TorontoOntario’s auditor general says the province isn’t on track to meet its targets on child-care fees, number of spaces created or percentage of qualified staff within the $10-a-day system.Number of registered early childhood educators increased, but below province’s targetAllison Jones · The Canadian Press · Posted: Oct 01, 2025 8:42 AM EDT | Last Updated: 1 hour agoAuditor general Shelley Spence’s office is releasing four special reports today, including one looking at Ontario’s progress in implementing the national child-care program. (Evan Mitsui/CBC)Ontario is not on track to meet its targets on child-care fees, number of spaces created or percentage of qualified staff within the $10-a-day system, the province’s auditor general has found.Shelley Spence’s office released a report Wednesday looking at Ontario’s progress in implementing the national child-care program and found that while several provinces have already lowered parent fees to an average of $10 a day, Ontario likely won’t meet that unless it makes some changes.”The $10 a day is achievable, but the next day it may be a problem,” Spence said at a news conference.While Ontario has an agreement-in-principle with the federal government saying that it wants to extend the program beyond the current term that expires on March 31, 2026, it has not yet signed a deal continue delivering the reduced parental fees. Officials have said that the current federal funding would leave the province short $2 billion next year.Ontario, which had the highest daycare fees in the country, has spent the federal government’s five-year funding over four years, Spence wrote.”If you start with the highest costs then you do take the funding and use it in four years instead of five, which is what it was given for, you can automatically see why you’d have that $1.95-billion deficit the next year,” she said Wednesday.WATCH | How many families will benefit from daycare fee caps? Ontario is reducing child-care fees — but how many families stand to benefit?Some Ontario parents will pay far less for childcare starting this month. The province has rolled out a fee reduction at daycares enrolled in the national $10-a-day program. CBC’s Britnei Bilhete has details on the new funding formula — and which families stand to benefit.Fees are currently capped at $22 a day, down from an average of $48 a day before the program began in Ontario. Those lowered fees created additional demand for licensed child care and has meant that lower-income families are losing out, Spence found.In addition to the national $10-a-day program, low-income families can get further fee subsidies on a sliding scale, such that parents earning $20,000 or less pay nothing. However, compared to 2019, there has been a 31 per cent decrease in the enrolment of children receiving fee subsidies, the auditor found.Child-care wait lists have also risen sharply since the program began, the auditor wrote, but the government doesn’t collect data to understand demand.The province has also not been creating enough new spaces to meet its targets, she found.When Ontario signed the child-care deal with the federal government in 2022, it agreed to create 86,000 new spaces within the system by December 2026, which the financial accountability officer has said would still leave the province short of meeting demand for more than 220,000 spots.The province only achieved about 75 per cent of its interim space creation target at the end of 2024, Spence found.Last fall the government reworked the way it assigned space creation targets in different regions of the province – instead of focusing on areas most in need of new spaces, it focused on areas that could more quickly create spaces, so Ontario had a better shot at meeting its overall target, the auditor said.As well, while the number of registered early childhood educators in the system has increased, it’s still below the province’s target, and while the government estimated in 2022 that it would need 8,500 more ECEs by 2026, the auditor said that has now risen to 10,000.
Ontario not on track on child-care fee, space creation goals: auditor
