You're correct; there is a trade-off. When you reduce the cost, the demand goes up, and then there's this ripple effect that impacts so many other areas of the industry.
The difficult part with the way this program is run is that education—in this case, early childhood education and care—is a provincial or territorial jurisdiction. All I can look at is what the federal government money is being used for and whether or not the federal government is receiving the information to show taxpayers that value for money was received.
When it comes to the additional spaces, a little less than half of the 250,000, which is the goal for this program, have been created, and there are just two years left to the five-year horizon. I do believe there is a risk that not all the spots will be created.
The federal government wasn't gathering information on whether or not new spots that were created had been occupied by parents. In fact, they had to turn to reports from Statistics Canada to find out whether or not parents were using those spots. What they found is that in many cases, parents said that the spots were not in their community, or they didn't meet their work schedule, or they didn't have the support that their children needed, if they had additional needs.
There's a real gap in information, and the federal government needs to do better to work together with the provinces and territories, so that Canada can really speak to the opportunities or the trade-offs of this program and then talk about the successes or not.