Canada-Wide Early Learning & Child Care (CWELCC)
The Canada-Wide Early Learning and Child Care (CWELCC) system supports quality, accessibility, affordability, and inclusivity in early learning licensed child care serving eligible children.
Ontario's action plan
The agreement focuses on 5 key pillars:
- lowering fees
- increasing access
- enhancing high-quality child care
- supporting inclusion
- enhancing data and reporting
Lowering fees
To ensure child care is more affordable for families, we are lowering average fees for CWELCC-enrolled licensed child care programs through a phased approach:
- As of April 1, 2022, we reduced fees by up to 25%.
- As of December 31, 2022, we further reduced fees by up to another 37%, bringing the provincial average fee to $23 per day (50% of 2020 fees).
- As of January 1, 2025, we capped the reduced fees at $22 per day, bringing the provincial average to $19 per day.
- By March 2026, we will lower fees to an average of $10 per day.
Increasing access
To provide families with more child care options and address increasing demand for child care, we are:
- creating 86,000 net new licensed child care spaces by the end of 2026
- supporting expansion of new child care spaces in geographic areas and diverse communities where they are needed most (for example, children with special needs, Indigenous and Francophone communities)
Enhancing quality
To ensure families have access to high-quality licensed child care, we are:
- improving compensation for lower-wage Registered Early Childhood Educators working with children up to age 12 in licensed child care
- implementing a workforce strategy to support RECEs employed by CWELCC-enrolled child care providers and a multipronged strategy to better support the recruitment and retention of qualified professionals and professional learning supports for child care and early years staff
Supporting inclusion
To support the needs of diverse communities and populations, we engaged with a broad range of partners to:
- ensure space expansion plans and all child care and early years programs are designed to support the needs of vulnerable and diverse populations in your communities (such as Indigenous, Francophone, Black and other racialized groups, newcomers, low-income families and children with special needs)
- gather data and assess the barriers to access for children of diverse populations and children with varying abilities
- release Ontario’s Access and Inclusion Framework, which supports service system managers in developing and implementing local service plans with an increased focus on access as it relates to inclusion
- this includes identifying their priority neighbourhoods and/or priority populations for space creation under CWELCC
Enhanced data and reporting
To monitor our progress and support families, we will continue to:
- use evidence-based analysis to evaluate and improve how the child care system supports children and families
- report regularly on our progress toward meeting federal requirements using enhanced data collection and analytics capabilities
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