Rahim Mohamed: Parents still waiting for Trudeau's promised $10-a-day childcare

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As the saying goes, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

And politically, the promise of $10-a-day childcare has been just too good to be true for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

Ten-dollar-a-day childcare was the perfect promise to anchor Canada’s recovery from COVID, an extended ordeal that stretched parents to their breaking point and sank women’s labour force participation to its lowest level in three decades. The program would be just what was needed to “counter the ‘she-session’” created by COVID and “turn it into a ‘she-covery.’”

It was also the right promise to anchor Trudeau’s successful bid for a third consecutive electoral mandate. The near universal appeal of $10-a-day childcare flummoxed the hapless Erin O’Toole, whose counter-offer of a childcare tax credit landed with a thud. “Beer and popcorn,” it was not.

Above all, it was a masterstroke of intergovernmental diplomacy for Trudeau; a prime minister who — to put it mildly — hasn’t always enjoyed the best rapport with his fellow first ministers. Within a year of announcing his intention to bring $10-a-day childcare to all Canadian families, Trudeau had, remarkably, inked bilateral childcare agreements with the premiers of all 10 provinces and three territories.

It was a masterstroke of intergovernmental diplomacy for Trudeau

Even former Alberta premier Jason Kenney, a man who’d once called Trudeau “an empty trust-fund millionaire (with) the political depth of a finger bowl,” eventually succumbed to a splashy joint policy announcement. In the end, $10-a-day childcare for Alberta families was just too taut a lifeline for the embattled Kenney to pass up.

There was just one problem. For anyone paying close enough attention, there were always reasons to be skeptical about Trudeau’s promise to deliver $10-a-day childcare within a five-year time frame. (His promise to reduce childcare fees by 50 per cent by the end of 2022 was even more risible.)

In British Columbia, where Canada’s first $10-a-day childcare program was launched back in 2018, the province’s NDP government has vexed many a parent with its slow rollout of $10-a-day spaces. According to the most recent estimate, calculated earlier this year, just over five per cent of British Columbia’s 126,000 total spaces come with a ‘$10-a-day’ price tag. The lack of progress on $10-a-day childcare is likely to be remembered as one of the biggest failures of the generally well-regarded premiership of John Horgan.

If a ‘have’ province with one of Canada’s most left-leaning, pro-government electorates can only muster 6,500 or so “$10-a-day” childcare spaces in four years, how can anyone take Trudeau at his word when he claims that he will bring childcare fees down to an average of $10 a day by the middle of the decade? This, I will remind you all, is a man who can’t even keep essential children’s pain medications on the shelves of our pharmacies.

For all the political capital that has been sunk into the Trudeau government’s childcare initiative, it is surprisingly cumbersome to track down how many $10-a-day spaces have been created so far and where they have been created.

The Trudeau government’s official $10-a-Day webpage does not contain any sort of live tracker or dashboard that keeps a tally of the creation of new $10-a-day spaces. The closest thing it has to an infographic is this less-than-informative map of Canada where provinces are shaded in different hues of purple (presumably with the help of Microsoft Paint’s “colour picker” feature). Looking at the map gave me no sense of how close we are to Canada-wide $10-a-day childcare (but it did make me nostalgic for Barney the Dinosaur).

To make a go of calculating a rough total of $10-a-day spaces created across Canada so far, one must comb through a heap of sporadic news reports and government press releases, documents that are often deliberately misleading.

One must comb through a heap of sporadic news reports and press releases

For instance, a recent Trudeau government press release stated triumphantly that $10-a-day childcare was “becoming a reality for families in Nunavut in December 2022” but buried the pesky little detail that only 30 of the territory’s planned 238 new childcare spaces had actually been created.

It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that information about $10-a-day childcare is so hard to come by because Trudeau and Co. would prefer not to advertise their lack of progress on the file so far.

Parents, who have been through hell and high water over the past two years and change, deserve better than the runaround from a Liberal government that’s promised to deliver results on affordable childcare.

If Trudeau can’t give parents $10-a-day childcare just yet, the least he can give them is transparency.

National Post

Rahim Mohamed is a freelance writer based in Calgary. He holds a PhD in Political Science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and has taught at Wake Forest University (Winston-Salem, N.C.) and Centre College (Danville, Ky.).