Manitoba Needs More Child Care to Support Working Families & Grow Our Economy!

Child care is essential for Manitoba’s economic growth and prosperity.

Working parents – particularly moms – need access to high quality, affordable and inclusive child care to help them get back to their paid jobs, to pursue new education, training or employment opportunities, or to take on full-time hours to support their families.

Employers also need child care to be there for their workers so they have the staff to fill shifts, grow their business and be successful.

An ongoing lack of child care is creating bottlenecks for Manitoba’s economic growth, preventing our province from reaching its full economic potential.

Everyone is held back by a lack of child care: parents wanting to go to work or pursue other opportunities, employers needing more workers, and children who benefit from enriching early childhood learning.

We’ve Made A Lot of Progress, But There’s Still More Work To Do:

With record support from the federal and provincial governments, Manitoba has made many important improvements in the last few years to make high-quality child care more affordable and accessible for families, while also making child care a more desirable sector in which to work. These improvements include:

• Affordable year-round $10/day child care for Manitoba families;
• Opening close to 2,500 additional spaces in each of the last two years (2023-24, 2024-25), compared to less than 300 the year prior (2022-23).
• Annual wage increases for early childhood educators, including the largest ever increase of close to $5/hour in 2025 (under the previous provincial government, funding for wages was frozen from 2016 to 2022);
• Free child care for the lowest income families receiving full subsidy;
• Annual operating grant increases to child care centers (ending a six-year operating grant freeze by the previous government);
• Increasing professional development days for early childhood educators, rising to 5 days/year by 2028 (in line with teachers), and offering the “ECE Recruit-Back Incentive” of $5,000 for early childhood educators to return to work full-time; and
• Investing public dollars in high-quality not-for-profit child care (public investment should be for the public good, and not be siphoned off for private, for-profit providers).

But Manitoba’s economy continues to suffer from a lack of child cares spaces, and a lack of extended-hour care for children whose parents and caregivers work evenings, weekends and rotating shifts. Currently in Manitoba, we only have enough licensed child care spaces for 22% of our children.  

Manitoba’s current child care expansion model is too slow and relies too much on parent volunteers to do the heavy lifting, instead of government taking the reins to plan for child care and make sure spaces are opened and available when and where Manitoba families need them.

Under Manitoba’s current system, parent volunteers are required to fundraise 40% of the capital cost of building new or renovated child care centres, and to oversee planning and construction. This saddles parents with the burden of raising hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars to get child care in their communities – that’s not fair and it’s not realistic.

We’d never ask parents to do all this work to ensure that there are sufficient schools for their children, so why should child care be any different?

Child care should be there to support parents to go work and earn a good living, not require them to be volunteer fundraisers, project planners and construction managers!

How Many More Child Care Spaces Does Manitoba Need?

Strong investments from both levels of government in recent years has allowed Manitoba to open more spaces, more quickly. But there’s still a big shortage of child care spaces. Manitoba families need and want to take advantage of high-quality, non-profit, $10/day child care. The demand for child care is far outstripping supply.

The Canadian benchmark for child care spaces is to have enough spaces for 59% of all younger children. To achieve this benchmark, Manitoba needs to add 23,000 net new infant and pre-school spaces. And in order to achieve the same 59% coverage rate for older children, Manitoba needs to add 54,000 net new school-age spaces.

Let’s Build a Child care System that Works for Everyone!

Manitoba needs thousands of additional child care spaces to meet the shared needs of parents and employers, to enable economic growth, create more good jobs, and support fair labour force participation for women.

All children and families should have easy access to a comprehensive universally-accessible child care system supported by public funds.

And those who work in child care must be fairly compensated, with good wages, benefits and working conditions.

That’s why we’re calling on the Manitoba government to commit to:

1. Adding a minimum of 77,000 net new spaces within the non-profit and public system, including:
   – 23,000 infant/preschool spaces to achieve the Canadian benchmark level of having enough spaces available for 59% of children.
   – 54,000 school-age spaces to achieve the same level of coverage for older children.
   Government should lead the planning process for creating more child care spaces and not just rely on parent volunteers to do all the heavy lifting.  

2. Eliminating the longstanding requirement for parent volunteers to raise 40% of the capital cost to build or renovate child care facilities. Child care is a public good that’s in high demand and it should be publicly funded, just like schools.

3. Working with non-profit child care centers and public providers to expand hours to better support parents who work evenings, weekends and rotating shifts.

4. Making sure child care workers have good jobs by funding regular improvements to wages, benefits, and access to professional development, and ensuring compensation doesn’t fall behind again. Without a stable workforce, new spaces can’t be staffed to open-up to serve families.