Ilona Dougherty is managing director of the Youth & Innovation Project at the University of Waterloo, where she co-leads the Young People and Economic Inclusion Longitudinal Study; she is also an Ashoka Fellow.
Brett House is professor of professional practice in economics at Columbia Business School, as well as a senior fellow with the Public Policy Forum, the Munk School and Massey College.
This essay is part of the Prosperity’s Path series. In a time of geopolitical instability and a shifting world order, the challenges facing Canada's economy have only gotten more visible, numerous and intense. This series brings solutions.
The federal government’s April 28 Spring Economic Update includes a $6-billion Team Canada Strong program, a commitment to recruit, train and hire 80,000 to 100,000 new Red Seal Trades workers. This is an undertaking built on solid data.
The program is also well-targeted. Team Canada Strong is implicitly focused on young men: The trades are more than 90 per cent male. And young men do need support getting on the jobs ladder. Statistics Canada observes that a recent increase in youth who are not in employment, education or training (NEET) is driven by men in their 20s without a bachelor’s degree who are opting out of the labour market. We know that NEET youth are at high risk of social disconnection, prone to commit a crime or become homeless, and suffer from mental-health challenges and long-term financial instability.
While Team Canada Strong addresses the challenges faced by young men, do we need an equivalent program to bolster other critical sectors of the economy – such as child care – that are predominantly staffed by women? The answer is yes. This is partly about equity, but critically, parallel investment in training and wages for early childhood educators is essential if we hope to proactively address demographic and employment shifts and support broad economic prosperity.
Recent government evaluations of existing federal wage-subsidy programs for young workers have found that they lead to higher long-term earnings for their participants. Research from the University of Waterloo similarly concluded that support for business investment in young workers produces good economic value. And there is an emerging consensus that we need to expand the aspirational opportunities for young people beyond university education.
But a $6-billion injection into a male-dominated sector, without parallel action in the domains where young women work, leaves Team Canada Strong imbalanced. This imbalance would remain even if this program were, say, to double the share of women in the skilled trades. The list of Red Seal Trades does include hairstylists, so they are seemingly eligible for training and wage subsidies under this program. But it’s safe to say that is not what the Carney government had in mind when it envisioned the jobs needed to “build the next port, bridge, mine, or data centre.”
Prime Minister Mark Carney greets workers during a visit to the International Union of Operating Engineers Local 793 training campus in Oakville, Ont., in April.Carlos Osorio/Reuters
Because it’s 2026, this trades-focused program needs to be complemented with initiatives that support young women where they currently work. At present, education and health care are two of the work force sectors most heavily dominated by women. Over the past two years, these are also some of the areas that have seen the strongest job growth, both in Canada and across North America. But demand is outstripping supply. And such high demand is set to increase as populations age, immigration is curtailed and education becomes an ever-more-essential prerequisite for well-paying jobs.
Within the sectors dominated by women, governments should focus additional resources on child care. Nationally, we’re falling tens of thousands of places short on the targets set for 2026 under the Canada-Wide Early Learning and Child Care program. To create these extra spots, we need more trained early-childhood educators and more centres in which they can work.
The economic case for the 2021 introduction of CWELCC was grounded in its potential to raise Canadian incomes: Access to high-quality child care enables more women to enter the work force. Following Quebec’s 1997 introduction of its low-fee universal child care system, the province’s labour-force participation rate for mothers with young children climbed 13 per cent over 20 years.
Canada's then-finance minister Chrystia Freeland and former prime minister Justin Trudeau announce the Canada-wide Early Learning and Child Care program, which promised to reduce fees to an average of $10 a day, as part of the federal budget in April, 2021.BLAIR GABLE/Reuters
In 2017, the International Monetary Fund found that closing the roughly seven-percentage-point gap between Canada’s male and female prime-age participation rates would add 4 per cent to our national gross domestic product. With GDP at about $3.2-trillion in 2025, these gains would translate into nearly $130-billion in extra income every year – nearly twice the Spring Economic Updates’ projected federal deficit of $66.9-billion in fiscal year 2025–26.
Incidentally, access to good, affordable child care could have a particularly notable impact in who participates in the skilled trades. Decades of recruitment campaigns have barely changed the fact that only 7.3 per cent of trades workers are women. This is partly because it is more difficult to re-enter the workforce after career interruptions in the trades than in other industries.
Owing to this reality, economies focused on skilled trades tend to see heightened gender inequality across a range of dimensions. Research highlights the need for targeted policies, such as affordable child care and flexible work arrangements, to address this reality. It’s not the content of the jobs but the systems around the jobs that provide the barrier. More resources dedicated to training early-childhood educators and expanding access to affordable daycare would help make Team Canada Strong more effective for young women as well as young men.
Ottawa has recognized the need for more child care spaces. The Spring Economic Update envisages ongoing annual increases in CWELCC transfer payments to the provinces, territories and cities to support the expansion of subsidized child care spots and worker training. But the projected payments are just in line with forecast trends in national economic growth. Meanwhile, the federal government’s Early Learning and Child Care Infrastructure Fund that helps to build child care centres will end next year.
Additionally, attracting and retaining more early-childhood educators remains difficult because their wages typically remain low. Spending in this sector will, therefore, need to involve not only training, but direct efforts to raise pay.
Attracting and retaining more early-childhood educators remains difficult because wages typically remain low.DARRYL DYCK/The Canadian Press
This support would help to close the persistent gender wage gap between young men and women, which continues to show up markedly in data collected under the University of Waterloo’s Young People and Economic Inclusion Longitudinal Study. The driver of this gap is clear: Young working women are concentrated in the low-paying care economy.
Jobs growth in the health and education sectors, as with the trades, would also add resilience and stability to the Canadian economy in the face of the advance of artificial intelligence. Early-childhood educators aren’t likely to be automated out of existence any time soon. Even where robots may be added to these workplaces, a human touch will remain in demand.
Canada needs more skilled-trades workers. But it also needs early-childhood educators.
This is essential to realizing the nation-building initiatives that Canada’s new government is pursuing and to staving off multifaceted and long-term social tensions. Investing more in accessible child care and the young women who staff it would make all of Team Canada Strong-er.