Executive summary
This report presents the methods and findings of the Licensed Child Care Demand and Affordability Study commissioned by the City of Toronto. The challenges of how to set appropriate targets for growing Toronto's licensed child care system, and what policies will best support that growth are not easy to solve. The Licensed Child Care Demand and Affordability Study provides information that can help the City of Toronto begin to navigate these planning challenges.
The study uses data from Statistics Canada and the City of Toronto to build an economic model of demand for licensed child care in 2015. Models were built for two separate age groups: ages 0 to 5 and ages 6 to 9. These models were used to better understand parental decisions for using licensed child care compared to other arrangements. The study also created two measures of affordability for licensed child care. More information about the methods and data sets used to build these models can be found in the Technical Report.
These models can be updated by the City of Toronto on an ongoing basis to predict demand for licensed child care based on changing conditions, such as new federal and provincial funding, changing demographics, or as new data becomes available (such as the 2016 Census data).