EDITORIAL: Child care options in Ontario reflects growing inequality in province

Mar 23, 2023 | Editorial, OP-ED

Child care shouldn’t be a luxury that parents have to choose in order to keep their children safe and cared for.

However, that is how it can end up feeling for many Ontarians trying to balance work and family life.

After the COVID-19 pandemic, many jobs that were temporarily remote returned to being in-person.

This means the temporary relief of not having to think about child care has ended for many families with young children. Once again, parents are forced to reckon with the realities of the often expensive options of child care.

While child-care prices vary from province to province, with Quebec at the lower end and Alberta at the higher end, Ontario finds itself with the second highest child care costs on average.

The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives announced in a report last year that the average monthly cost of child care in Toronto was $1,675.

According to a Statistics Canada survey on early learning and childhood arrangements conducted in 2019, one in 10 parents with children under five had to change their work schedule due to difficulty finding child care.

This is an issue that disproportionately affects women.

Lisa Durante, a working parent consultant, said women often end up shouldering the burden of child care when the system fails them.

“This responsibility propels some women to take extended leaves out of the workforce or choose jobs with reduced working hours,” she said

This is an idea that is also supported by Statistics Canada. In a 2019 study, it found that when child care was not available, women took on 60 per cent of the child-minding duties in the home.

This reduced their work hours significantly and contributed to an already existing wage gap.

Many post-secondary institutions and public government bodies offer some kind of child care for their employees or students.

This is a practice that should be celebrated and repeated in all working environments.

It’s a system that has proved lucrative for the parents as well as the places of work.

In a 2007 study done by Michigan State University, researchers found that in 90 per cent of cases, parents who were able to leave their children at an on-site day care where they worked reported to have a boosted moral and higher productivity levels.

The study also reported that having these facilities meant that they were able to retain employees 23 per cent more often than before.

Although these numbers are promising, outside of the education and public sector, Ontario has very few options for on-site child care.

Nationwide, Quebec seems to be leading the way with a handful of private companies such as Ericsson and L’Oréal offering on-site child care for their employees. Toronto has seen a few of these kinds of spaces open up in recent years with companies such as KPMG offering similar benefits to employees.

Although experts may agree that having affordable or free child care would pay for itself in the long run, it seems Ontario may still have a long road ahead.