Vera Belazelkoska (left) is an Ontario mother who put her child on 24 daycare centre waitlists when she was three months pregnant.
A childcare crisis in Ontario has left numerous parents struggling to enroll their children in daycare centres, where staffing shortages have made exceedingly long waitlists the new normal.
A mother in Ontario got candid online about her current stressful situation, having four months left of her one year maternity leave, and now unsure if she will be able to return back to work.
She shares that her child still has not received a spot at a daycare centre after all this time.
“Yesterday we went and toured a daycare and got put on the wait list. We are number 1,028,” she said in the video.
For children six years and under who are enrolled in a licensed childcare program in Ontario, they are eligible for the Canada-Wide Early Learning and Child Care (CWELCC) which caps fees at a maximum amount of $22 a day.
Ontario also has a child care fee subsidy for children under 13 years old (or up to 18 years old if the child has special needs and meets the other criteria) based on the family’s income.
Months on a wait list, with no spot in sight
Across the province, numerous families find themselves on several childcare centre waitlists, for months without receiving any response.
Vera Belazelkoska is a parent of a one year old in Ontario, and in December 2024 when she was three months pregnant she placed her daughter on 24 wait lists, and did not receive any calls back until recently.
“My maternity leave came up last month, and we had zero spots. And of course I applied to daycares near our home, but also a little bit further off, so not just walking distance. I’m talking, like we were open to driving if needed, knowing that there is a shortage and that there is a high demand,” Belazelkoska told The Brandon Gonez Show.
Belazelkoska had to delay her return to work due to this issue, despite putting her child on a waitlist three months into her pregnancy.
“I hear it all the time in different play dates in the park and swim class, when we’re with her. I hear from other parents that many of them have had to delay their return to work to 18 months, even though they were planning to take only a year,” she said.
Despite applying to 24 different centres, home daycares, nonprofit centres, some funded by the $22 a day CWELCC program, it took her family over a year to secure a spot.
“Our luck turned, and luckily we found a home daycare nearby that, through word of mouth and us acting quickly and being already on the list, and saying yes to whatever date they said,” she shares.
Although she is returning back to work in September, she shares the financial and emotional strain this situation has put on her family.
“So it does mean that now we were past the employment insurance phase, and now we’re just living off of, you know, at least on my side, living off of savings, because employment insurance is only up to 12 months,” she tells The Brandon Gonez Show.
Staffing shortages affect Ontario’s childcare waitlists
The federal government agreed with Ontario to a one-year extension to the CWELCC agreement until March 2027 and the federal government recently invested $5.4 billion into the program over the next two years.
However, Ontario is one of only two provinces that does not have a continuation of the CWELCC program past March of 2027.
The Brandon Gonez Show spoke with Amber Straker, the Executive Director of the Association of Early Childhood Educators Ontario (AECEO).
Straker speaks on the current one-year extension agreement between the province and the federal government for the CWELCC program and shares what AECEO hopes will be negotiated.
“I do think that if that agreement does include some additional workforce compensation and support, and with some of the spaces being built for the educators to work in, I actually do see the wait list decreasing,” shares Straker.
According to Straker, the long childcare centre waitlists is deriving from the increase of demand now that spaces have become more affordable, but the main issue is due to a workforce crisis as an early childhood educator (ECE) worker in Ontario.
“Living here in Ontario, there are spaces that are actually available right now but are not in use because we don’t have the early childhood educators or the child care workers to actually bring those spaces alive and be able to have children learn and grow inside of them,” she said.
The AECEO have visited and spoken to classrooms full of ECE students, interested and passionate about the job, but once entering the field many tend not to stay for long causing a retention crisis.
“What we are hearing from early childhood educators is that they’re leaving for work that is less stressful and less demanding and has higher wages, has health benefits, have pension plans,” says Straker. “I think the lack of those things in our field just demonstrates that lack of respect and recognition for the work that early childhood educators are doing, and they feel that.”
While the minimum wage floor for a registered ECE employee is established at $25.86 per hour, numerous childcare workers, educators, and petitioners are excluded from this threshold.
“We’re still seeing the majority of the workforce being left behind in that wage floor. And we’re starting also to hear from educators about the disparity between their wages increasing and other people they work with, whose roles haven’t changed, but their wages not increasing in line,” said Straker.
Those working in this field may not be able to see their jobs as a “career”, one that they can move up in their company and make more money, hence why many are leaving the profession.
The AECEO is partners at the Ontario Coalition for Better Child Care and Straker shares they have created a roadmap to universal child care in Ontario.
“I think the number one recommendation from that list that I would like to speak to today is to create and fund a pay equity compliant wage grid for early years professionals. We need to see pay that increases with years of experience with levels of education where ECEs can see themselves progressing through the work,” she says.
She also noted that alongside this, educators need to be given health benefits and pension plans.
Straker emphasizes the importance of childcare and how the jobs of these educators play an extremely important role in the community.
“We have to remember that children’s learning conditions are educators’ working conditions, and that if we want to have quality care for every child who needs it in Ontario, we need to ensure that we also have quality working conditions for those educators who are leading those programmes.”
