{T} he Trudeau government’s multibillion-dollar takeover of Canada’s child-care sector continues to be a horrendous failure.

In Ontario, the YMCA, which accounts for about one-fifth of the province’s licensed child-care spaces, is warning of closures because of insufficient funding. The province’s financial-accountability officer estimated just over a year ago that the province would soon be short 220,000 child-care spaces. Meanwhile in Alberta, the child-care-industry estimate is that government policy is wiping out about half the net income of a typical center of 100 spaces, destroying private centers and eroding parental choice. On January 30, dozens of child-care centers across the province shut their doors for a day, and hundreds of child-care providers and parents protested the governmentalization of child care.

Asked about the Alberta situation, Jenna Sudds, the federal minister of families, children, and social development, admitted to “challenges” but insisted that the national program has been a “resounding success.” According to Sudds, “for the vast majority of provinces and territories, it is working really well.” Statistics Canada data on child-care attendance by province, however, show that attendance has remained flat or has declined across the board in 2023 compared with four years ago, and in all ten provinces, a greater proportion of families have reported difficulty finding child care in 2023 than in 2019.

It is therefore unsurprising that when Sudds began listing the provinces where government child care “is working really well,” she named only two. One was British Columbia, where she said early-childhood educators were recently given wage increases — a fact that has to do with rising costs, not with the accessibility or quality of child care. The other province Sudds brought up was Prince Edward Island, whose population of 176,000 accounts for about 0.4 percent of the country. As headlines scream of child-care crises and shortages across Canada, the Trudeau government has repeatedly pointed to this province to proclaim its program’s success: “Prince Edward Island to achieve $10-a-day regulated child care two years ahead of national target,” the government crowed in December, announcing that its mission there would be accomplished on January 1, 2024.

But what does the Trudeau government’s child-care-success story in Prince Edward Island actually look like? At a January 16 meeting with provincial legislators, the senior operations manager for CHANCES, a large nonprofit child-care provider, said, “I hear horror stories every day working in centers; people calling and begging for spaces.” There are families who join wait lists before they are even pregnant, “and they still don’t have a space by the time the child is a year old.” The statistics are not perfect but still indicative: Two thousand families are on the province’s child-care wait list, up about 65 percent from four years ago.

One problem with child care in Prince Edward Island, the CHANCES executive director said, is the regulatory burden, such as a new requirement for child-care directors to have a bachelor’s degree. “There is a lot of regulation when it comes to establishing an early-years center or a school-age program, and it’s not organization-friendly in terms of looking at all the requirements.” While “we are a huge organization, and I have the capacity to pull teams to be able to navigate the system,” she said, “I can’t imagine a smaller center; it would be really discouraging.” The other problem, of course, is a lack of money. To keep the price of child-care low and meet the government’s $10-per-day target, “our staff are not paid significantly,” the CHANCES executive director said. The organization just increased the hourly wage from $16 to $17, but still “you can’t recruit staff, you can’t retain staff, and it’s not sustainable.” The organization therefore recommends: more government help for child-care-center spaces and renovations, a more generous funding formula, greater volume and scope for government grant programs, and more wage subsidies for managerial staff.

This dire picture of child care in Prince Edward Island is corroborated by other sources. With 2,000 children wait-listed, CBC News reported in January, child-care operators say “they have to tell sobbing parents on the other end of the phone line that there are still no spots available.” One child-care operator whose wait list exceeds 200 families predicts that “it’s only going to get worse” as the government-subsidized and government-fixed price of $10 per day continues to inflate demand.

Meanwhile, unsubsidized home-based child-care facilities, which face inflated costs in a sector awash with public funds but don’t receive any of that funding, are under severe financial burden. According to another CBC News story from January, some home-based child-care operators in Prince Edward Island say “rising operating costs are making it hard to keep their services affordable while still making a living.” Moreover, “CBC News has heard from a few that say they’ve been forced to shut down in recent months — forcing more parents onto the lengthy waitlist for childcare.” Unlicensed home-based centers could become licensed to receive provincial funding, but the administrative costs of doing so are overwhelming.

To recap, in Prince Edward Island, child-care centers are shutting down, options for families are narrowing, wait lists are exploding, the subsidized segment of the sector is saying it needs more money for everything, regulation is impeding supply, and increasing numbers of families are unable to find child care for extended periods of time. If this is the Trudeau government’s big child-care-success story — in the one province where it declares its mission to have been accomplished — the Liberal Party’s takeover of child care has proven to be an appalling shambles all around.