It is an exciting time when you find out you are expecting. There is a lot to think about, including names, how you are going to tell people, figuring out your birth plan, and now immediately deciding if you are going to require care for the baby if you decide to go back to work.
Currently, parents are advised to go to the OneList website, where they can sign up their children for the wait lists at multiple daycare centres. You can search by hours, days you need care, location, and any other particular things your child might need.
The theory is that this alleviates the parent's need to call and sign up on each daycare’s list individually.
This OneList was introduced in 2014 as a requirement from the Ministry of Education to help support fair and equitable access to licensed child care. At that time Early Years, Child Care, Lambton Child and Family network, and community partners were consulted and OneList was selected as Lambton’s centralized child care wait list system.
The issue some parents are having is there is no guarantee signing up will get you a space, and the wait list, no matter when or where you sign your child up, is long.
The system works with each individual centre to get the names in order by sign-up date from the County. That goes into making up their locations wait list. They cannot see any other wait lists, and with their own determining factors affecting their wait list, it's hard for them to give an accurate estimate on how long it will take for someone to get a spot.
According to Lambton County, there are currently just over 3,000 children on the One List looking for care. This number includes infants, toddlers, preschoolers, and school-age children.
This number has doubled in the last five to 10 years.
“Sitting in my role 10 years ago as a child care caseworker, a fee subsidy caseworker, a lot of our day-to-day duties would be assisting families that were switching child care centers,” says County of Lambton assistant supervisor of childcare, Jackie Sanderson.
“You would have that ability, where now we don't see that. Once you have a space, it's very rare that you would, in that time frame of that child's age, be able to switch to a different provider.”
Kate LeClair found out she was pregnant with her first child in October 2018 and when she was about six months along, she applied to the OneList looking for care when she would return to work after a 12-month maternity leave.
“I did get a call for my daughter when she was around 18 months old. So from six months pregnant to 18 months, I didn’t obtain a spot for two years,’ says LeClair.
“That’s still quite long, but obviously that is prior to Covid, prior to the $10 a day government announcement program that started, or at least initiated.”
In 2021 the Liberal Government decided to implement the Canada Wide Early Learning Child Care Plan (CWELCC) which would see parents paying $10 a day for daycare by 2026. Currently in Ontario, the cost for licensed daycare is about half of what it was, sitting in and around $20 per day.
At the time Prime Minister Justin Trudeau had this to say about the program, “investing in early child learning and establishing Canada-wide child care will make life more affordable for families, create jobs, strengthen our economy, get women back into the workforce, and grow the middle class. We will get it done.”
It’s this $10 a day promise that saw an increase in applications to licensed care.
“There are simply not enough spaces for all the children who need care,” says London Bridge Executive Director Angela Woodburn.
“Part of the reason is that there is a shortage of Early Childhood Educators (ECE) across the province and much of that has to do with the historically low wages for ECEs.”
Currently, Lambton County is trying to alleviate this problem.
One solution is offering a one-year fast-track program with the local college.
“We started to work with our partners at Lambton College, with the deans, and they developed an early childhood education one-year fast-track program,” says Lambton County manager of children’s services, Kim Godin.
“It was after hours, so unqualified childcare staff that wanted to get their credentials to increase their wage were able to apply for this opportunity. We sponsored it, so it was no cash out of hand.”
This idea would allow daycare workers the opportunity to work during the day while not having to take a two-year college course. The first year’s graduating class finished in February, with more students in the program now, and another intake of 20 in 2025. This will in theory infuse another 60 ECE staff into the County’s system.
And the County has a plan for how to retain these workers after graduation,
“When anyone enrolls into the one-year fast-track program they sign a scholarship commitment letter…that they will work in Lambton County for two years,” explains Godin.
Maddie Parkin had her child in early 2020 and put them on the OneList about three days after birth. After talking to friends, she realized it was much too late.
All my friends were like, you should have applied when you found out you were pregnant,” says Parkin. Parkin looked around the County for care and initially planned to go back to work at 12 months.
“I hadn’t received a call and I told my work I wasn't sure if I would be back in 12 months,” says Parkin. “I finally got a call and it was only for part-time care…I had to say yes because I hoped that by the next year, we would be able to get an extra day or two or three. We had to rely on my mom, who had a blast…but it also wasn’t the plan for us to have to rely so heavily on my mom’s care on a day-to-day basis.”
In Canada, parents can take either a 12-month leave or an 18-month leave. With the majority taking a 12-month leave, this puts a strain on the availability of an infant spot.
Because of this, there are a lot of contributing factors to getting your baby a spot.
“In an infant room it is one educator for three kids,” explains Nicole Blanchette, the executive director at La Ribambelle.
“But in a toddler [room] it is one educator for five kids. And in a preschool, there is one educator for eight. So that’s why the infant rooms are often impacted. Because if we take our staff to operate the infant room, then we have two educators and are servicing six kids. When we can use the two educators to open the preschool room we can service 16 kids.”
Blanchette says that because of the shortage of educators, they are trying to cater to the maximum amount of children, which is directly impacting a parent who wants to return to work after 12 months.
“Women who really need to get back to work after a year, don’t know where to put their kids,” says Blanchette.
“It’s really affecting women. Those are the phone calls we get. ‘I need to get back to work, there’s no childcare spaces, what am I going to do?’ Economically women are highly affected and we see it in our phone calls.”
Lindsay Marshall found out she was pregnant with her daughter in February 2020 and put her on the OneList before she was 18 months.
“I knew it was bad, but not as bad as it is,” says Marshall.
“I had family watching her and I was off for maternity leave so I didn’t jump the gun thinking it wouldn’t be as difficult as it was, I was like I will look into when I’m halfway through my mat leave and put her on the list.”
