Families in Nova Scotia eventually won’t have to worry about putting their children on dozens of daycare waitlists in hopes of securing child care.

Work is now underway to build an online child-care portal that will include a centralized daycare waitlist run by the province, the legislature’s public accounts committee heard on Wednesday.

It’s a program operators and advocates have been pushing for for years.

“It’ll allow families to register their child and see exactly what’s available to them in a single portal, instead of that chasing around phone numbers, and leaving messages on people’s voicemails, and hoping that somebody has added you to a list,” Tracey Barbrick, deputy minister of Education and Early Childhood Development, told reporters after the meeting.

Barbrick said the “Child Care Connect” site will be a digital portal where both service providers and families will register.

She told committee members it will also be a place for operators to submit documents and certifications to the department, replacing the “cumbersome reporting system” that currently exists. 

The Education Department currently has no sense of how many families are waiting for a daycare spot, something Miia Suokonautio with the YWCA Halifax says has been a major hurdle for providers like herself when making decisions about where they should expand services and build new centres.

“We know that data-driven solutions are the key,” she said.

Suokonautio said the creation of an online portal should have been one of the first steps back in 2021 when the province first began transforming the child-care sector under a bilateral agreement with Ottawa.

“We are living in a world where you can order a bag of chips and have it brought to your door and have it gone through your credit card,” she said. 

“The fact that for child care, you still have to go to a website, and go through an alphabetical list, and call them … and get your name written in pencil in a spiral ring Hilroy binder does not make any sense at all.”

Liberal MLA Becky Druhan, who previously served as education minister in Premier Tim Houston’s cabinet, said the creation of an online portal and centralized waitlist was always part of the plan, but she’s concerned about how long it’s taking.

“The current structure is inefficient and it doesn’t give a good picture across the province as to availability of child care,” Druhan told reporters. 

“I think it’s something that is overdue at this stage and it does make me worry in light of the failure to meet $10-a-day [daycare] … that this is no longer a priority of government.” 

Portal to launch in 2027

Paul Wozney, the NDP education critic, also said the program is “long overdue,” but he worries about how it will be executed, pointing to concerns with transparency surrounding the province’s need-a-family-practice registry.

“Nova Scotians have some degree of anxiety around centralized waitlists with this government,” he said. “There’s some trust issues … but if it’s done well, it has potential to offer tremendous positive impact for families.”

Barbrick said a request for proposals for a contractor to create the portal has closed and applications are now being evaluated. She could not say how many bids it received.

She said the province has put aside $8.2 million for the project, and it will be operational in 2027 with the waitlist component to come in 2028.

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