BC Voters Guide: Child Care
How do BC parties promise to support families with affordable child care?
Last updated October 15, 2024
Entire generations of younger British Columbians are being squeezed between rising costs (especially for housing), stagnant earnings, and scarce family supports. Too many younger people have felt this squeeze tighten in recent years, as higher interest rates and housing costs have harmed their finances disproportionately by comparison with other age groups.
Some young people are adapting by putting off their dream of having a family — or even giving up on the prospect of having kids altogether. For others, the squeeze is passed on to the next generation, leaving up to one-third of our kids starting school in ways that mean they’re more likely to fail, go to jail, or wind up sick as adults.
All political parties have a stake in easing the squeeze on younger people and families. Here are the questions we're asking as we evaluate parties for our Good Ancestor Proficiency Report Card. Keep reading for our answers.
- Do parties have an evidence-based plan to make high quality child care affordable to all British Columbians?
- Do parties commit to expanding affordable and high-quality child care spaces in a timely way?
- Do parties recognize that attracting and retaining qualified child care professionals requires paying fair professional wages?
Do parties have an evidence-based plan to make high quality child care affordable to all British Columbians?
Good ancestors want their legacy to include a province-wide system of affordable and high-quality child care to help the next generations of British Columbians get off to the good start they need to thrive. And they believe that access to high quality child care — like access to medical care — shouldn’t depend on your income.
Federal and provincial commitments to $10/day child care generally propose setting $10 as the average daily fee for families. Gen Squeeze recommends $10/day as the maximum fee, not just the average — a recommendation echoed by others. We know this is feasible, because five jurisdictions across Canada have now set fees at $10/day or less. We also argue that there should be no fee at all for low-income families.
By continuing to invest in building a province-wide $10/day system, the BC NDP and BC Green parties are progressing towards the goal of affordability for all. But more urgency is required from both parties to ensure that child care no longer costs any BC family another rent- or mortgage-sized payment.
The Conservatives offer fewer details. The information they do provide often deviates from evidence about what kinds of services deliver the highest quality care for our children.
The BC Greens promise to “ensure the province remains on track to deliver $10/day childcare for all” (p. 31), including $250 million to create more spaces for children under age 5, $100 million in capital funding, and some un-costed commitments to expanding care for school-age kids.
Without dedicated line-items for this child care spending in the Green party’s costing tables, it’s difficult to fully track the scale or timing of these planned investments (see pg. 68). The funds it proposes are about half of what the NDP promises in its platform. We therefore award a grade of developing.
Despite early historic leadership on implementing the $10/day model around 2018, the BC NDP have shown less ambition in recent years. The current platform does promise to add new “desperately needed accessible and affordable child care spaces” and to “bring costs down for even more families through affordable before- and after-school care in every school District” (p. 14).
But the party still has not allocated the full $750 million in new annual provincial funding it promised four years ago. Instead, it swapped out funding received from the federal government for the provincial dollars initially pledged. The truly ambitious approach BC needed would have pooled the provincial and federal funds.
It appears that this trend would continue in coming years under an NDP government. New commitments in the platform promise an ‘initial’ (p. 14) investment of another $500 million to scale up the $10/day system — which, to its credit, is more than any other party in this election.
However, we also know from the federal budget that child care transfers from Ottawa are increasing in the years ahead. So it may be that the BC NDP plans to continue riding federal coattails when injecting new money for child care. It’s hard to discern accurately, because there is no dedicated line-item costing for child care in the NDP platform, compromising accountability for these funds (see pg. 63).
Underwhelming child care investment levels by the NDP stand out by comparison with its other budget priorities. In its most recent budget, the NDP government chose to direct a record extra $4.5 billion to medical care in 2024 alone — about half of which will go to the ~20% of British Columbians over age 65. An election platform that invests in wellbeing urgently from the early years onward should show comparable levels of ambition when it comes to critical investments to support younger British Columbians and their families.
Despite these ongoing shortcomings in the NDP’s child care plan, we award the NDP a proficient grade for advancing toward the goal of affordable child care. The party platform does offer better policy than before, but more is needed before the NDP will have a viable plan to make $10/day child care a reality for all BC families with young kids.
The BC Conservatives clearly affirm the role child care can play in making life more affordable for families. We applaud the party’s high-level vision that all families “deserve access to childcare that helps their child thrive and provides the opportunity for parents to return to good jobs if and when they choose.” Unfortunately, the way in which the party proposes to deliver on this vision falls well short of the standards of evidence-based public policy. The costed platform it released on October 15 also reveals that the Conservatives only plan to add $37 million/year to child care -- considerably less than the $250 million promised by the Greens, and the $500 million promised by the NDP.
