David Eby Got Attacked for His $10-a-Day CWELCC Spot. Ontario's Directors Earn $254,000 and Nobody Is Asking.

British Columbia NDP leader David Eby is on the defensive. During a snap provincial election, Conservatives attacked him for having his children enrolled in B.C.'s $10-a-day child care program despite earning more than $226,000 as premier. His response: the centre was already a $10-a-day site when his child enrolled, he donated the difference, and the program is universal by design.

The outrage is valid. If you earn $226,000, you do not need a fee subsidy to make child care affordable. You need market rates to come down, or income-tested support to be better targeted, or both. What you do not need is a universal fee reduction that is meaningful for a family earning $50,000 and amounts to rounding error on a six-figure public salary. The Conservatives are scoring political points, but the underlying critique stands.

In Ontario, nobody is applying that same logic to the people who administer the program. They should be.

What Ontario's Service System Managers Earn

Ontario's 47 CMSMs and DSSABs are the Service System Managers responsible for administering CWELCC in their jurisdictions. They approve operating plans, conduct cost reviews, process OIOF submissions, make funding determinations, and oversee compliance for every enrolled child care centre in their area. The 2025 Ontario sunshine list, which captures every public sector employee earning over $100,000, shows what their senior staff earn:

• City of Toronto (Children's Services): highest director $254,519; five staff at director level
• City of Ottawa: director $199,558; umbrella/GM $253,756
• Regional Municipality of York: highest umbrella/GM $234,433
• County of Wellington: umbrella/GM $228,936
• Regional Municipality of Halton: director $228,505
• City of Windsor: director $213,200
• Regional Municipality of Peel: director $209,332
• Regional Municipality of Waterloo: director $202,949
• Regional Municipality of Durham: director $190,495
• City of Hamilton: director $188,575
• County of Simcoe: director $186,742
• Regional Municipality of Niagara: director $186,298

Every one of these individuals works for an institution that administers CWELCC fee caps. Every one of them qualifies for those same fee caps if their child is enrolled at a participating centre in their area. The fee cap is universal. There is no income test at the point of service.

The Math That Makes the Outrage Concrete

The CWELCC fee cap in Ontario currently sits at $22 per day. At the maximum 261 service days per year, that is $5,742 annually per child. Here is what that figure represents as a share of household income at different salary levels:

• $50,000 household income: $5,742 is 11.5% of gross annual income
• $100,000 (the sunshine list threshold): 5.7%
• $150,000: 3.8%
• $200,000: 2.9%
• $254,519 (top Toronto director): 2.3%

These are single-income figures. Most households at the director level have a second earner. A household with two professionals in this range could easily exceed $350,000 to $400,000 combined. The $5,742 annual cost becomes a trivially small share of household income.

For comparison: a non-CWELCC infant care space in Toronto runs approximately $80 to $100 per day at market rates. At $100 per day, the annual cost is $26,100. For a Toronto director earning $254,519, that works out to 10.3% of salary. For the Halton director at $228,505, it is 11.4%. That proportional burden is almost exactly what a $50,000 family bears under the subsidized CWELCC rate. The director who qualifies for the fee cap is paying 2.3% of their income for a benefit that would cost a lower-income family 11.5%. That is not progressive policy. That is a program designed without income sensitivity at the access point, administered by institutions whose senior staff are among its most comfortable beneficiaries.

The FOI Request Nobody Has Filed

These questions are answerable. Under the Municipal Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act, any person can submit a request to a CMSM or DSSAB. The right questions are straightforward:

• What percentage of SSM employees, including director-level and manager-level staff, have children enrolled at CWELCC-participating centres within the SSM's jurisdiction?
• What was the average waitlist duration for SSM employees who secured a CWELCC spot, compared to the general population in the same area?
• Do SSM employees, who by virtue of their roles have established professional relationships with participating operators and centre directors, experience meaningfully shorter waitlist times than the public?

