Statistics Canada data suggests that mothers are now more empowered to join the work force after Ottawa's $10-a-day child-care program was launched in 2021.DARRYL DYCK/The Canadian Press
Ottawa’s introduction of an affordable daycare scheme designed to boost the work-force participation of women with young children is showing positive results in some provinces, according to a recent study tracking employment trends.
Women with daycare-aged children are joining the work force in greater numbers than they were five years ago, according to the report from the Business Council of Alberta. And though economists caution that more time and data are needed to know for certain that the daycare program is behind the trend, the numbers suggest that mothers are now more empowered to join the work force.
“It’s not perfect, but [the data] certainly point to a fact that there has been a real and positive increase in participation of women with young children,” said Alicia Planincic, director of policy and economics at the Business Council of Alberta, who last summer wrote the report assessing Labour Force Survey data trends for Canadian women.
The federal government said its affordable child-care program launched in 2021 was meant to address an economic and social issue, and that greater access “enables parents, particularly mothers, to reach their full economic potential.”
Child-care costs have come down since the program was introduced, and are supposed to fall to $10 a day, though the rollout has been inconsistent across provinces and plagued by access issues amid higher demand.
Despite some challenges with implementation, economists are seeing promising trends related to women’s ability to balance work and parent young children. Improving that balance has been pegged as a major challenge when it comes to closing the labour gap between men and women, as women’s careers are more likely to be affected by child-care duties than their male partners’.
Ms. Planincic’s research looked at Statistics Canada Labour Force Survey data related to women, comparing 2019 with 2024. She found that women with young children (up to the age of 5) in Manitoba, Ontario and Alberta saw disproportionate increases in labour force participation relative to other groups of women in those provinces.
The most noticeable difference was in Manitoba, where there was a 7-per-cent increase in women with young children participating in the labour force, versus a 1-per-cent increase among women overall in the province.
In Alberta, women with daycare-aged children were the only group that had an increase in work-force participation compared with all women in the work force.
Ms. Planincic said it’s not entirely clear why these work-force trends have varied across provinces – though at least in Alberta’s case, daycare prices were significantly higher before the program took effect, potentially explaining the increase of working mothers. “There are still a lot of questions that are worth digging into further,” Ms. Planincic said in an interview.
Even with the variations across the country, the pattern largely held up when looking at the most recent Labour Force Survey data to December, 2024, according to a similar analysis done by The Globe and Mail.
The data is limited, Ms. Planincic said, with a lack of information about the types of jobs women are doing, or whether they are working in part-time or full-time roles. She also highlighted that other factors could be contributing to the phenomenon, such as the rise of more flexible work arrangements, which may have enabled more women to work more while managing their child-care obligations – a point also raised by TD Economics researchers in a 2023 report.
Gordon Cleveland, an associate professor emeritus of economics at the University of Toronto, found a complementary pattern in numbers from CANSIM, Statscan’s database on various social and economic indicators.
Prof. Cleveland, who studies the economics of child care, compared the number of children up to the age of 5 who have employed mothers from 2019 to 2023, and found a noticeable increase over the four years. In 2019, 61 per cent of young children had employed mothers, and by 2023, the number had risen to just over 70 per cent.
He cautioned that while it’s too early to say with certainty that affordable child care is the reason for the increase, it’s a likely explanation for the pattern.
“That’s a big change over a short period of time, and the most likely culprit is the $10-a-day program. It’s hard to think of other culprits that would be able to explain that,” he said.
The federal program may be in its early stages, but there are also lessons about work-force participation that can be drawn from Quebec’s provincial child-care program, which was introduced nearly 20 years ago.
A Statscan report published in September, 2024, highlighted that Quebec has made the largest employment gains across provinces for single mothers – and the bump in working mothers coincided with the introduction of the province’s low-cost daycare program. From 1997 to 2023, employment for mothers in one-parent families in the province grew by 31 percentage points, the report said.
“While it is too soon to identify any shifts resulting from the implementation of the Canada-wide early learning and childcare system, which was launched in 2021, it is possible that patterns in labour market participation among mothers will evolve as access to affordable childcare increases across the country,” Statscan said in its report.
Ms. Planincic said she’ll be watching to see how the numbers change if child-care staffing challenges and long wait-lists are addressed and more families are able to participate.
“Is this the maximum, or is this actually going to increase further over the next couple years, is my big question,” she said.