Stressed out, maxed out and out of reach

For years, Manitoba’s worst-kept secret was how hard it is to secure a government-funded child-care space.

The odds became nearly impossible last year when the then-Conservative government announced that $10-a-day child care would soon be a reality.

While the news was celebrated by families — at least those lucky enough to have a spot — many child-care executive directors were gritting their teeth, anxious about what was to come. After all, there was already a chronic shortage of spaces in the province. The $10/day fee would further strain a maxed-out system.

“The whole $10-a-day rollout, it was like they just closed their eyes and went, ‘OK, let’s do it,’ with no thought whatsoever,” says Cathy Gardiner, the executive director of Learning and Growing Daycare in Charleswood.

“Because now the people that really need it are never getting in. The people that are maybe sitting on social assistance or wanting to go back to work or back to school, but they couldn’t afford child care, well, they can’t find it now. They will never, ever get in unless they hit the lottery. And those are the people that need it, those are the kids that need it.”

Successive provincial governments — both the Conservatives and the NDP — have pledged to make child care more affordable and more accessible.

Those promises, however, have been stacked on a crumbling foundation of worn-out staff, low wages, high attrition rates, poor regulatory compliance and compromised quality.

Part 3 of a Free Press investigation into Manitoba child care examines the sector’s fragile state.

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Manitoba signed the Canada-Manitoba, Canada-Wide Early Learning and Child Care Agreement in August 2021, and with it came an investment of $1.2 billion from the federal government to be spent over the next five years.

One of the primary objectives was to make child care more affordable by reducing parent fees to $10 a day for infants, preschool and nursery-school spaces in non-profit centres and child-care homes that receive provincial operating grants.

The province has further committed to extending that same low rate for school-age spaces on in-service days and holidays.

When the Conservative government announced the fee in April 2023, Manitoba joined Saskatchewan, Nunavut and Newfoundland and Labrador as the first jurisdictions to roll out $10-a-day care.

For parents, it was a big win. According to a report by the Toronto-based Childcare Resource and Research Unit, families that were paying between $450 and $875 a month are now paying $200.

“I worried about $10 daycare because we weren’t given a lot of information on what it was going to look like,” says Susana Lam, the executive director at Seven Oaks Child Day Care Centre.

“While I understood it was going to benefit families, it wasn’t going to help the centres that look after these kids and are already working with tight budgets and long waiting lists.”

Gardiner says she has between 600 and 700 children on her waiting list, while Lam has around 500.

Of the more than a dozen directors the Free Press spoke to, all said they were wrestling with waiting lists for preschool and infant care that were at least 100 families long, with a majority having well over 300 names.

If someone was to add their name today, it will take years to get into their centres, several directors said. Some facilities and child-care advocacy groups recommend families sign up as early as two years before their preferred date of enrolment.

But even that might not be enough. Of the several families the Free Press spoke to as part of its investigation, only one had earned a space via a wait list.

Maylee Jacob put her son Oliver on 13 wait lists for licensed child care in Winnipeg when she was three months pregnant. He’s now seven months old and she still doesn’t have a spot.

“It’s kind of a game,” Jacob said. “People are like: ‘You’ve got to make phone calls, you’ve got to follow up’.”

Jacob says she is now considering unregulated home daycares, but she wants to be sure her son is with other kids his age. And there are other factors on which she won’t compromise: that the children have access to the outdoors, the TV is not on all the time, and just the feeling of knowing her son is safe.

“At the end of the day, you’re putting your kid’s life in the hands of somebody you don’t really know,” Jacob said. “It’s a little bit of a stressful situation. Do I trust this person?”

Meanwhile, Lam says that after months of giving families false hope, she made the decision to close Seven Oaks’ wait list.

“We were telling families it’s a three-year wait list, but it’s not really a wait list since you’re not getting in,” Lam says.

“I need to be honest with families, so they understand what it’s like out there. Some get really emotional because they really need a spot and they’re going back to work soon. I feel for them, but you can only do so much.”

Back in 2011, families could start adding their name to the province-wide Online Child Care Registry, a wait list for licensed facilities.

