Study finds 100 per cent of Kitchener child care centres have wait list

The City of Kitchener has earned a dubious honour: according to a new study, it is the only one of 28 major cities in Canada where every single child care centre have a wait list.

David Macdonald, a senior economist with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, is one of the co-authors of the study.

He tells 570NEWS that Kitchener was only at a 90 per cent level for that same statistic in 2016.

Macdonald says, to be fair, many cities, especially in the GTA, are still in the 90 per cent range.

Perhaps more shocking is that Kitchener is one of most expensive cities in the study for child care.

For example, Macdonald says the average fee for pre-schoolers for child care in Kitchener is $975 per month — six times more expensive than Montreal’s $168.

He says Quebec, Manitoba, and PEI show the route the rest of Canada must follow: the provincial government sets the child care rate, and then provides a transfer payment to providers to make up the difference.

But he says one good thing for Kitchener that came from their study is the fact that the cost of child care has increased by slightly less than the rate of inflation.

Macdonald says those costs in most cities are going up faster than inflation, meaning parents get further and further behind.

The study, called ‘Time Out: Child care fees in Canada 2017’, looked only at the City of Kitchener — it did not include Cambridge or Waterloo.

Barb Cardow, Director of Child Services for the Region of Waterloo, says not every child care across the entire Region has a wait list.