What a school-age day costs, and who is counting

Twenty-four dollars and thirty-seven cents.

That is what a licensed centre in Ontario charges, on average, for the hours on either side of a school day: the stretch between the last bell and a parent getting off shift, for a child between six and twelve. A licensed home agency charges $27.36. For a kindergarten child in the same building, being picked up from the same door, the figure is $13.18.

The gap is not an accident. Canada’s fee reduction applies to children under six and stops there. Ontario’s Early Years and Child Care Annual Report 2025 is the first place all three of those numbers sit on one page.

Between 24 August and 8 September, four provinces did something to before- and after-school care. For a part of the sector that is rarely counted at all, three weeks produced an unusual amount of counting.

British Columbia funded room. About 1,200 new licensed before- and after-school spaces will open across 22 school districts over the next year, made by repurposing space schools already have: $5 million in capital, $20 million in operating funding over three years, $2 million to get programs started, and a separate $2.9-million fund for programs the school boards run themselves. We covered that announcement on 1 September.

Manitoba took fees off 4,100 children from 3,000 low-income families. Eligibility runs from 12 weeks to 12 years, so school-age children are in it. How many of the 4,100 they are, the province did not say.

New Brunswick arrived at school-age care from a direction nobody was watching. Its new screen-time rules cap licensed child care at 30 minutes, none at all for children under two, and none at all in any program running three hours or less. That last clause is not written about school-age care. It describes almost all of it.

What those same three weeks did not produce is the part worth sitting with.

Ontario holds 193,470 school-age spaces. They grew 1.8 per cent in the latest year, slower than any other age band in the province. The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives released its national survey of child care fees on 25 August; it does not track school-age fees at all. And an open letter signed by 22 prominent Canadians, calling early childhood education essential infrastructure, runs its full length without using the words before and after school once.

Four provinces moved. Twenty-two people signed their names to a letter about what this country owes its children. Between all of them, the six-year-old waiting in the hallway at 3:15 was worth $24.37 a day and no mention.

Sources: GOVERNMENT OF ONTARIO – Ontario’s Early Years and Child Care Annual Report 2025 · GOVERNMENT OF B.C. – Opening more child care spaces in schools · GOVERNMENT OF MANITOBA – Manitoba Government Makes Child Care Free for 4,100 Children · GOVERNMENT OF NEW BRUNSWICK – Screen time and cellphones in licensed early learning and child care facilities and schools