By 2018, there were 16,605 children on the registry, with more than 12,800 in immediate need. The registry was replaced by the Manitoba Child Care Search tool in 2021, which required families to connect with licensed facilities directly. That put the burden — and pressure — of managing wait lists on centre directors.

Out of desperation, families will offer legal or accounting services, pledge to serve on the centre’s parent-led board of directors, and even offer cash inducements in the hopes of landing a spot, directors say.

Anecdotally, it’s a struggle for families, but there is currently no firm data, a provincial spokesperson confirmed, on how many are waiting for spots in Manitoba. The elimination of the province-wide list, which some suggest was a deliberate move, makes it impossible to track.

“Why do you think they removed the provincial wait list prior to giving the $10-a-day daycare?” says Lynn Martin, who is the director of Early Learning and Child Care Thompson, as well as Kiddies Northern Preschool.

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As part of the $1.2-billion agreement with Ottawa, the province also announced the ambitious goal of creating 23,000 new full-time regulated spaces by 2026, “to ensure all families of children up to six years old can access child care.”

At the time, there were 35,446 total regulated spaces in Manitoba, with 93 per cent of those spots in government-funded centres.

However, just one in five children has access to a licensed child-care space, according to the 2022-23 annual report from the Department of Education and Early Childhood Learning, the last available report. While 29 per cent of children aged 0 to 5 have access, just 12 per cent of children aged 6 to 12 do.

The province has earmarked $326 million in federal money to constructing new child-care spaces, having committed to over 100 capital projects since the start of the Canada-wide agreement.

And while industry experts applaud the province’s Child Care in Schools policy, which mandates every new school or major renovation to a school must include a child-care centre, they say it barely moves the needle given how few new schools have opened or are in the planning stages.

“The reduction of parent fees has only driven up the demand for child care, putting even more stress on an already stressed system.”–Susan Prentice

In the first two years of making its pledge, the province created just 2,146 new licensed spaces, a pace well-short of reaching the goal of 23,000.

But a provincial spokesperson said as of March 2024, the province has opened or committed to more than 8,500 spaces for children aged 0-6 and more than 4,400 school-age spaces. The province did not break down the number of open versus committed spaces.

Most of those commitments will be completed by March 2025, Manitoba’s Education and Early Childhood Learning Minister Nello Altomare said in an interview, which will leave the province several thousand spaces shy of the overall goal.

Altomare says the government showed in its spring budget that it is committed to making it happen, having increased operating grants by five per cent and wages by 2.75 per cent, and by adding professional development days for early childhood educators, but admits it won’t be easy.

“This is going to be a real challenge for us,” he said in an interview.

The province’s goals, however, come with a cost, says Susan Prentice, a sociology professor at the University of Manitoba who specializes in child-care policy.

“The reduction of parent fees has only driven up the demand for child care, putting even more stress on an already stressed system,” Prentice says. “People are voting with their feet and people are leaving the field.

“Nevertheless, we’re in Year 3 of a promise that within five years we’re going to make 23,000 more child-care spaces, and we’re bleeding people.”

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Jodie Kehl is the executive director of the Manitoba Child Care Association (MCCA), a non-profit organization with more than 4,000 members. It is the biggest and longest-run child-care advocacy association in Canada.

Kehl says she’s constantly telling the province that to grow the system, it must fix it first. MCCA has long advocated for the province to work on retaining staff before focusing on expansion.

Government legislation sets minimum staff-to-child ratios and the workforce education requirements — both of which are dependent upon a range of factors, including the child’s age, program size and type of facility.

For a full-time centre, as an example, two-thirds of staff must meet the requirements of an early childhood educator (ECE) II or ECE III classification.

The former is a two-year education program, the latter is three years. Centres also are staffed with child-care assistants, who must complete a 40-hour course within their first year of employment.

The ratios are in place to ensure the environment is safe for both the staff and children receiving care. However, they are often unmet. MCCA estimates the industry is short of approximately 1,000 early childhood educators.

“We do nothing different from what a kindergarten teacher does in terms of quality. But if you want quality, you have to have qualified staff,” says Lynda Raible, president of the MCCA and the executive director at Earl Grey Children’s Centre.