She ended up having her mom continue to care for her child as she returned to work. When her daughter was school-age, she used the OneList again to put her in before and after-school care.
“It was an absolute nightmare,” says Marshall.
Marshall felt the site was unorganized, pages wouldn’t load, and it would say there were errors when there weren't any obvious ones. Marshall also faced a common before and after school care problem, assuming that it is part of the school since it is run in the school when in actuality it is all done through the OneList.
“It was email after email, jumping through hoops trying to explain to them why I needed it when I needed it, what times I needed it for, and I finally got the OK for it middle of July,” says Marshall.
This was going above and beyond the OneList to get her child care. Marshall’s story is similar to many that you read on Facebook Mommy groups. In actuality, many of the daycare centres have their amendments when the OneList is downloaded on their end. According to the County, “each agency has the ability to have a ‘priority’ waitlist.
This could be staff members needing care in order to report to work or a family that already has a sibling in care. No one should be calling directly and getting a space outside of OneList.
“If somebody registered to start as of Sept. 18, and someone registered a month before that but needed care right away we give them the priority,” says Varsha Kulkarni, agency supervisor with Wee Watch.
Wee Watch is a network of licensed home daycare providers, so Kulkarni says their wait list runs differently than others since spot numbers change frequently and you can have different ages in the same home. Their ratio is one provider for every five or six kids.
“The operation isn’t at all like daycare centres like they know how many spots and enrolment they have in one room since they know how many staff members they will have,” explains Kulkarni.
For French language centres like La Ribambelle, they also give priority to French language families, while over at London Bridge, they have something called guaranteed enrollment.
“One of the things that we do is we can guarantee a certain number of spaces in September each year,” says Woodburn.
“That is based on the number of children that leave childcare and move on to school in September, they start junior kindergarten. But once all those spaces are full, space availability becomes very limited and unpredictable. We have what we call guaranteed enrollment for start dates that are more than two months in the future…We will put out an offer for a family, they pay $500 which is a non-refundable fee, which guarantees their space and that fee is applied towards their tuition when they start.”
What London Bridge found is that families were putting their names on a bunch of lists, and sometimes when they would call it would be slightly before their desired start date, so this was a way to guarantee parents that their children would have a space when they were ready to start.
“They feel good, they have a space, they don’t have to worry about it anymore and for us, it’s applied to their first month’s tuition,” says Woodburn.
LeClair was able to take advantage of guaranteed enrollment for her third child when they needed daycare. There was a gap between when her second child left and when her third would start so the sibling rule wouldn’t apply.
“I knew they were one program that had the guaranteed enrollment. I put down the deposit to be able to get my daughter a spot for January. I was able to go around the system by giving that deposit to get her spot,” explains LeClair.
Because of these ‘exceptions’, a misconception about the OneList is that if you are at the top of the list you are next to be called, but in actuality, it all comes down to the age of the child, the variables, and the spaces available.
“You could be number one on the list but if you’re an infant and you want June but we don’t have a space for you, there might be a preschooler that is tenth on the list and we know we are going to have that spot in September, then we might offer them a space and you can pay your guaranteed enrollment and it goes towards your first months tuition,” says Woodburn.
The County explains that allowing parents to see where they are on the OneList isn’t an option since there are so many internal factors to consider. They don’t want to give families false hope or information. This is why contacting parents is left to the childcare centres themselves. And with spaces at a premium, it’s not surprising that families who are able to do guaranteed enrollment might have to pay for the space even if they aren’t using it right away to keep it.
Woodburn says it is smart to put your child on the list as soon as possible and keep in mind the variables that play a factor.
“It does not guarantee you will be offered a space…families will ask their numerical position but they don’t understand it is subject to all the variables,” says Woodburn.
She says you should be flexible with your start date and keep your information updated on the OneList and remove it once you’ve found care.
“I often reach out to the families and request that if they are placed and don't intend to move child care centers, to please login and update their information,” says Sanderson.
“The only reason we do that is it is really important to have accurate information. It's just such a spotlight right now with Canada-wide and we want to be able to ensure we're meeting the needs of the community.”
Sanderson reiterates the importance of updating or taking your child off the list because OneList does not remove your child's name, in case you are looking to switch centres. The removal or updating is entirely up to the parent. And Godin explains that the OneList is updated nightly by each daycare centre so that they have an accurate list each day.
While the OneList has been used for the last 10 years in Lambton County, that doesn’t mean the County is set on continuing to use this method. In the Child Care and Early Years Service System Plan for 2024-2028, brought to council in February of this year, the focus was on increasing the number of daycare spaces, recruiting and retaining new ECE employees, and exploring options for an effective childcare registry that is universal and enhances the communication experience for families.
“We believe that we're on track to continue to meet this need probably in the next couple of years,” says Godin.
This “effective child care registry that is universal and enhances the communication experience for families” is something parents would like to see.
“I think it would be nice if it would be commonplace for centres to tell you where you are on their wait lists. So you know, this is what I’m planning for, I'm 56 on this waitlist and it’s the closest to me but the next closest one I’m third on the wait list. That would be nice to know and have the ability to find that out on the website…so people can plan,” suggests Parkin.
Marshall would love to see these systems brought into place, even if just for the employees at these centres.
“I was a PSW for over 12 years, it’s the same thing, you get tired and you don’t want to go to work. You are so short-staffed and it just becomes mentally frustrating,” says Marshall.
LeClair, who had three children go through the OneList, is optimistic things could change, but ultimately suggests parents apply as soon as they are expecting.
“Truly, apply for it as soon as you find out…and just be patient.”