consequences of relying almost exclusively on not-for-profit construction for child-care expansion. Publicly funded capital projects can be very expensive. A recent B.C. government announcement celebrated the creation of just 37 new spaces at a cost of $216,000 per space. They also usually take significantly longer to complete and are heavily constrained by bureaucratic processes. Private-sector operators build new centres for a fraction of the cost, at no expense to taxpayers and under the same rules and expectations. Calling private expansion an irresponsible use of public funds is the opposite of the truth: ignoring the most cost-effective means of building spaces is what wastes public dollars.