Headline: Child-Care Advocate Says $10-a-Day Program Hides High Costs, Six-Figure Salaries and Empty Spaces
In a strongly worded social media post aimed at British Columbia Premier David Eby’s $10-a-day child-care program, Helen Ward, president of the Kids First Parent Association of Canada, says the “ludicrous unfairness” of a family with an income reportedly of $500,000 per year receiving heavily subsidized daycare is only the first of many inconvenient facts the government-subsidized daycare lobby does not want the public to see. Ward, whose organization operates KidsFirstCanada.org, argues that a closer look at the data reveals troubling details about the real cost of care, executive salaries at supposedly not-for-profit daycare organizations, low enrolment rates, enormous government spending, and thousands of funded but vacant child-care spaces. She specifically points to Premier Eby’s own daycare arrangements, noting that Eby has said he donates the difference between his family’s fees and the $10-a-day rate. Ward says those donations “barely touch” the real cost of his children’s daycare. She estimates the actual cost of daycare is not $10 a day but more like $100 to $200 per day, or $26,000 to $52,000 per child each year. For comparison, Ward notes that Sweden was spending approximately $27,000 per child per year in daycare two decades ago.
Ward then turns her attention to the compensation of senior staff at not-for-profit daycare organizations, a sector that is central to government child-care expansion plans. According to Canada Revenue Agency data cited by Ward, the top employee at the BC YMCA, which she says is reportedly the daycare provider used by Premier Eby, earned more than $350,000 in 2025. Nine other YMCA staff members were paid more than $160,000 each. Ward argues that these salaries are difficult to reconcile with the public image of a struggling, underfunded daycare sector. She provides more examples: at the Vancouver Society of Children’s Centres, an organization whose stated charitable purpose is the “reduction of poverty,” one executive received compensation in the $200,000 to $249,000 range, while nine other employees earned between $80,000 and $160,000. At the University of British Columbia, a daycare executive was paid $180,000, and at Simon Fraser University, an executive received $117,000. These figures, Ward says, undermine the idea that not-for-profit daycare is a low-cost, charitable enterprise. Instead, she suggests, substantial taxpayer dollars are being directed toward administrative salaries rather than directly to children and families.
The post goes on to examine enrolment numbers, which Ward says are far weaker than politicians often suggest. She argues that politicians trying to outdo each other with promises of new daycare “spaces” should first ask how many children are actually enrolled in the spaces that already exist. Ward notes that Statistics Canada combines preschool and daycare centre enrolment in its reporting, which she says inflates the numbers. Even with that inflation, she says, only 32.2 per cent of children aged 0 to 5 are enrolled in daycare across Canada. Provincial numbers vary: Quebec has 46.1 per cent, Ontario 24.2 per cent, British Columbia 31.8 per cent, and Alberta 32.1 per cent. For children aged 6 to 12, the national enrolment rate in daycare centres is just 2.2 per cent, with Quebec at 0.7 per cent, Ontario at 1.7 per cent, British Columbia at 2 per cent, and Alberta at 3 per cent. Ward says this means the vast majority of children and parents receive zero child-care funding. “The system discriminates against the vast majority of kids and parents because they do not use it and get $0 child care funding,” she writes. In her view, the current policy is not delivering broad public benefit but instead concentrates subsidies on a relatively small group of families who have access to designated spaces.
Ward also highlights the enormous increase in government spending that has produced only modest gains in enrolment. She reports that enrolment among children aged 0 to 5 has risen by only 1.2 percentage points nationally since 2019, moving from 31 per cent to 32.2 per cent. That marginal increase, she says, has been purchased at extraordinary cost. Federal spending alone since 2021 totals $63.4 billion. In 2024 alone, federal and provincial daycare spending reached almost $12.5 billion. Ward calculates that if that money were divided evenly among all children aged 0 to 12, with no income testing, it would amount to $220 per month for every child. In reality, she says, most families receive nothing. This, she argues, is a fundamental fairness problem. Rather than providing universal support to parents, the government child-care model relies on a designated network of subsidized providers, leaving families outside that network to pay the full cost of care while also contributing through their taxes. She suggests the daycare lobby has been successful in convincing policy-makers that the only answer is more funding for more spaces, despite evidence that the current system is expensive, inefficient, and highly selective.
On the question of daycare shortages, Ward argues that low enrolment rates are not caused by a lack of physical capacity. She points to British Columbia government data showing there are currently more than 11,500 new, funded, non-operational child-care spaces. Despite repeated political claims about long waitlists and severe daycare shortages, these spaces are not being filled. Ward says this reality contradicts the narrative that provinces simply need to build more spaces and hire more workers. The figures suggest that there may be a mismatch between the type of child care being offered and the preferences or needs of families, or that many families cannot afford or do not wish to use institutional daycare. She also raises the possibility that completion deadlines, staffing shortages, or regulatory delays are preventing these funded spaces from becoming operational, but insists that the existence of so many empty funded spaces should force politicians to question their assumptions. If the system were working as advertised, Ward argues, these spaces would not be sitting vacant. She calls on reporters and policy-makers to examine why so many funded spaces are not being used before demanding even larger child-care budgets.
Ward concludes that the $10-a-day program and similar government child-care initiatives are being driven by well-organized lobby interests rather than by evidence about what families actually need. She urges politicians to stop promising more spaces and start asking harder questions about enrolment, executive salaries, vacancies, and the real cost of care. The issue, she says, is not simply a shortage of daycare options; it is a system that subsidizes a small minority while sending nothing to the majority. She notes that the daycare lobby has been effective at portraying any criticism as an attack on early childhood education, but she insists that taxpayers and parents deserve an honest accounting of where the money goes. Ward says the hidden data on costs, salaries, enrolment, spending, and vacancies should be a central part of the public debate. As long as those inconvenient facts are ignored, she argues, policy will continue to expand a costly system that does not serve most children and leaves parents with fewer choices and higher taxes. Her post ends with a direct challenge to political leaders, especially those in British Columbia, to answer for the funded spaces that remain empty and to explain why families with high incomes continue to receive some of the most heavily subsidized child-care benefits in the country.