Saskatchewan not expected to meet new child-care space goal: Report

She said her centre and other centres in the area still have huge waiting lists nearly five years into the subsidized program.

“It definitely is something that is acute, and it’s a real problem for rural areas especially,” said Werner.

She said she feels like the program was rolled out backwards, with the infrastructure coming afterward, which made wait lists worse.

“And they will be worse before they get better until we start seeing more of those spaces open up and also see more educators coming into the field,” she said.

The numbers

The report from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, titled “The last mile: Provincial child care expansion at the five-year deadline,” looked at how many new spaces were created by the provinces since they first signed the child-care deal with the federal government.

The report said most provinces aren’t expected to meet their goals for new spaces by the end of the first five-year deal, but it put Saskatchewan and Manitoba the furthest away, despite having some of the highest need for more spaces.

According to the report, as of the third quarter of 2025, Saskatchewan had created 6,915 spaces out of the 28,100-space goal it set.

“The Saskatchewan goals are actually really ambitious — they set a really high bar that would have doubled or tripled the number of licensed spaces in the province,” said David Macdonald, a senior economist with the think tank and author of the report.

The education minister wasn’t available to comment on the report, but Saskatchewan’s Ministry of Education said the province has created more than 26,000 new spaces since the child-care agreement was signed, saying there are more than 43,500 early learning and child-care spaces either in operation or development across the province.

When asked about the province’s numbers, Macdonald said the math was a mystery.

He said it appears the province was counting Pre-K or early learning program spaces as new spaces in 2024 when that program has existed since the 1990s and has had the same number of spaces for the past decade. Christian family think tank Cardus also pointed out that math in a report from September last year, looking at space creation in the second and third years of the deal.

Macdonald also said the provincial government also appears to be including spaces still in development in their numbers, while the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives only included spaces that have opened.

Child-care desert

According to the report, the need for child-care spaces in Saskatchewan is the second most acute among the provinces. It said 42 per cent of children in Saskatchewan live in a child-care desert, which means there are fewer than three spaces available per 10 children. The report also found that 48 per cent of kids live in areas with adequate coverage, which have between three and 5.8 spaces per 10 children.

While he said there is a long way to go for Saskatchewan to hit its goal, Macdonald said Saskatchewan did manage to move a lot of kids out of the child-care desert category.

“Things were a lot worse five years ago than they are today,” he said.

The report said Saskatchewan saw a 24 per cent reduction in children living in child-care deserts.

Macdonald also said it’s worth pointing out there were new spaces created, and basically all of them were non-profit, which tend to be higher quality.

That could be set to change, though. Saskatchewan previously wasn’t providing any operating funding to for-profit centres, but in the new deal signed in November and expected to start in April, that will change.

Why are the provinces behind?

The report shows that a number of provinces are behind on their child-care goals, and Macdonald said there are some common themes.

He explained most provinces, including Saskatchewan, were hoping already-existing non-profit providers would take on the responsibility and fiscal burden of building more child-care centres.

“That’s sometimes a pretty hard sell for non-profits; that’s not something they’re necessarily interested in,” said Macdonald.

He suggested that if provinces want to hit those targets, they need to pick one or two of the largest non-profit providers and put them in charge of expansion – giving them the tools for it, but making that provider responsible.

“The challenge is, without someone being responsible for it, it hasn’t happened in most cases – that’s the case in Saskatchewan, but it’s also the case across the country,” explained Macdonald.

Werner in Rocanville said there can be a lot of hoops to jump through to open a new centre, including need to attract and retain Early Childhood Educators.

A new deal

The provincial government signed a new five-year deal in November to keep the $10-a-day program going.

Many provinces signed agreements months earlier, but Saskatchewan’s Education Minister said the province was holding out to get a better deal.

The new deal includes a base funding increase to help with inflationary costs and an expansion to the age limit so kids who turn six can stay in the program until they start school.

Werner said the delay may have contributed to a lack of new spaces opening in the last while, because providers wouldn’t want to go through all the work of planning and funding if the program was going away.

“All of that gets put on hold – we don’t want to go into a bunch of debt and then not know if the funding is even going to be in place,” she explained.

Though the new deal was signed in November, Werner said it’s been “radio-silence” from the ministry since then, so she doesn’t have any other details about what changes might look like.

She said the government needs to sit down with stakeholders in the sector to understand the flaws in order to improve things and increase the number of available spaces.

“We need the people involved to step up and support the program,” said Werner.

The federal, provincial and territorial ministers responsible for the program are expected to meet in Ontario later this week to talk about the future of the $10-a-day plan.

Shocking numbers

The Sask. NDP spoke about the CCPA report Wednesday afternoon, calling the numbers in it “shocking.”

Child care and early learning critic, Joan Pratchler, said the provincial government is missing its own goals, and said Premier Scott Moe has dragged his heels at every turn on the child-care file and has failed to meet the demand.

When it comes to the province’s own accounting bringing the number up to about 26,000, Pratchler said the government is counting operational spaces as well as “aspirational” spaces which aren’t open yet.

“You can’t send your child to an aspirational space, it has to be an operational space. They may be in the plans, parents don’t need plans, they need child care that’s up and running,” she said.

Pratchler said the provincial government should have had a good plan at the beginning of the program to get spaces built and should have consulted the people who are most involved in this — the child care providers.

by Lisa Schick/CJME