Provinces are taking the lead on increasing funding, and federal leaders are debating child care. Is the stage set for a national strategy?

By now, Chanequa Cameron knows the ins and outs of Canadian child care better than she ever wanted to.

Her six-year-old daughter Symphony has bounced from one arrangement to another as her parents navigate a child-care system that offers few options, let alone affordable ones.

Stretching her paycheque to afford licensed child care, enlisting relatives for help, hiring babysitters — Cameron, a 30-year-old master’s student at Ryerson University, has tried it all. The child-care scramble has been “definitely stressful,” she says.

Cameron’s struggle is familiar to many Canadian parents. But a new report is finally giving some child care advocates cause for optimism.

According to data compiled by the Childcare Resource and Research Unit, over a year-long period last year, provinces and territories spent a combined $4.2 billion on child care, an all-time high that was up more than $600,000 from 2012.

The additional money, some of which came from federal sources, contributed to nearly 40,000 new regulated spaces for children under five. There are now enough spots for 24.1 per cent of Canadian children that age, a slight improvement from 22.6 per cent in 2012, and for the first time the employment rate of mothers with children under the age of two has topped 70 per cent.

Martha Friendly, executive director of the CRRU, says the report is an indication that Canada “may have turned a corner” after 10 years of inaction on the child-care file.

She stresses that there is still an extreme child-care shortage. But with the provinces committing more funding, and the issue being debated by the three main federal parties in this year’s election, she believes there is now “fertile ground” for something she and other advocates have been pushing for decades: a national child-care strategy.

“There seems to be a recognition ... that it’s an essential service for families,” she says.

Don Giesbrecht, the CEO of the Canadian Child Care Federation, agrees that the report shows both progress and the need for a national program that would provide steady funding and set standards for quality and affordability.

He notes that improvement has been uneven. Funding in Saskatchewan and British Columbia barely increased since 2012, while Quebec, which instituted a universal subsidized child-care program 18 years ago, makes up almost 60 per cent of Canada’s child-care spending.

“What that really says to me is the need for national leadership on this,” Giesbrecht says.

Parents like Cameron often feel like they need all the help they can get.

Before Symphony turned one, Cameron found her a spot in a Markham child care centre for $900 a month. The fee was high, but Cameron, who was working as an early-childhood educator at the time, says she wouldn’t have found a space that cheap if she hadn’t been an employee at the centre.

She’d hoped things would get easier when Symphony entered kindergarten, but her school in Scarborough didn’t offer child care. Neither did the next two she enrolled in.

Cameron finally caught a break this fall when she found an after-school program run through a local family centre that only costs $35 for the whole school year. But it’s only four days a week, focuses primarily on children’s physical health, and isn’t staffed by certified early childhood educators.

The price is right, but it’s not ideal, Cameron says. “If she was going to a regular licensed program they’d be focusing on the development of the whole child.”

By the numbers

1,201,377: regulated child care spaces in Canada

$4,273,366,946: Provincial and territorial spending on child care, which includes funding from the federal government

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

$602,696,961: Increase in provincial and territorial spending on child care since 2012

$1,676: Median monthly fee for an infant child care space in Toronto, the most expensive in the country

$152: Monthly fee for an infant child care space in Quebec

Clarification– October 16, 2015: This article was edited from a previous version to clarify that Don Giesbrecht did not refer to Manitoba as one of the provinces where funding for child care has barely increased. According to him, Manitoba has had significant funding increases over the long-term.