The data to answer these questions may not be compiled in a way that makes them easy to produce. Child care enrolment records sit with individual centres, and SSMs may not track which families on waitlists are their own employees. But that gap is itself a finding. The sector has spent enormous energy on operator compliance, OIOF submissions, SFR reviews, and eligible cost determinations. It has spent none examining whether the administrators of the system have any preferential relationship to its benefits. The FOI requests have not been filed. They should be.

The Simpler Alternative Nobody in Power Has Incentive to Propose

The most efficient child care funding model is also the least discussed: income-tested credits or grants paid directly to families. No fee caps. No cost-based funding formula. No SFR. No OIOF. No eligible cost determinations. No rolling top-up reconciliation. No profit and surplus caps. Operators price at market. Families with low household incomes receive a rebate that makes that market price genuinely accessible. Families earning $250,000 receive nothing.

The administrative burden of this model flows through existing tax infrastructure, not through 47 CMSMs and DSSABs. It does not require five directors at the City of Toronto Children's Services at the salary levels disclosed above, or a GM in Ottawa at $253,756, or any of the manager-level staff in the sunshine list table to review cost allocations for individual child care centres. The benefit is targeted. The bureaucracy is minimal. The access problem the advocates correctly identify is actually solved, because the support reaches families who cannot currently afford care rather than flowing universally to families at every income level.

The reason this alternative is not on the table is not that it would fail families. It is that it would eliminate the institutional role of the SSMs in child care delivery. The bureaucracy that administers CWELCC is the same bureaucracy that has a direct interest in CWELCC remaining a system that requires bureaucratic administration. That conflict does not make anyone a villain. It makes the system exactly as self-reinforcing as most large administrative programs become over time.

At What Expense for Operators

The B.C. conversation focuses on the demand side: who benefits, who gets access, who is left out. The Ontario conversation needs to add the supply side: what do operators absorb so that everyone, including the highest-earning public servants in children's services, can access a fee-capped spot?

CWELCC participation requires operators to give up pricing autonomy entirely, submit to annual SFR reviews where every cost is tested against the three-part attributable, appropriate, and reasonable standard, operate within a funding formula set by the Ministry and locally administered by the same SSMs whose staff may be accessing the fee cap, accept a profit and surplus cap that adjusts downward when centres spend below their Program Cost Allocation, absorb the gap when collective agreement wage increases outpace the Ministry's benchmark assumptions, and navigate go-forward correction rules that mean an underfunded allocation for January cannot be recovered in June.

This is the cost operators bear for a system that delivers a fee reduction equally to a single parent on assistance and to a director of children's services with a household income above $300,000. That is not a design flaw that slipped through. It is the result of choosing a supply-side fee cap model over a demand-side income-tested one. The choice was made by the same institutions that benefit most comfortably from it.

The Question Worth Asking

Sharon Gregson, a child care advocate in B.C., put the Eby controversy in its proper frame: the news is not the premier's household income. The news is that the system has not expanded fast enough for the benefit to reach everyone who needs it. That is correct. And it applies directly to Ontario.

But the Ontario version of the story is more structurally troubling than a politician using his own program. The people administering CWELCC, earning six-figure and near-quarter-million salaries, are the ones setting the terms under which 6,000 child care centres operate. They are capping what operators can earn. They are deciding which costs are eligible. They are processing adjustments on a go-forward basis only. And they are doing all of this while qualifying, without any means test, for the same fee reduction that a family earning $50,000 needs and a family earning $250,000 does not.

How many of Ontario's SSM directors and managers have children in CWELCC care? How long did they wait for a spot? The answer to those questions, through FOI requests that any person can file today, would be more informative than anything in this year's OIOF cycle.

Source: Farrah Merali, 'B.C. NDP Leader David Eby gets $10-a-day child care. Opponents are outraged,' CBC News, October 13, 2026. Salary data: Ontario Public Sector Salary Disclosure 2025, ontario.ca.