Brampton is still a child care desert—federal candidates haven’t explained what they would do about it

More than a decade ago Brampton was labelled a “childcare desert” when the Canadian Centre of Policy Alternatives published a report in 2018 that revealed 95 percent of children in the city did not have access to early care.

Childcare expenses in Brampton and Mississauga cost about $1,000 monthly, but the real problem was the lack of space, with one spot available for every four to five kids.

In 2021, the Liberal government of Justin Trudeau established a national framework and introduced the Canada Wide Early Learning and Childcare program to provide accessible, affordable and high-quality care by investing $30 billion over five years in a collaboration with provincial, territorial and Indigenous leaders. The program aimed to provide parents access to childcare for about $10-a-day for some families within five years.

Ontario signed on in March of 2022 and was set to receive $10.2 billion over five years, to lower daycare fees 50 percent by March 2023. Under that agreement, many families across Peel with children under six took advantage of the licensed childcare spots they were able to access, cutting their fees in half.

While the Liberals $10 a day childcare plan has resulted in more children receiving support, wait lists have continued to grow.

(Government of Ontario)

In 2023, Statistics Canada reported that approximately 938,000 children were getting support from licensed childcare programs participating in the plan (daycares had to opt in). About 42 percent of children five and under were getting the benefits of the program, and that number will increase as the plan continues. 

It has been widely analyzed by experts who, for the most part, see the Liberal strategy as a big success.

In parts of Peel, the challenges are more complex. In 2023, Regional staff estimated that more than 14,000 additional spaces were required to fill the gap, as a lack of available spaces was the major bottleneck for families. The funding model of the current federal program is not financially viable in certain places including parts of Brampton where critics have said the program limits the number of spaces due to funding caps, preventing growth beyond the local capacity. In certain neighbourhoods, a range of factors contribute to this lack of capacity, a major one being the concern of local providers who fear they might lose subsidies if the current program is not renewed. 

When asked if he would cut the program if elected prime minister, Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre said last month, “We will protect these programs and nobody who has them will lose them,” referring to the childcare plan, along with the recent dental-care and pharmacare programs introduced by the Liberals. He has not provided details of what childcare under a Conservative government would look like.

Liberal leader Mark Carney has pledged support for the existing program but has not explained how it might be expanded and accelerated to meet the needs of families in places like Brampton where the lack of spaces is a barrier.

The Pointer reached out to all candidates in Brampton running for the Liberal and Conservative parties for comment on this story. None responded. 

Many spaces in Brampton are provided through licensed home care, not the more common model in cities like Toronto where large, corporate owned centres operate. These businesses are drawn to communities where families earn higher incomes and can afford higher fees. The problem, according to critics, is that these types of businesses have taken up an outsized number of the subsidized spaces, leaving neighbourhoods across other parts of Ontario grappling with a lack of available spots that offer reduced fees as part of the federal program, while home-based businesses face challenges to hire staff and cannot offset potential revenue declines by adding more spaces.

Another concern is that daycare providers going forward will be reimbursed through a cost-replacement model, not a direct subsidy for fee reductions. Large centers can more easily recover their larger costs without sacrificing the quality of care, while smaller operations do not have that luxury.

The Liberals have pledged to build 250,000 new “high-quality child care spaces” and facilitate the hiring of 40,000 early childhood educators, but it is unclear how these resources would be steered to the communities that need the investments most.

Poilievre, meanwhile, has offered no details of a national childcare strategy and was heavily criticized when he said the current program limits the “freedom and flexibility” of parents and providers, before he changed his stance last month when he committed to keeping existing coverage in place for those families currently participating in the plan. 

Last year a joint letter to the federal government from Ontario’s provincial government and the Association of Municipalities of Ontario warned that many cities and towns were struggling to implement the $10-a-day child care plan, labelling Peel—a known child care desert—as the poster child of the problem. 

The agreement between the federal and provincial governments to deliver $10-a-day child care mandated that 70 percent of the spaces be provided by the nonprofit sector and 30 by for-profit businesses. This, according to the letter, had created a bottleneck, with nonprofits unable to create enough spaces to meet the demand, and reach the 70 percent threshold.  

“We are now at the midpoint of the (childcare agreement) and with parents struggling to access affordable child care and service system managers constrained from creating child care spaces by the cap on for-profits, the situation is becoming untenable,” the letter cautioned.

