Toronto-area parents struggle to find before and after school care as more workers return to office

Crayons are seen on a table at a new child care facility operated by the YMCA, in North Vancouver, B.C., on Thursday, July 3, 2025. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Darryl Dyck

As more workers across the Greater Toronto Area return to the office on a fulltime basis, some parents are scrambling to find licensed before and after school care for their children.

Several organizations, school boards and city programs across the region that provide before and after care told CTV News Toronto that they have waitlists of sometimes hundreds of kids at a time and that demand has been steadily growing in recent years.

The waitlists are putting parents in impossible situations forced to choose between their jobs and finding care for their children, Carolyn Ferns, public policy co-ordinator for Ontario Coalition for Better Child Care, told CTV News Toronto on Thursday.

“It’s become like a perfect storm,” she said. “It means a lot of stress for families as they’re scrambling to try to find and make childcare arrangements. They’re calling multiple centers. They’re trying to make multiple arrangements to make things work for them. What we’ve heard from centres is that their wait lists are very long and families are sometimes not able to find before and after school spaces at all. “

All 60,000 Ontario Public Service workers will be required to be in the office five days a week starting in January 2026. Several banks have also asked their workers to return to the office a minimum of four days a week.

Ferns said parents have had a particularly hard time looking for before school care when there are very few recreational programs available.

“I have a child who is school-aged, and I see in the school yard before school, lots of children who are dropped off just super early, and it’s getting cold. This isn’t really what we want for our children,” Ferns said.

“We have school buildings there. They’re heated, they’re warm, they’re large buildings that could be providing childcare, but they’re not.”

Ferns said for many childcare providers it is not a space issue, but rather a significant staffing shortage of early childhood educators and childcare workers to help expand the before and after care programs for school-aged children.

Nakiema Palmer, the director of Early Years and Child Care Services in Peel Region, also stated that her region, like the rest of Ontario, has had significant challenges in finding staff, which has contributed to the extensive waitlists.

“It’s one of the main challenges that we hear from childcare providers, their ability to staff up in order to respond to the demand for before and after care spaces,” Palmer told CTV News Toronto.

“When providers struggle with staff. It means that they’re not able to open as many classrooms in order to meet the need or the demand from families. Without staffing, you’re not able to operate those spaces for families.”

PLASP, the non-profit organization that provides most licensed programs in the region, told CTV News Toronto that struggles with a shortage of qualified staff, which has contributed to its waitlists.

Palmer said there are currently 1,470 children on waiting lists for before and after school care for the 2024-25 school year in Peel Region. She, however, cautioned that the number includes families who may have put their child on more than one program waiting list, and that the region does not have a centralized wait lists and relies on the 342 licensed sites to provide the data.

“We’re asking providers to report the data to us, even though we know it’s not an exact science in the way that we’re collecting it, because it does give us a sense of where we might need to work with the school boards and the childcare providers to increase services for families,” Palmer said.

“Wait lists impact families when they’re reliant on these programs. It means that they’re not able to find the care that best meets their needs.”

Palmer said the demand for before and after school care has steadily increased year-over-year since the COVID-19 pandemic, and that over the last year, the region had seen a nine per cent growth in enrollment.

Ferns said the Canada-Wide Early Learning and Child Care (CWELCC) program, which capped preschool childcare fees at $22 a day, supported families with younger children but excluded school-age care - making before and after school care costs much higher.

Not only are parents struggling to find before and after school care, she said, but they are also dealing with costly programs.

The City of Toronto told CTV News Toronto that their afterschool recreation program, which has 48 sites across the region, has waitlists of more than 200 people at any given time.

“Our understanding is that waitlists for before and after school care have increased across many operators,” the city said in an emailed statement on Thursday.

“Demand is increasing overall. That is why we added 200 spaces in 2025, by establishing two new locations for 100 participants, and by accommodating an additional 100 new participants into existing sites from waitlists across the system.”

The City of Toronto wrote in a recent report that one “unintended consequence of CWELCC has been the fragmentation of the childcare system with programs serving children aged zero to five facing a separate set of requirements and funding guidelines than programs exclusively serving children aged six to 12.”

The city states that as the cost of providing childcare rises due to inflation, operators have had no choice but to increase school-age fees to cover those costs. Between 2021 and 2025, the median daily school-age fee increased by 11 per cent while all other age groups saw decreases ranging from 49 per cent to 75 per cent over the same period, the city stated.

The city told CTV News Toronto that a voluntary survey for licensed childcare operators in Toronto conducted in 2024 received 594 responses and most responders who operate before and after school programs reported that their waitlists had become much or somewhat longer since the introduction of the CWELCC program in March 2022.

The YMCA of Greater Toronto also told CTV News Toronto that it has waitlists of more than 100 kids at any given time – a number, which they say, is manageable for their organization.

“We’ve done everything possible to expand wherever the demand is needed and are pretty responsive to families,” YMCA spokeswoman Linda Cottes said.

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