“You can say, ‘Ok, let’s create 23,000 new spaces.’ But we’re already 1,000 ECEs short, to maintain what they have now in our centres.

“You’re supposed to have 66 per cent trained staff. My belief is you should have 100 per cent trained staff. We don’t do that in schools. We don’t say, ‘Well, we’ll have 66 per cent teachers and the rest will just be people down the street.’”

Making matters worse, there are fewer ECE II and ECE III staff working today in Manitoba than several years ago.

There were 2,051 ECE II and 1,019 ECE III trained staff, or a total of 3,070, in 2016-17, compared to 2,013 and 792, respectively, for a total of 2,805 in 2022-23, according to the most recent Manitoba Education and Early Childhood Learning annual report.

According to a Free Press analysis of the 1,100 licensed child-care centres and homes in Manitoba, nearly 150 failed to achieve the minimum staffing requirements, leaving them operating on a provisional licence. (In total, the Free Press analysis found more than one-third of licensed centres are operating on provisional licences for failing to meet a host of health, safety and operating standards.)

There is little follow-up enforcement by the province or the child-care co-ordinators responsible for issuing the licence to meet the staffing shortfall, Gardiner says.

“There are no repercussions for it. There’s no time limit. It’s just a provisional licence, and if they were to start shutting centres down because they have a provisional licence or have had for the last two or three years, then they’re just compounding the problem,” she says.

“For years, when I was a newer director, I was just so nervous about all of the regulations and meeting all of the regulations, and then I finally got to a point where I was like, ‘I can’t get blood from a stone.’ If I can’t find trained staff, then this is just the way it is.”

“I finally got to a point where I was like, ‘I can’t get blood from a stone.’ If I can’t find trained staff, then this is just the way it is.”–Lynda Raible

Gardiner’s Charleswood-based centre is currently on a provisional licence for not reaching the required proportion of trained staff; she notes she’s at around 50 per cent.

She hopes it won’t be long until the centre meets the minimum threshold — she currently has a few employees studying for their ECE II — but there’s no guarantee considering how unstable the sector has become.

At one point, Gardiner adds, her provincial co-ordinator suggested how to fudge the numbers by listing Gardiner and her assistant director, both of whom spent much of their time in an office, as floor workers, which are the employees included in the child-to-staff ratios.

“Ultimately, they’re trying to cover up the real issues in this industry,” Gardiner says.

In a 2023 report titled The Big Short: Expansion of Early Childhood Education in Post-Pandemic Canada, University of Toronto researchers looked at the demand for early childhood educators as the country eased out of the COVID-19 pandemic.

They examined each province’s promise for increased licensed child-care spaces and then figured out how long it would take, in years, to train enough ECE graduates to fill those new spots. For Manitoba, which produces on average 140 new graduates annually, it would take 18 years to meet the mark.

“The reason we don’t have enough staff is we just refuse, as a society, to pay early child educators what they’re worth,” says sociology professor Prentice.

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Shaelyn Corby grew up surrounded by children. She’s the second youngest of nine siblings, and her mother ran a home daycare during much of her childhood.

She attended Red River Polytechnic, where she earned her ECE II at just 20 years old. Her experiences growing up gave her the “it” factor every director looks for.

Corby was hired at Created 4 Me Preschool in East St. Paul. It was the same place she had her first practicum, and because she lived just a short drive away, it made for an easy transition into a career she believed would be life-long.

Five years later, Corby is contemplating whether her life’s passion is worth pursuing anymore.

It’s not that she hates her job — the look on kids’ faces each morning or when they learn something new still melts her heart — it’s because she doesn’t see a future given how little she’s paid.

“If people were paid better and felt like they were more valued in society or by the government, it would be a huge help to the industry.”–Shaelyn Corby

“I don’t know that money should be your biggest motivator, but if people were paid better and felt like they were more valued in society or by the government, it would be a huge help to the industry,” says Corby, who is working on her ECE III.

“People are still in child care and have been in child care for years, even though the pay is awful. Even though people are not getting paid well, they’re staying dedicated to this field because they’re passionate about what they do.”

