ST. PAUL – Waitlists at several childcare providers in St. Paul indicates some parents are having a tough time finding care for their young children.
Joelene Hazen is the executive director of The Boys and Girls Club of St. Paul & District (BGC St. Paul), and she confirmed that BGC St. Paul has quite a long waitlist when it comes to childcare.
“We only have so much room and we’re only licensed for so many spaces, and all of our rooms are filled to the max,” says Hazen.
While the Boys and Girls Club isn’t experiencing any issues with staffing its daycare, which is located on main street in St. Paul, she has heard of staff shortages with other childcare providers in St. Paul.
While speaking with Lakeland Today, Hazen referred to a census indicating that St. Paul is not a child-care desert, which she disagrees with, stating that St. Paul and the surrounding area definitely needs more childcare spaces.
According to the Canadian Centre of Policy Alternatives (CCPA), the threshold for a postal code being a “desert” is having a 33.3 per cent coverage rate or less. CCPA’s interactive map indicates that St. Paul (T0A) has 4,030 children aged zero to four years old, with 1,363 spaces for children of the same age. This means St. Paul has a coverage rate of 33.8 per cent, “So [St. Paul] isn’t considered a desert, but it’s pretty close,” stated CCPA in an email to Lakeland Today.
Lori Stokes works with the St. Paul Family Day Homes. The organization works with day homes, offering an alternative for parents who want to send their child to a setting other than a traditional daycare. Stokes confirmed that St. Paul Family Day Homes has had a waitlist for several months.
The organization is even struggling to find places for all the families who were previously registered in the program but had to give up their space for reasons including maternity leaves or COVID-19.
“They wanted to come back and there was no room,” says Stokes.
St. Paul Family Day Homes currently has nine active providers, with one awaiting approval, according to Stokes. She says the program averaged to about six providers for a number of years until early 2022, when the provincial and federal governments introduced the $3.8 billion Federal-provincial child-care agreement.
But the demand is still outpacing the spaces available locally.
“All of my providers are full... so we can’t take any more children – hence the waiting list.”
TLC Daycare
TLC Daycare, is a for-profit childcare centre located in St. Paul, and it too has a waitlist and simply does not have enough childcare spaces to meet the needs of the community.
Tamara Champagne is the owner of TLC Daycare. She says many of the children on the waitlist are under a year old.
“Unfortunately, I don’t have space for that many babies and I have seven on my waiting list,” explains Champagne. As a for-profit daycare owner, Champagne is also worried about the new $3.8- billion five-year grant program aimed to bringing down childcare costs.
Aside from a wage-top up, which had not increased since 2007, Champagne says it has been difficult to pay staff or offer any incentive to bring back staff who left the field due to the pandemic.
“It’s great that parents can tap into this [grant’s] affordability [but] I can only take so many kids because I can’t find staff,” she explains. “The government’s not giving us anything to work with to entice these people to come back into the field.”
There is also a misconception that for-profits like TLC, rake in a lot of money. For Champagne, there is barely enough profit and just enough money to pay the bills and her staff.
To keep staff and increase their wages, Champagne is considering terminating her out-of-school care next summer and focusing only on daycare.
“Unfortunately, the sacrifice would be out-of-school care,” she says, adding, “That’s painful knowing that there’s no care for this age group in this town and no programs that they can join after school.”
Champagne admits she was ready to completely close her daycare last spring but providing a valuable service and a passion for childcare has kept the doors open.
“Where are these kids going to go?” she asks. “If I close, there’s nowhere else for them to go and I can’t do that.”
Champagne says she loves her job – and it’s something she’s been doing since 1988.
“When I first started in child-care, I said, ‘Oh, this isn’t for me. Give me four years I’ll be out of here doing something else’ – Yep, I’m still here.”
CORRECTION: A previous version of this story incorrectly reported the planned $10-a-day childcare by 2026 does not support for-profits, and applies only to not-for-profit, public, and family-based childcare providers. The original report referred to a Nov. 15, 2021 news release from the Prime Minister of Canada on an agreement between the federal government and the Province of Alberta. The news release stated the agreement would provide $10-a-day child care spaces for children under six years old. But, the agreement also "includes" creating 42,500 new regulated early learning and child care spaces among "licensed not-for-profit, public, and family-based child care providers" by the end of March 2026.
*This story was last updated on Sept. 16 at 3:35 p.m.
