Coalition-Building and the Fight for Universal Child Care in Ontario, Canada, 1981-2022

This thesis constructed a chronological account of the advocacy work of the Ontario Coalition for Better Child Care (OCBCC) from 1981 until 2022, evaluating how effectively the OCBCC advanced an inclusive vision of child care that served all families and child care workers. This account of the OCBCC was based on a descriptive analysis of news articles, Hansard transcripts, organizational documents, and interviews with former OCBCC executive, OFL and CUPE staffers, child care researchers, and Registered Early Childhood Educators (RECEs). I also used Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) to identify discourses used by government to justify child care reform and the OCBCC in its campaigning for a public child care system. I found that although the OCBCC campaigned for reforms that benefitted low-income racialized families, including campaigning for expanding child care subsidies, the OCBCC did not engage in more explicit anti-racist campaigning to demand culturally appropriate and anti-racist child care. Similarly, although the OCBCC campaigned to improve the wages and working conditions of child care workers as a highly feminized and racially diverse profession, the OCBCC initially opposed supporting child care’s integration with the education system in the 1980s and more disruptive forms of direct action in support of child care workers. I discovered that even as neoliberal reform, including austerity, deregulation, and marketization, undermined the actualization of the OCBCC’s child care objectives, neoliberalism and its ongoing threat also had a conservatizing effect on the OCBCC and its affiliates. This occasionally undermined the coalition’s ability to advance an inclusive child care system. The defunding of women’s advocacy groups by the federal government left the OCBCC with fewer resources to support the equitable inclusion of marginalized workers and parents within the OCBCC’s decision-making executive bodies. Austerity and its threat also conditioned the OCBCC’s non-profit child care operator affiliates to oppose reform beneficial to child care workers because of concerns over rising labor costs and lost revenue in the absence of sufficient direct operational funding from scarcity-minded governments.

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