When she first got hired, Corby was making $17.50 an hour. She received a couple of raises, first to $18.50 and then to $20 an hour.

When it still wasn’t enough to provide the kind of modest life she desired, she threatened to go to a bigger centre that was offering more money. She ended up staying for $21.90 an hour.

Tristen Sanness, like many of the ECEs who spoke to the Free Press, echoes her sentiments about wages.

After a couple years as a child-care assistant, he went through the workplace program at Red River to get his ECE II, where he’d spend two days in school and the rest at his child-care centre, allowing him to continue to earn money while upgrading his education.

He also took advantage of the province’s ECE tuition reimbursement program, which incentivizes prospective workers by giving back up to $5,000 a year.

While Sanness agrees it’s a terrific program to get people interested in the job, the focus must be on keeping them, he says.

“They’re adding more spots. They’re making it more affordable for families,” says Sanness, who works at Stanley Knowles Children’s Centre.

“But until you get those trained professionals, the passionate trained professionals, and you incentivize them enough to join the workplace and stay in the workplace, it’s going to remain an endless cycle. We’re stomping on snow when we should be shovelling it.”

“We’re stomping on snow when we should be shovelling it.”–Tristen Sanness

In the past year, Sanness debated changing professions, faced with the surging costs of having three children who are active in sports. At one point, in 2018, he picked up a second job just to pay his bills, which he says is not unusual for those working the front lines in child care.

Sanness ultimately decided to stick with it because of a desire to be a positive influence for children, and he hopes one day to become a director and open his own program. But he adds not everyone is able to push through the challenges of a sector that doesn’t get the respect or appreciation it deserves.

“I’ve seen people that come into child care as child-care assistants and they’re very passionate, they love working with children like the rest of us, and then after a year or so, they just feasibly can’t do it anymore,” Sanness says.

“They want to make more money, and for the amount of work that they’re putting in versus what they’re getting paid for, it doesn’t match up for those people and so they leave.”

The latest provincial wage grid, which will come into effect July 1, shows a 2.75 per cent increase for front-line staff, with a child-care assistant starting at $17.51 an hour (Manitoba’s minimum wage is $15.30), an ECE II with two-plus years’ experience earning $22.79 an hour and an ECE III bringing in $24.31 an hour.

For directors with an ECE III and in charge of between 150-200 spaces — the highest ranked position on the grid — the starting wage is $36.81 an hour, with a “target” mark only slightly higher at $37.85.

The target rate is what the province encourages child-care facilities to eventually reach, or exceed, depending on their budget.

“My title is an early childhood educator. I’m not an early childhood babysitter.” –Tristen Sanness

Sanness and Corby suspect there wouldn’t be a debate over increasing wages if more people understood what they do, how important these years are for a child’s development and how much better it could be with a major overhaul of the system.

“There’s social and emotional development. There’s cognitive development. Whether we’re focusing on critical thinking, on problem solving, whether we’re focused on growth or fine motor skills, there’s always a reason behind what we do,” Sanness says.

“We have curriculum, just like teachers do. My title is an early childhood educator. I’m not an early childhood babysitter. I’m not an early childhood caregiver. And that’s one of the biggest misconceptions.”

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Tracy Cosser has spent 20 years in child care, most recently as the executive director of Can You Imagine Preschool and Educational Centres in the Elmwood and Weston areas.

Rather than complain about low wages, knowing that will get her nowhere, she focuses on the one measure — though it’s far from ideal — that can improve the situation. A centre can increase its revenue by adding spaces at new locations.

“When you open more locations, it brings in more revenue… which means everybody makes more money. It wasn’t just about me, but it was about how do I maximize the revenue I can get to pay everybody more, including myself? And this was the way that really kind of made sense.”

Cosser currently runs five sites, including two preschool and three before-and-after school programs.

She employs two assistant directors to oversee the programs and then each program has a supervisor that’s always on site. Cosser says one of her older buildings need major renovations. To cover the bills, she’s again hoping to add spaces to help generate the necessary funds.

Cosser knows she wouldn’t need to be so savvy if Manitoba’s funding model was different or if the provincial government significantly increased the annual operating grants.

