What the Child Care Practitioners have to say about Expansion Prospects

In September 2022, B2C2 conducted a Survey of non-profit and public child care
licensees across the province of Ontario. The Report on the results
of the survey is called How to Remove the Barriers to Child Care Expansion.

We asked the licensees whether they were likely to expand, by how much, and what
they thought the barriers to expansion would be. We also asked them to
recommend solutions and gave them the opportunity to send a message to Minister
Steven Lecce about changes that are needed.

The messages we heard from the respondents comes through loud and clear.

• Governments can and should act now to facilitate expansion of child care to meet parents’ needs (and to fulfill the promises they have made to parents).
• Child care providers need government action to attract staff to early childhood education as a career – to raise wages in order to recruit and retain qualified educators. 
• Not-for-profit and public licensees need guarantees that operating funding will be available if they do expand. These licensees need access to capital funding, especially a program of capital grants, to kickstart the process of expansion.And these not-for-profit and public child care operators need municipalities, school boards and provincial and federal governments to identify lands and buildings suitable and available for expansion. 
• Without action on these clearly identified issues, government promises of $10 a day child care, predominantly provided by not-for-profit and public providers, will not be fulfilled.