Manitoba needs 77,000 more daycare spaces to meet national benchmark: Child Care Coalition - CBC

Susan Prentice, a member of the Child Care Coalition of Manitoba and a University of Manitoba sociology professor, says Manitoba needs to add 23,000 infant and preschool spaces and 54,000 school-age spaces to hit the benchmark of 59 per cent coverage. (Adam Yadaoui/Radio-Canada)Social SharingAt least 77,000 more child-care spaces must be created in the province to meet a national access benchmark, the Child Care Coalition of Manitoba says.

"No Manitoba government has ever plainly declared how much child care we think our province needs," Susan Prentice, a sociology professor at the University of Manitoba and member of the coalition, said at a news conference Tuesday.

Other provinces have identified a 59 per cent child-care coverage rate — 5.9 spaces for every 10 children under age six — as the target, which has since become a national benchmark under the federal government's Canada-wide early learning and child care plan, she said.

In Manitoba, there are 29,475 preschool spaces and 15,107 school-age spaces for a total of 44,852, said the coalition, which used figures from 2024-25 and added 2025-26 figures it gathered via a freedom of information request.

That breaks down to about 33 per cent coverage for preschoolers and 13 per cent for school-age children, Prentice said. As a whole, Manitoba's child care covers about 22 per cent of its children.

The national average is 31 per cent, also well below the 59 per cent target, Prentice said.

For Manitoba to hit the mark, another 23,000 infant and preschool spaces and 54,000 school-age spaces are required, the coalition said at the news conference at the University of Winnipeg Student Association daycare.

Manitoba has made good progress in recent years toward making child care more accessible by introducing $10-a-day care, adding thousands of new spaces, increasing wages for early childhood educators and increasing operating funding for child-care centres, the coalition said.

But many families still face long waits and limited options, particularly for parents working evenings, weekends and rotating shifts, said Molly McCracken, coalition chair and Manitoba director with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.

A lack of child-care spaces impacts the provincial economy because parents and caregivers can't work if they need to stay home, she said.

She also called on the Manitoba government to radically adjust its approach to building new child-care spaces, saying it relies too much on parent volunteers to do the heavy lifting.

Under the current model, parent volunteers must fundraise 40 per cent of the capital costs of building new child-care spaces or renovating existing facilities.

Molly McCracken, chair of the Child Care Coalition of Manitoba, says the current model for creating new child-care spaces in the province saddles parents with the burden of raising hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars. (Adam Yadaoui/Radio-Canada)

“This saddles parents with the burden of raising hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars to get child care in their communities," McCracken said.

“We don’t ask parents to do this for schools, so why are we asking them to do it for child care?”

Creating thousands of new spaces would require capital, but it would also generate many jobs in construction and then in the early childhood education workforce, Prentice said.

"We will need to grow the ECE workforce by maybe 10,000 or so educators," she said.

All new spaces should be non-profit and public, she said.

"This child-care system would be for all families, so we're calling for more expanded-hours care."

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About one in four workers in Manitoba have non-standard hours, which means work starting before 7 a.m., ending later than 6 p.m., with rotating shifts and on weekends, Prentice said.

The rate is even higher for those employed in health care, hospitality, protective services, transportation, tourism and more, she said.

"All of us need to be sure there's spaces when and where we need them. So today, the Child Care Coalition of Manitoba is asking our province to aim high, to invest in the system that supports children, women, working families."

CBC News has reached out to the province for comment.