Parents speak out after Toronto daycare leaves national $10-a-day program

Two months after Josclyn Johnson's 18-month-old daughter started daycare, the centre announced it was leaving the national $10-a-day program, which has left Johnson considering a line of credit to pay the new $2,310 monthly fee or leaving the workforce to care for her child.

"We're sort of forced to stay in the daycare for now," Johnson said. She has not yet been able to find a space in another daycare offering the reduced fees.

"I work contract to contract, so while it feels like a waste to be sending her to a daycare right now, when I technically could do the care here, if I want to continue to grow in my career..." she trailed off, choking up.

"Today just feels pretty hopeless."

Sunnyside Day Care, with two west-end Toronto locations, represents two out of 14 centres in the city that have given notice to leave the $10-a-day system since the province announced a long-awaited new funding formula this summer. The national program subsidizes fees for parents, and in Ontario they have so far been cut at least in half, with a goal of getting to $10 a day by 2026.

Parents like Johnson have been paying $928 per month for a space in the toddler room.

"As a final note, hope remains, and perhaps (the program) will continue to evolve and return in a new and improved way," the daycare wrote in a Nov. 1 letter to parents announcing it was withdrawing as of Jan. 1.

New fees would be up to $2,565 per month for an infant space, the centre said, based on its pre-pandemic fees with "deferred annual increases relative to inflation" factored in.

But the parents at Sunnyside are mad, and they are not accepting the news quietly. They have sent the daycare a letter of their own, demanding a meeting and an explanation of why they feel they cannot stay in the $10-a-day program.

"This abrupt change, coupled with the tone of your communication, has conveyed a lack of empathy and transparency that falls far short of what we expect from a child-care centre so integral to this community," the dozens of parents wrote.

"We understand that there are challenges related to participation in (the program), but such a drastic decision merits an open, thorough dialogue with the families whose lives will be affected. Instead, your communication was conspicuously vague and unacceptably final."

The parents didn't stop there. The leadership structure of the daycare has always been unclear, they said, so they pulled corporation profile reports from a provincial database.

Two people — Holton Hunter and John McCallum — are listed as the active directors of Sunnyside. They are also listed as the active directors of Curious Caterpillars, whose two locations are also leaving the $10-a-day program.

Curious Caterpillars, care of John McCallum, is listed as the registrant for two other centres leaving the program — Alphabet Station and Alphabet Academy.