The Problem Canada’s $6 Billion Workforce Plan Forgot to Address

Last week, the federal government announced a $6 billion investment to train and support 100,000 new skilled trades workers. It was called one of the flagship measures of the 2026 Spring Economic Update, a bold response to Canada’s urgent need for construction workers, infrastructure builders, and the tradespeople who will literally build this country’s future.

It is a meaningful commitment, however, it is incomplete.

Because buried in the fine print of every apprenticeship, every training program, and every recruitment push aimed at getting more Canadians into the trades is a problem nobody in that announcement addressed: childcare.

The research is clear: the policy response hasn’t caught up

Research from the Labourers’ International Union of North America (LiUNA) Local 506 Training Centre in Ontario identified the lack of accessible childcare as one of the most significant barriers to entering the skilled trades, ranking above skills gaps, wages, and general interest in the field. And the problem extends well beyond traditional trades. Nurses, paramedics, early childhood educators, and countless other shift-based professionals face the same wall every day. Standard daycare centres operate roughly 7 a.m. to 6 p.m., Monday to Friday, which works well if your job does too, and this is assuming you can actually secure a spot.

The people Canada is counting on to build its housing, staff its hospitals, and keep its infrastructure running are rarely that lucky. When the childcare system is designed around a 9-to-5 workforce and the workforce we’re trying to grow operates well outside those hours, something has to give, and too often, what gives is a person’s career.

The trades want more women, but that won’t happen without solving childcare first

When childcare falls through, it is disproportionately women who absorb the impact, taking the job with more predictable hours, reducing their days, deferring the apprenticeship, or stepping back from the workforce altogether.

This matters enormously in the context of the trades, an industry that has spent years trying to recruit and retain more women. An inclusive trades workforce and an unsolved childcare problem cannot coexist, and it’s time we stopped treating them as separate conversations.

There’s another crisis hiding in this one

Here’s what rarely gets mentioned when we talk about childcare access: the people we’re counting on to staff daycare centres are leaving.

Canada is in the middle of a significant Early Childhood Educator (ECE) workforce crisis. Early childhood educators are underpaid, overworked, and burning out at alarming rates. Centres are struggling to hire and retain qualified staff, which means even the childcare spaces that exist aren’t always fully operational. We are trying to expand a system while the professionals who run it are walking out the door.

And yet, those same professionals have options that the current conversation never acknowledges. Until now.

What if the answer to the ECE staffing crisis was already in front of us?

Many ECEs leave centre-based work not because they’ve lost their passion for early childhood education, but because the conditions don’t reflect their expertise. They are qualified professionals being paid entry-level wages with little autonomy over their environment, their hours, or the families they serve.

Home daycare ownership changes that equation entirely.

An ECE who opens a home daycare sets their own rates. They design their own program. They choose their hours, their enrollment, and the kind of care environment they want to create. They bring all of their professional training into a setting where it is applied on their own terms. For many, this isn’t a step down from centre-based work, but rather a step into something more sustainable, more autonomous, and more fairly compensated.

From a system perspective, every qualified ECE who opens a home daycare represents new childcare capacity entering a market that is desperately short of it, and by its nature tends to be more flexible and more responsive to the families who need early drop-offs, part-time arrangements, or care that simply doesn’t fit neatly into standard centre hours. Like skilled trades workers.

We should be actively encouraging this path, not as a workaround, but as a legitimate, well-supported professional choice for the educators and childcare providers who helped build this sector and who deserve far better than the conditions that are currently driving them out of it.

The infrastructure to support them is here

For many ECEs considering opening their own home daycare, the barrier isn’t desire or qualification, but visibility. Building a client base, getting in front of the right families, and signalling availability in a way that reaches the parents who need them most has historically required operating under an agency, or relying on word of mouth and a lot of luck.

Her Yes Club was built to change that, giving home daycare professionals a platform to independently manage their business, list their services, set their terms, and connect directly with families searching for care that fits their lives. Her Yes Club is a business management tool, built for a profession that has operated without it for far too long, and the families searching for flexible, trusted care are already there looking.

The bottom line: the $6 billion plan needs a childcare strategy to match

A goal of 100,000 new skilled trades workers is ambitious and achievable, but not if the parents entering those training programs can’t find childcare that works around a job site schedule. When more qualified childcare professionals are empowered to offer care on their own terms and supported by a platform that gives them real visibility, the childcare gap starts to close in a way that actually makes sense for everyone: the childcare providers and educators, the families, and the growing workforce.

Her Yes Club was built on the belief that home daycare professionals deserve the same visibility and legitimacy as any other part of the childcare system. If you’re an ECE or childcare professional ready to run your own program, or a family trying to find care that works around your schedule, we’re here for you. Download it from the App Store or Google Play Store to get started today.