The Conservative party argues for “ending the NDP’s funding bias against independent childcare providers” — by which the party means commercial child care enterprises. The Conservatives propose more support for for-profit child care providers on the grounds that they deliver “high-quality care in local neighborhoods” that meets a “variety of needs, circumstances, and cultural and personal preferences.”
There may be some examples of such commercial child care services, but there’s also an overwhelming convergence in the evidence that for-profit providers deliver lower-quality care on average. This evidence should drive any government’s efforts to increase access to $10/day child care.
Equally concerning, the BC Conservative plan would “revisit” the idea of delivering cash directly to parents to help them cover the cost of child care — diverting funds from what is required to scale up the $10/day system. This approach has been widely discredited as more costly, less efficient, and less likely to build high quality care options. Not to mention that it’s been tried in BC before, and did little to consistently improve access to quality, affordable care.
For these reasons, we assess the BC Conservatives as regressing.
↑ Back to top ↑
Do parties commit to expanding affordable and high-quality child care spaces in a timely way?
Good ancestors know we can’t wait to create the child care spaces BC families need. Yet none of the parties commit to specific targets or timelines for growing child care for BC’s kids.
The BC Conservatives two-part plan to add child care spaces is to “work in partnership with independent childcare providers” and fix "unnecessary or unreasonable regulations… that prevent high-quality childcare spaces from opening, whether in home-based childcares, commercial spaces, or in public buildings like schools and rec centers." Further details aren’t provided on the number of spaces the party anticipates can be created through these measures, or the timelines involved.
The Conservative do deserve recognition for specifically acknowledging the importance of affordable spaces for “kids who have the fewest alternatives,” and for committing to create 24-hour spaces that can be accessed by shift workers and first responders. These are important considerations in expanding supply that merit attention.
Overall, we grade the Conservatives as emerging.
The BC Greens recognize the need "to create more spaces to meet demand" (p. 31). The party proposes “a universal Early Childhood Education funding model” to address (among other things) “space creation” (p. 31). Further details on this model and when it will be created are not mentioned.
The $250 million in new funding included in the Green platform will “expand childcare space creation for children and infants under 5” (p. 31) on top of which the party commits to expanding school-age child care spaces (with no $ figure attached). As noted above, the Greens also allocate $100 million to capital costs that will — though only in part — support the creation of child care spaces.
We assign the Greens a developing grade for this theme.
As the incumbent government, the BC NDP has the advantage of being able to point to historical accomplishments — hence the platform flags the additional 37,000 licensed child care spaces created since 2017. However, NDP plans are light on details when it comes to building on this momentum.
The platform refers to building new child care spaces “where and when families need them the most” both in the early years and via expanded school-age care. The promised $500 million in new spending will support creating “new desperately needed accessible and affordable child care spaces” — and also will initiate a (very vague) commitment to “a longterm capital plan” (p. 14).
The absence of any further information is a factor in our assessment of these NDP promises. It’s difficult to hold the party accountable for delivering without knowing more about the number of planned spaces, by when they will be created, and how sufficient funds will be secured. Hence we assign the BC NDP a grade of developing.
↑ Back to top ↑
Do parties recognize that attracting and retaining qualified child care professionals requires paying fair professional wages?
Good ancestors support fair wages for the essential professionals who care for the next generation of British Columbians.
The pandemic made it painfully clear how vital child care professionals are. The hard work they perform every day allows others to keep doing their jobs, which in turn keeps the economy moving for all of us. But poor pay is a major barrier to attracting and retaining qualified staff, and to ensuring that the care they provide is of the highest possible quality, including for kids who need extra support.
Child care professionals should be paid in accordance with the importance of their work, as well as the skills and education they bring to it. We echo the recommendation of the Coalition of Child Care Advocates of BC, who are calling on all parties to develop a wage grid for child care workers, with a starting wage of at least $30-$40 per hour, plus benefits.
The BC Conservatives are silent on the issue of remuneration for child care providers, so we assign a grade of ignoring.
The NDP point to some historical progress on recruiting more child care workers (p. 60), and “boosting wages” (p. 62) for child care workers — all of which is true. But the platform offers nothing new, so we assign an emerging grade.
The BC Greens promise to implement a wage grid for child care workers, reaching $30-40 per hour by 2026 (p. 31). They also propose to ensure access to “pension plans and extended health benefits to improve job security and retention” (p. 31). The amount the Greens are budgeting to ensure these commitments are met is unclear. Balancing the Greens ambitious language with the lack of detail on implementation and accountability, we assign a grade of developing.
