Picture this: you wake up before dawn, get the kids dressed, pack their lunches, and drive across town to drop them at daycare. You work all day, pick them up, and discover that the cost of care has eaten nearly a third of your family’s income. You love your children. You are grateful for a safe place. But you wonder how you will ever save for a home, pay off debt, or simply breathe. Then you read a story about a family with an income reportedly around $500,000 a year receiving a heavily subsidized daycare spot, and you feel a quiet anger. This is not about jealousy. It is about fairness. Helen Ward, president of the Kids First Parent Association of Canada, put her finger on exactly this injustice after British Columbia Premier David Eby shared details of his family’s daycare arrangement on X. Ward argues that the spectacle of a wealthy family getting super-subsidized childcare is only the tip of the iceberg. Beneath the surface lies a daycare system funded by massive amounts of public money, promoted by politicians as “universal,” yet used by only a minority of families. For every parent who gets a subsidized spot, there are many more who receive nothing: parents who stay home, grandparents who provide care, families who work irregular hours, and parents who piece together informal arrangements. They are asked to pay for a system they cannot use, while the benefits flow disproportionately to those who are already comfortable.
The first uncomfortable truth is about cost. The $10-a-day promise is a beautiful slogan but a misleading one. In British Columbia, the real cost of childcare is not ten dollars a day. According to Ward, it is closer to $100 to $200 per day, which translates to $26,000 to $52,000 a year per child. Premier Eby may make a donation to “cover the difference” between the old fee and the new $10-a-day fee, but that donation barely touches the true cost. What matters is that he was heavily subsidized before the $10-a-day program even existed, and he remains heavily subsidized now. The public purse is covering the gap. To put that in perspective, Sweden spent roughly $27,000 per child per year on daycare twenty years ago. Canada, in many cases, is now spending similar amounts, yet it is not building a system that feels generous or fair. It is building an expensive, centralized, institutional system that captures enormous public funds while leaving most families outside its walls. If the government simply handed every family with young children a childcare budget, parents could decide what works best for them. Instead, the current model forces everyone to pay for a single type of care: regulated, centre-based daycare. That is not freedom of choice. It is a one-size-fits-all policy that fits very few.
The second uncomfortable truth is executive pay. Daycare is supposed to be about children, but increasingly it is about administration, bureaucracy, and high salaries for senior staff. Ward points to Canada Revenue Agency data showing that top staff at the “not-for-profit” BC YMCA—reportedly Eby’s daycare provider—make more than the Premier himself. The top staffer reportedly took in over $350,000 in 2025, and nine other staff were paid over $160,000. Meanwhile, children and educators in the same system are struggling. Daycare workers, mostly women, earn modest wages for physically and emotionally exhausting work. They change diapers, soothe tantrums, read stories, and comfort children who miss their parents. They deserve better. But instead of paying early childhood educators like the professionals they are, the money gets absorbed at the top. At the Vancouver Society of Children’s Centres, a charity whose stated purpose is the “reduction of poverty,” several executives were paid between $80,000 and $160,000, with one earning between $200,000 and $249,000. At UBC, the top daycare executive made around $180,000. At SFU, around $117,000. The pattern is clear: “not-for-profit” does not mean “low-cost” or “volunteer-driven.” It simply means there are no shareholders. It does not mean there are no big salaries. It does not mean that the money is going to the children. When parents see their fees go up or government subsidies increase, they assume the money is going to care. Too often, it is going to overhead, expansion, and executive compensation.
The third uncomfortable truth is low enrolment. Politicians love to announce new “spaces.” They stand in front of newly built centres, smile for cameras, and promise parents that more spaces will solve everything. But no one asks the obvious question: how many existing spaces are actually filled? Statistics Canada data shows that when preschool and daycare centre enrolment are combined, only 32.2 per cent of Canadian children aged 0 to 5 are enrolled in centre-based care. That means more than two-thirds of Canadian children in that age group are not using licensed daycare centres. The proportions vary by province: Quebec, often held up as the gold standard, has 46.1 per cent enrolled; Ontario has 24.2 per cent; British Columbia has 31.8 per cent; and Alberta has 32.1 per cent. For school-aged children, aged 6 to 12, the numbers are even more striking. Nationally, only 2.2 per cent of children in that age group are enrolled in daycare centres. In Quebec, it is 0.7 per cent; in Ontario, 1.7 per cent; in BC, 2 per cent; and in Alberta, 3 per cent. These are not the numbers of a universal program. They are the numbers of a niche service, generously funded and heavily used by a select group. Ward’s point is devastating: the system discriminates against the vast majority of kids and parents because they do not use it and receive zero childcare funding. A parent who chooses to stay home with a toddler, or relies on a grandparent, or works nights so their partner can work days, gets nothing. The government’s approach says, in effect, that only care delivered in a licensed institution is worthy of public support. That is not just unfair; it is an insult to the diversity of Canadian families.
The fourth uncomfortable truth is spending. Despite the low enrolment numbers, governments are pouring staggering amounts of money into daycare. Federal spending alone has reached $63.4 billion since 2021. In 2024, federal and provincial daycare spending combined was almost $12.5 billion. And what did Canadians get for that massive investment? Enrolment for children aged 0 to 5 rose just 1.2 per cent, from 31 per cent in 2019 to 32.2 per cent. Let that sink in. Hundreds of billions of dollars later, the number of children in daycare has barely moved. If the cash were divided evenly among all children aged 0 to 12, with no income testing at all, the amount would be roughly $220 per month for every child. That money could support a parent who chooses to stay home, help a low-income family pay for the care they actually choose, or cover the costs of a family child-care provider down the street. Instead, most families get zero. Some families get thousands of dollars in direct subsidies for a centre-based spot. The result is a profoundly unequal system that happens to be dressed up in the language of progressive “investment.” The daycare lobby says that more money is always the answer. But the data suggests that the money is not going where parents need it most. It is swallowed by a system that spends heavily on infrastructure, administration, and salaries, while the actual number of children served barely changes. It is hard to imagine a more inefficient way to help families.
The fifth uncomfortable truth is vacancy rates. For all the stories about long waitlists and impossible shortages, there are currently more than 11,500 funded, non-operational daycare spaces in British Columbia, according to provincial government data. That is not a typo. Thousands of new, approved, funded spaces are sitting empty. Some are in buildings that have not yet opened. Some are in centres that cannot find enough qualified staff because the wages are too low. Some are simply in the wrong locations, far from where families actually live or work. Yet politicians continue to promise more spaces, and the lobby continues to demand more money. It is a strange kind of crisis that creates thousands of empty spaces while claiming that families are desperate. The truth is that Canada does not have a childcare shortage in every neighbourhood, nor a universal need for centre-based daycare. What it has is a system designed by policymakers who believe they know best, built from the top down, and mismanaged at enormous expense. Helen Ward’s analysis, rooted in the experience of parents and the numbers governments would rather ignore, points to a better way. Instead of pouring more money into buildings and bureaucracies, Canada should respect parents. It should fund families directly, allow them to choose the care that works for their children, and end the discrimination against parents who stay home or rely on informal care. The goal should be to help children, not to prop up an expensive institution. The daycare lobby may not want you to know these facts. But parents deserve the truth. And the truth is that the current system is failing the majority of Canadian families, while pretending to speak for everyone.