Saskatoon child care application not approved as province shifts to opening rural, northern spots

Kinza Nisar says she applied in January and was told last month the ministry was not approving new regulated child care licenses in her area. (Keenan Sorokan/CTV News)

A Saskatoon woman hoping to reopen a daycare out of her home is struggling to understand how her application was not accepted.

Kinza Nisar ran a daycare in River Heights alongside her mother and sister for about one year before her sister sought an education.

With the daycare being under her sister’s name, the trio took a break from running the daycare and had to reapply to the Ministry of Education to become a regulated home-based child care option once again.

Nisar says she applied in January and was told last month the ministry was not approving new regulated child care licenses in her area.

“I was very mad and a little sad because we have been running a licensed daycare for like a year, and we had invested a lot of money and time and effort into it,” she said Thursday.

She says for 15 families in her immediate area, they will now have to seek child care elsewhere with the future of her daycare now uncertain.

“We had to tell them, ‘oh, I’m sorry.’ We have to close it, and we are not getting the license back,” Nisar said.

What’s puzzling to Nisar is the number of parents and operators who keep speaking about growing waitlists across the city.

“The licensing process is pretty time consuming,” she said. “You have to get a lot of documents... and they’re very particular about stuff like the toys you have and the backyard — we had to get it all done.”

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In the letter dated June 23 to Nisar, the Ministry of Education said it is shifting focus from rapid expansion toward stabilization and long-term sustainability.

Priorities include opening new child care spaces in areas of greatest need, including communities without access to $10-a-day child care and in rural or northern areas.

The letter also said it will continue to include child care spaces in all new school construction projects and consider replacing child care spaces in communities when a provider closes.

NDP education critic Matt Love says this letter raises plenty of questions with concerns of growing regulated child care waitlists in Saskatoon becoming common.

“There’s a discrepancy between what the government has determined and what the reality is that people in Saskatchewan see each and every day,” he said. “And I think that’s why we’re asking this government to show their work. What data are they using to make these decisions? Because it certainly doesn’t align with the reality that has got from daycare providers and families.”

Love is calling on the province to review rejected license applications due to no demonstrated need. He wants to see the data being used to determine available spaces in a given community.

After years of scarcity of regulated child care spaces, Love finds it troubling the province is suddenly denying applications in the province’s largest city.

“I would say this is almost a new low for the government, the Ministry of Education, to say to good people willing to provide child care in a community where there’s a waitlist,” Love said. “And for the government of Saskatchewan to say, ‘no thanks, we don’t need your help.’ Absolutely wild.”

The province says Nisar’s application has not been rejected.

“Those qualified applicants have received written communication advising that their application will be held to allow for further assessment of need in their community or neighbourhood, which includes a review of the number of early learning and child care spaces in the community, as well as the utilization of those spaces,” the province said in a statement to CTV News.

As of May 31, the province says it created 93 per cent of the 28,000 child care spaces targeted in the original agreement signed with the federal government in 2023.