Alberta's Five Point Plan to Invest Federal Dollars in Young Children: Possibilities and Pitfalls

Lynn Odynski, President, Public Interest Alberta

November 20 was the National Day of the Child.  This year, there is reason to be cautiously optimistic that Alberta families needing child care will finally have better access to higher quality more affordable programs. In mid October the Alberta government announced a plan to invest 489 million dollars, provided by the federal government, in early learning and child care programs over the next five years.

But while this new plan offers concrete hope that more parents will finally be able to access child care programs they can both afford and trust, a closer look reveals that is also creates pitfalls – policies that must be avoided if young children and their families are actually going to benefit from this plan.

The plan will increase the maximum child care subsidy provided to parents and boost the income threshold of families eligible for full or partial child care subsidies by 50%. This move is intended to enable more parents to access regulated care. Currently, only 9.3% of Alberta children aged 0 – 6 requiring childcare are being cared for in regulated facilities. While it is true that regulation is no guarantee of quality, it at least ensures that minimum standards are being met - which is an improvement over no standards at all.

However it remains to be seen if the number of affordable regulated spaces in high quality programs actually increases. In the absence of any limits on additional fees that can be charged by a provider, families may well continue to have difficulty accessing quality care. As it now stands, any benefit that should accrue to families through boosts to income thresholds or increases in subsidies can be completely wiped out through additional fees.

Worse still, the refusal to set limits on fees that can be charged to subsidized parents, can lead to “two tiered fee rates” where low income subsidy recipients are charged higher monthly fees than non-subsidized families. As a result the lower income families end up subsidizing those families whose income wasn’t low enough to qualify for a subsidy in the first place. This practice is rightly referred to as “gouging the poor.”

Until the Alberta government puts regulations in place limiting the fees that can be charged to families receiving a full or partial subsidy it may well be that, in some situations, profit margins rather than families will be the benefactors of the province’s plan.

In addition to increasing the number of families eligible for subsidy, the plan will also result in an increase in funding for wages and for training opportunities for people working in accredited day care and approved family day home programs. This should improve the ability of childcare providers to attract and retain more highly qualified staff that, in turn, should lead to higher quality programming. While childcare workers will still be receiving low level wages, and in effect continuing to subsidize the provision of child care, it is at least a step in the right direction.

The pitfall in this part of the plan is that child care providers working with children aged 6 – 12 years in “out of school care” programs are not eligible for these increases. Yet they require the same training and qualifications as those working with children 0 – 6 years of age. Workers in out of school programs are already quitting their jobs and seeking the higher paying positions now available in child care and preschool facilities.

Until the Alberta government ensures that salaries and professional development opportunities are equitable for those working with school age children, families could find it exceedingly difficult to find appropriate after school care.

But, the issue that could completely erode any opportunity this new plan provides to benefit children and families is the absence of any attempt to prevent this funding from becoming nothing more than a business subsidy for large commercial corporate day care providers – as happened in Australia.

Currently 65% of the childcare used by Alberta families is provided by the private sector. For the most part, these are small independent operators who are equally as dedicated as their not for profit counterparts in providing the best quality of care they can afford to provide to their young charges.

However, under the current plan it is possible that what happened in could happen here. Fourteen years ago had policies in place to ensure that community childcare services met government priorities and community need. But, in 1991 policies were brought in that provided funding to for–profit providers and opened the door to shareholder corporations. Large commercial providers now dominate the child care sector in . One shareholder corporation has forced out of business or taken over many small child care operations and now owns 25% of the child cares services offered throughout the country and in some cities owns the vast majority of all of the childcare services. This corporation is boasting an annual profit of over $52 million, over 50% of which is a direct result of government subsidies.

The Child Care Advocacy Association of Canada has recognized this concern and has recently called on the Federal, Provincial and Territorial Ministers responsible for childcare to ensure that the same thing does not happen in . They are calling for existing for profit child care operators to be grand parented in the new funding regime, and the development of a transition plan that will restrict funding for new services to non-profit and public delivery.

Given that we know that non-profit and public providers provide, on average, better quality care than commercial providers, this makes good sense. Without a commitment to a policy framework that views early learning and childcare as public services, the unintended consequences of this new five point plan could be that parents will continue to have little or no choice when it comes to obtaining high quality, affordable programming for their infant and preschool children. And once again, the promise of vital child care improvements will remain unfulfilled.