Costly gaps found in updated $10-a-day childcare agreement

Months after Saskatchewan signed the new $10-a-day childcare agreement, families are learning their children don’t qualify.

Back in November 2025, the provincial government announced it had reached an agreement with Ottawa to continue offering the daily $10 price for daycare.

While this announcement came later than expected, the delay brought new information – now children turning six in kindergarten would qualify for the lower cost childcare until the end of their school year. Previously, it only included those five and under.

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This age expansion comes into effect on April 1. However, it comes with a caveat.

While the previous understanding was that six-year-old kindergartners who aged out of the $10 childcare would re-qualify at the start of next month, that’s not the case, based on an email written by the government on Mar. 2 and shared by the NDP.

“We now understand that as the new agreement begins April 1, only those children who are still receiving the benefit prior to April 1 will be eligible,” the email read.

That means if a kindergartner turned or will turn six between January to March 2026, that child is permanently ineligible for the $10 childcare since they aged up under the conditions of the existing agreement.

“If their birthday was before that April 1, they’re just stuck paying that full fee until July when they age out of the program,” said Cara Werner, chair of Child Care Now Saskatchewan.

According to NDP leader Carla Beck, families would’ve been counting on that affordable childcare, but are now left paying a costly price in the range of “$30 to $85 a day.”

In total, Werner said families will be “paying thousands of dollars more than what they should,” and it’ll likely impact between 200 to 500 families across the province.

Beck characterized the change as, “certainly not as advertised and not what families were budgeting for this year.”

For Beck, this caveat contradicts what Saskatchewan’s Minister of Education Everett Hindley advertised after the deal was signed late last year.

“We were one of the last provinces to sign on to the extension of the Child Care Agreement that Minister Hindley said, ‘It’s just, we’ve got to get the best deal possible,’” she said.

“It’s now clear that the minister didn’t understand what had been signed on to,” Beck said.

Better than what we have

Hindley said even if the new deal isn’t perfect, it’s better than the existing one.

“The current agreement we have right now has no change, has no provision for children who turn the age of six,” he said.

According to Hindley, the provincial government spent months trying to get in contact with the federal government and start negotiations on the $10-a-day childcare agreement. When Ottawa finally responded, he said negotiations moved quickly and the government “worked very hard” to expand the age eligibility.

Hindley clarified that this gap was not an oversight.

“This is the best deal that we were able to obtain,” he said.

– with files from 980 CJME’s Lisa Schick and Jacob Bamhour