Queen’s Park had identified Peel as needing the most new child-care spaces, but the region had turned down more than 2,000 potential spots under the $10-a-day program because those operators are for-profit, according to the joint letter.

Unlike other parts of the province, where non-profit capacity is much larger, parts of Brampton in particular have seen significantly lower per-capita take-up of the program.

Barriers in Peel’s nonprofit sector include staffing challenges (with many early child care workers being paid little more than minimum wage), a lack of funding for partner agencies stemming from the rapid growth of the region which has not been met with proportionate public-sector support from governments and the inability to expand the non-profit sector into the licensed home-based model which is popular across much of Mississauga and Brampton, but has not been able to meet the rapidly growing demand.

Communities where child care is limited offer fewer options for parents seeking support while employment conditions often limit their ability to work from home. Even subsidized child care is out of reach for many families in Mississauga and Brampton where fees are among the highest in Canada due to the lack of spots. 

Part of the challenge plaguing child care service providers across the province is the ability to retain workers in the sector, which, according to the Ontario Coalition for Better Childcare — the province’s central advocacy group for universal early childhood education — is worsening.

The advocacy group has been calling on the Province for immediate action to improve pay for workers, highlighting that wages have dropped far below a livable level. This, the group explained, has resulted in a child care workforce crisis it warns is “blunting the effectiveness of the Canada-Wide Early Learning and Child Care program — limiting enrolment, impacting quality and making programs unstable.” A report previously commissioned by the organization revealed Ontario has fallen behind most other provinces on wages in the child care sector, with Ontario being one of only four provinces that still has not introduced a salary scale or wage grid as part of the Canada-Wide strategy.

“Ontario has a child care workforce shortage amid an increased demand for child care spaces,” the advocacy group previously stated. “Currently many child care programs are limiting enrolment because they cannot adequately staff. This workforce crisis is now a major roadblock to the successful implementation of the [CWELCC] plan in Ontario. It is slowing planned space expansion and blocking access to child care for many families.” 

This was highlighted by the Region of Peel in a staff presentation last year that addressed the federal government’s child care plan. “The Region has seen a shift in pressures related to child care programming and system management.” Staff said the Region “now requires greater flexibility in the use of non-mandatory Regional contribution to support current and future pressures in order to optimize services for children and families.”

Staff cautioned a year ago that the Liberal program as well as its expansion had presented new system challenges with the plan’s implementation, including significantly increased workload and administrative needs for the Region. The staff report said the federal government’s program “has brought Peel back into a workforce deficit.” Through the national strategy Peel has been tasked with adding 11,980 new child care spaces (1,145 school-based and 10,835 community-based spots) to the system by the end of 2026. Regional staff warned the additional spaces cannot be operationalized without the addition of 1,625 child care staff to the workforce. 

“This creates massive system pressures to meet our expansion targets,” Nakiema Palmer, director of the Region’s Early Years and Child Care Services, told councillors last year. “The current workforce shortage poses the single most significant risk to the successful implementation of the Canada-Wide Early Learning and Child Care Program as a strong workforce is needed to ensure that families have access to affordable child care. It is also the main challenge that our child care partners continue to highlight.”

“This risk equation is simple: if we’re not able to address the workforce shortage, we will see empty child care classrooms, while experiencing growing waitlists for families requiring child care,” Palmer warned. 

The lack of capacity, both spaces and workers, leaves parents across Peel in a precarious position, choosing between paying for childcare or securing employment—a decision that impacts women, particularly immigrant mothers, more acutely. This can lead to long-term financial impacts for families forced to make a choice. 

Those same families are now being asked to make another choice. Who will be the next prime minister, ultimately responsible for delivering investments to a region still described as a childcare desert?

The Pointer's 2025 federal election coverage is partly supported by the Covering Canada: Election 2025 Fund.

Email: [email protected]

At a time when vital public information is needed by everyone, The Pointer has taken down our paywall on all stories to ensure every resident of Brampton, Mississauga and Niagara has access to the facts. For those who are able, we encourage you to consider a subscription. This will help us report on important public interest issues the community needs to know about now more than ever. You can register for a 30-day free trial HERE. Thereafter, The Pointer will charge $10 a month and you can cancel any time right on the website. Thank you