Until the Kinew government provided a two per cent boost shortly after it was elected last fall, centres had had their operating grants frozen since 2016. The NDP government increased grants by another five per cent this spring.

Prior to the boost, the government’s funding formula worked out to $295 per daycare space. It’s now $354, a 20 per cent increase.

While that may seem like a significant bump, the new total doesn’t cover the cost of inflation, nor the successive years many centres were running deficits, directors say.

“Five years ago, paper towels used to cost me $97 per box, and today they cost $182. And that’s just one example,” says Raible, the MCCA president. “That’s why we’re still seeing so many centres running deficit after deficit.”

Raible describes much of the investments as piecemeal and not what’s required to provide quality care. Most problematic is the one-size-fits-all approach to funding.

The model doesn’t take into consideration factors such as the variance in operating costs between centres.

For example, those attached to a school might pay a minimal fee, around $100 a month, or get their space for free. Other facilities can spend thousands of dollars a month for a commercial site.

“The province has got to step up here. They’ve got to stop taking credit for all of this federal money and pretending that there aren’t these problems anymore.”–Cathy Gardiner

Gardiner says she pays about $6,000 a month for her Charleswood-based centre. Her rent has increased by nearly 30 per cent since 2016, while her funding has remained mostly stagnant.

To cover the costs, she used to fundraise between $25,000 and $30,000 a year, but no longer wants to put the additional burden on parents.

So, Gardiner has been using the influx of cash that was given to child-care centres during the pandemic to make up the difference, knowing that the money won’t last forever. (To address the impacts of the pandemic, the province allocated $122.7 million in early child-care operating grants.)

The funding shortage has forced centres throughout the province to make tough decisions, such as dropping lunch programs and field trips.

“The province has got to step up here. They’ve got to stop taking credit for all of this federal money and pretending that there aren’t these problems anymore,” Gardiner says.

“You have to be really creative with your budget. I honestly don’t know how we do it every year.”

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Burned out mentally, physically, emotionally and spiritually, Kisa MacIsaac had finally hit her breaking point.

She handed in her two-week notice in November 2022 after more than 20 years working in child care.

“I just upped and quit. When I quit, I was reflecting on if I even belonged in the field anymore,” MacIsaac says. “I was just feeling so exhausted and, honestly, working through the pandemic and child care was very, very challenging.

“I just knew I needed rest, and I just knew my own kids were not getting much of me at that point. I put so much energy and love into my work and then I’d get home and just had nothing left for my own three.”

But she returned to the same sector in her next career move, taking a job teaching the next generation of ECEs. She realized she had never lost her love for child care and could use what she’d learned over two decades to prepare the future workforce.

“I’m feeling re-energized, and my passion, just right away came back with speaking to these new people going into the field,” MacIsaac says.

“You have to do great work because these children are so vulnerable and a lot of parents are vulnerable, too.”

As an instructor, MacIsaac talks often with her students about the importance of burnout prevention and also shares the many positives of the job. What’s most important, she believes, is developing strong, loving relationships with the children and their families.

Studies have repeatedly shown how critical a child’s development is between birth and age five, MacIsaac says, and it’s maddening to her how seemingly little the provincial government wants to invest in early-years programming.

“You have to do great work because these children are so vulnerable and a lot of parents are vulnerable, too.”–Kisa MacIsaac

She believes current staff-to-child ratios and regulations for the number of ECEs at each centre need to be significantly improved in order to relieve the burden on front-line staff and allow them to deliver a curriculum that ensures children have the best chance for success.

“I remember a kindergarten teacher saying to me once, ‘I know which children came from your program.’ Honestly, I started to cry, because sometimes you feel really unseen,” MacIsaac says.

“But she directly knew the kids who came from this really high-quality, beautiful, land-based early learning and child-care program so when they get to kindergarten, they’re ready for kindergarten because they’ve had such beautiful experiences.”

In theory, that’s the way early childhood enrichment is supposed to work, as a critical building block in a child’s development.

The reality, MacIsaac and other directors say, can be much different.

— with files by Katrina Clarke

jeff.hamilton@freepress.mb.ca

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