REGINA — Saskatchewan has finally signed on to an extension of the Canada-wide early learning and childcare agreement, and those interested are looking closely at what it all means.
The announcement was made Friday morning at the YMCA of Regina childcare centre on Albert Street, with Education Minister Everett Hindley and Buckley Belanger. Secretary of State (Rural Development) making the announcement. Federal Jobs and Families Minister Patty Hajdu was unable to attend.
According to Belanger the deal between the two levels of government is as follows:.
The Government of Canada will provide $1.6 billion to Saskatchewan over five years to support the continued access to high-quality, affordable, flexible, and inclusive early learning and child care programs and services, including maintaining that crucial $10-a-day child care after March 2026.”
There will be also be funding increases of three per cent a year starting in 2027 and 2028. Belanger said that will give Saskatchewan more flexibility to deal with inflationary pressures over the life of the agreements, helping to keep the system sustainable for the long term and helping to protect the gains that families are counting on.
“So, in plain terms, this announcement this morning is about keeping fees low, supporting the creation and maintenance of services, and making sure that the system can keep up with rising costs instead of leaving families to carry that burden alone. By giving families real choices about child care, governments are giving people a bit more breathing room and more powers to choose, and that's exactly what governments should be doing.”
The province had not initially signed on to an extension when it was announced earlier this year, and Minister Hindley made it known he was looking to renegotiate a number of items. He indicated the final agreement did include items they advocated for.
One was expanded age eligibility, where a “child in care who turns six while attending kindergarten can continue to receive $10 a day daycare until they complete the school year.”
“That was something we just thought was common sense and we needed to achieve in the renegotiated agreement,” said Hindley.
The five year length of the new agreement, running to March 31, 2032, is another important aspect. For child care operators, Hindley said, the agreement “provides some long-term reliability and sustainability to the program, knowing now that we've now signed on to this for five years with our federal partners.”
Another item HIndley pointed to that the province had asked for was “additional flexibility when it comes to the various pillars of spending, buckets of funding within the program.”
“And there's some flexibility that we had asked for in there that is now going to be accommodated as part of a new agreement, so that we do have the ability, if we see one part of the sector that perhaps we'd like to be able to transfer some funding to be able to build that part of the sector up, we should have the ability to do that. We didn't have that flexibility in the initial agreement, so that allows, what we heard today, just to talk about the maintenance and statutory approach to this, it allows us to be able to do that.”
Hindley also noted that under the current agreement which expires March 31, 2026, the province had committed to a growth target of creating 28,000 additional childcare spaces in Saskatchewan. He said Saskatchewan is well on its way, having established 91 per cent of those new spaces, with thousands more to open in the coming weeks and months.
But Hindley said that under the current agreement there was “a very large focus on the initial agreement to add spaces. And sometimes, I would say perhaps, to the detriment of other parts of the sector.”
“So by having some flexibility in that regard, we can actually focus some of those dollars towards other areas, so we can kind of level off the sector to make sure that child care centres are more of a level playing field. We didn't have that opportunity, it's my understanding, under the existing provisions of the current agreement, but that's something that will change with this new agreement coming April 1. And again, it still allows for us, at the officials level, and working with the child care sector to have that flexibility so that we can try to address some of these gaps that are there.”
Also included in the new agreement will be some grant funding for for-profit child care. But Hindley said “the vast, vast majority of the child care sector in Saskatchewan is not for profit, and it will continue to be that way, but with a small provision for-profit.”
When asked by reporters about the consultations that had been done with early child care operators or educators prior to the agreement being signed, Hindley said they did hear back about the important of having a program of $10 a day childcare, but also about the sustainability of it and the long-term goal of this program.
“So, yeah, we did hear from sectors, from people across the sector far and wide, I would say, over the past number of months. And that's why, you know, I think we took the position that we did to try to make sure that as much as there were some very, very positive things in the initial agreement and what positives that brought to our province and to families right across Saskatchewan, we wanted to take a look and see, in terms of the feedback we were hearing from the sector, where were there changes that needed to be made? And so from that perspective, that's where we as a government felt that when we were going to renegotiate this agreement, we wanted to try to bring some of those things to the table.”
