Federal government wreaking havoc on P.E.I. child care

Gudie Hutchings, the federal cabinet minister for the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency and an MP from Newfoundland and Labrador, was recently in Charlottetown with local Liberal MP Sean Casey to trumpet the Liberals’ $10-a-day child-care program. “P.E.I. families have access to $10-a-day childcare,” Hutchings said.

Ironically, two days after she made that statement, a Saltwire story from Charlottetown ran under the headline, “P.E.I. families struggle to find childcare spots,” which features a mom who immediately signed up for the province’s child-care registry when she discovered she was pregnant in May 2021. Her daughter is still on a wait list three years later.

The licensed in-home daycare her daughter was initially going to attend closed down just after Christmas in 2023, Saltwire reported, because the taxpayer subsidies were “not sufficient to keep up with new regulation.” Initially, because she did not remove herself from the child-care registry, the mom was hopeful she might find a replacement spot soon. To date she has been unsuccessful despite significant efforts.

Around the same time that particular in-home daycare closed, the Trudeau government crowed in a news release: “Prince Edward Island to achieve $10-a-day regulated child care two years ahead of national target.” According to the government, its $10-a-day child-care mission would be accomplished effective January 1, 2024.

However, the government’s mission to deliver accessible, affordable quality child care clearly has not been accomplished in P.E.I. On the contrary, it’s been a disaster, with many families in similar situations as that Charlottetown mom struggling to find child care for her daughter.

Why?

High levels of government regulation impeding child-care supply has caused some daycares to shut down, resulting in massive waitlists. The evidence on the ground clearly contradicts the glowing child-care utopia painted by the Liberals back in December and again by Hutchings during her recent visit to Charlottetown.

In fact, at a meeting in January, a manager with CHANCES, a large non-profit child-care provider in P.E.I., told provincial legislators, “I hear horror stories every day working in centres; people calling and begging for spaces. Honestly, there’s people that have been on there—exactly like you said—before they were even pregnant, and they still don’t have a space by the time the child is a year old.”

The CBC reported in January that “the province's records show about 2,000 P.E.I. children are waiting for a licensed child-care spot,” which leaves daycare operators “saying they have to tell sobbing parents on the other end of the phone line that there are still no spots available.”

The CHANCES executive director also spoke to legislators and flagged the regulatory burden as a major problem. While more manageable for larger organizations with some scale, for small daycares “it would be really discouraging,” she said.

Finally, the Trudeau government’s child-care program, while focusing on children ages 0-5, is wreaking havoc on the child-care sector as a whole by reducing supply for older children as well. As the P.E.I. government increasingly directs resources to centres that care for children ages 0-5, fewer resources are available for school-aged children, reducing spaces for them as well.

The evidence from P.E.I. suggests shortages and negative results all around. Indeed, according to Statistics Canada data, in P.E.I. the number of children attending child care in 2023 was 5,400, down 10 per cent from 2019. Meanwhile, among families using child care in 2023, a staggering 58 per cent said they had difficulty finding it. And despite the federal Liberals’ boasting, things don’t seem to have improved much, if at all, in the first half of 2024. In fact, they may have gotten worse.