What can Alberta Learn from British Columbia's experience with $10-a-day child care?
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2023-05-29
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Abstract
On November 14, 2021, Alberta became the ninth province to sign onto the Canada-Wide Early Learning and Child Care (ELCC) Agreement. Under the terms of this bilateral agreement, the Province of Alberta will receive approximately $3.8 billion from the federal government to facilitate the creation of at least 42,500 new subsidized child-care spaces over five years. This would increase Alberta's total supply of licenced child-care spaces by over forty percent, resulting in enough total spaces to serve nearly half of all children in the province aged five and under, with an average daily user fee of $10 a day.
This paper will use a novel analysis of British Columbia's recent experience with publicly subsidized child care to extract lessons for policymakers in Alberta. In the fall of 2018, British Columbia became the first Canadian province to launch a "$10-a-day" child care pilot program. Since then, the province has created more than 12,700 $10-a-day child-care spaces, giving it a sizeable head-start over the other provinces that signed onto the Canada-wide ELCC agreement (with the exception of Quebec, which this paper will touch on less directly).
Using an original data set containing data on 267 $10 a day child care centres across British Columbia, I identify a marked regional disparity in the distribution of centres and preliminary evidence of the inequitable distribution of spaces within Vancouver. These findings are similar, although not identical, to findings obtained from earlier studies of access to subsidized child care in Quebec (see, e.g., Haeck et al., 2015).
In light of both my novel findings from British Columbia and the extant literature on Quebec's child-care program, I recommend that policymakers in Alberta take proactive action to offset the likely regressive effects of the introduction of $10-a-day child care to the province. Such action could include subsidies for informal care in parts of the province with low concentrations of $10-a-day spaces and mandating that a certain proportion of $10-a-day centres be created in low- and moderate-income areas. Policymakers should also take steps to ensure fairness in the process of choosing which sites are to become $10-a-day centres.
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Mohamed, R. (2023). What can Alberta Learn from British Columbia's experience with $10-a-day child care? (Unpublished master's project). University of Calgary, Calgary, AB.