Everyone deserves to succeed. But today, for too many Canadians, your hard work isn’t paying off like it did for previous generations. Your paycheque doesn’t go as far as costs go up, and saving enough to go after your dreams seems harder and harder. It doesn’t have to be this way. Everyone deserves a fair shot at success.
Part of what fairness looks like is making sure that we support each other at every stage of life, and invest in each other. That starts from childhood. Every child deserves the best start in life, but for too long, child care costs were as much as a rent or mortgage payment. This makes it harder to start and support a family, and as a result, parents – especially moms – often face impossible choices between their careers and child care fees. That’s why we introduced $10-a-day child care across Canada – with all provinces and territories already offering, or on track to offer, $10-a-day child care, and with record levels of women participating in the workforce.
But not enough families have access to affordable child care spaces – so we’re building more.
The Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, today announced measures from the upcoming Budget 2024 to build more affordable child care spaces – saving more families thousands of dollars and helping more parents return to their careers.
These measures include:
- Launching a new Child Care Expansion Loan Program. With $1 billion in low-cost loans and $60 million in non-repayable grants, public and not-for-profit child care providers will be able to build new spaces and renovate their existing child care centres. This means more resources for child care providers and more affordable child care options for families.
- Offering student loan forgiveness for rural and remote early childhood educators. This will encourage educators to work in smaller communities and help families get the child care they need. With a $48 million investment over four years, student loan forgiveness will increase the longer an educator works in a rural or remote area, attracting and retaining the talent, similar to the programs we’re offering rural doctors and nurses.
- Increasing training for early childhood educators. We’re investing $10 million over two years to train more early childhood educators, building up the talent needed for the expansion of affordable, high-quality child care.
While in Surrey, British Columbia, the Prime Minister also announced that the Government of Canada is providing British Columbia with $69.9 million to create new child care spaces and support inclusive child care services across the province. This investment, through the Early Learning and Child Care Infrastructure Fund, means more spaces – and more affordable spaces – for families in British Columbia.
Additionally, British Columbia announced that over 930 child care spaces are moving into the province’s $10 a Day ChildCareBC program this spring, which will save families an average of $920 a month per child. These spaces mean the Province has met – and exceeded – its target of bringing the number of $10 a Day ChildCareBC spaces to 15,000 by this spring.
In just three years, we’ve made incredible progress in building the Canada-wide early learning and child care system. Across the country, over 750,000 kids are already benefiting from affordable, high-quality child care, with some families saving up to $14,000 per child, per year. Alongside provinces and territories, we have also announced over 100,000 new spaces, well on our way to reaching our goal of creating 250,000 new spaces by March 2026.
This is just one of the things that we are going to be doing in this budget to support families and build an economy that is fair for every generation. Alongside affordable child care, we’re investing in good health care, dental care, protecting pensions, and increasing access to medications, to make sure every generation can be safe and healthy to get ahead. This will build on the already historic investments we have made to build a strong social safety net and strengthen the middle class. We’re doing this not just because it’s good social policy, but because it’s good economic policy. When workers are well supported, our businesses do well, our economy does well, and that means everyone, in every generation, benefits.
