Putting profits ahead of kids puts Saskatchewan child care at risk

For decades, Saskatchewan kept public child care funding out of private hands. A new agreement suggests that line may be blurring

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Saskatchewan built its child care system on the idea that children come before profits. That principle is now being tested by Saskatchewan’s renewed child care agreement with Ottawa.

The Canada-Saskatchewan child care agreement was extended in November for five more years, and while we haven’t seen details yet, comments by Saskatchewan Minister of Education Everett Hindley suggest that the deal will allow for the expansion of for-profit child care provision within the province. In his words, “there would be some public dollars in the form of grants available to for-profit centres.”

This may sound minor, but it is a worrying departure that should concern all advocates for a quality, affordable and accessible child care service in the province.

Saskatchewan’s child care system is currently 96 per cent non-profit. This has been a deliberate policy choice of past Saskatchewan governments that refused to allow for-profit providers access to public money. But Saskatchewan is an outlier in Canada in this regard; in other provinces, for-profit child care providers can represent up to 70 per cent of existing services.

Indeed, since the establishment of the Canada-wide Early Learning and Child Care program (CWELCC) in 2022, 57 per cent of all the net new licensed child care spaces for non-school-age children in the country have been for-profit spaces, with larger for-profit chains making up a quarter of the growth. CWELCC is the federal program that underpins the $10-per-day child care system now being rolled out across most provinces.

This expansion of for-profit spaces has occurred despite the federal government’s stated intention that new spaces created under CWELCC should be primarily not-for-profit. The insistence on non-profit providers is not ideological; it is based on years of empirical evidence demonstrating again and again that non-profit child care providers deliver higher quality care and can produce better child development outcomes.

These quality differences are closely tied to labour practices. Non-profit providers tend to hire better-trained staff, pay higher wages, and invest in more professional development, which supports a stronger culture of quality.

In other words, better working conditions translate into higher “process quality,” or the daily interactions and experiences between caregivers and children that are so important to early child development and learning. Conversely, providers that must prioritize profit above other considerations are more likely to pay lower wages, spend less on learning materials and resources and experience higher rates of staff turnover and lower morale. These pressures to lower costs will be even more intense for a for-profit provider where the government imposes a limit on the fees it can charge parents, as is the case with CWELCC.

While Saskatchewan’s predominantly non-profit child care system has so far been shielded from these kinds of profit pressures, the government’s decision to allow for-profit providers to expand in the province will invite those pressures back in. Most concerning is the potential introduction of corporate child care chains into the province.

The majority of corporate child care chains that are already prevalent across the country are backed by private equity—a controversial business model where investors “buy in order to sell,” often once the acquired company is loaded up with debt and/or stripped for parts. Child care centres operating under the direction of private equity will, by necessity, be even more focused on delivering profits to investors than they will be in delivering quality care to children.

The establishment of such chains in Saskatchewan would also create a powerful political lobby in the province that would seek to advance its own economic interests. In other provinces, the private child care industry has successfully lobbied to reduce inspections and standards of care. The National Advocacy Council on Private Childcare—the for-profit child care providers industry association—explicitly opposes the current $10-per-day universal child care system, advocating instead for a “free market” approach that would means-test fees by income, with subsidies sent directly to families rather than the universal capped fee approach.

For-profit child care providers are not shy about the kind of child care system they want, a return to the unaffordable, inaccessible and byzantine system of the past. The people of Saskatchewan need to know who the government is inviting in the door with its decision to allow for the expansion of for-profit child care in the province.

Simon Enoch is a senior researcher with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives in Saskatchewan.