By John Francis
Tobermory’s Primary Place child care centre is maxxed out. They can’t take any more young children.
But it’s not just the size of the facility that is causing the problem. It’s also lack of staff.
It’s the same at Bruce Peninsula Family Centre in Lion’s Head.
This is not a trivial problem. It makes life very difficult — for young entrepreneurs, for fledgeling businesses, for our community’s future tradesmen and service workers.
And make no mistake — the future of any community is its young families. Without them, a community will dwindle until it’s an outpost of lonely seniors with nobody to blow their driveways so they can drive an hour to Wiarton to see their doctor…
No young families — no nurses.
No young families — no carpenters.
No young families — nobody to blow your driveway or cut your lawn or ring up your groceries.
The United Way says that the living wage in Grey-Bruce in 2025 was $25.60 per hour for a single person. They point out that Grey-Bruce is Ontario’s second most expensive place to live; only Toronto is more expensive.
But even that fails to capture what MNBP’s young workers and families have to contend with.
You can get a fully detached house in Grey County for barely half of what you’d pay in MNBP.
Realtor.ca’s listings for Grey County include four liveable houses at under $200,000 and two full pages of listings under $350,000, many of them in town and village settings.
In MNBP, there are no houses in Lion’s Head or Tobermory under $420,000. The bottom of the second page of listings is $599,000.
Call it an extra $150,000 in purchase price. Amortize that over 20 years at current interest rates and it increases the monthly mortgage payment by about $1,000. An average full-time worker puts in approximately 165 hours per month. That extra $1,000 on the mortgage payment requires them to earn an extra $6 per hour over what it would cost in Grey County.
And that’s AFTER taxes. Compensate for 20% income tax and you’d need an extra $7.50 per hour before taxes.
But it’s actually worse than that, because it’s pretty much impossible to live in MNBP without a car. That adds several thousand dollars more to the living wage requirement.
That would put the living wage up over $30 per hour, wouldn’t it?
Does the average child care job pay over $30 per hour?
Hard “no” on that. Not even close.
This is the part where we act all surprised that there’s a shortage of child care workers in MNBP. (While we’re at it, let’s all act surprised that Golden Dawn has a hard time finding Personal Care Workers and nursing assistants! But that’s another rant for another time.)
So shall we wring our hands in agony? Clutch our pearls in distress?
Or fix the problem?
What would a solution look like?
Tobermory’s flagship businesses have solved their personnel problems with a two-pronged solution: pay a living wage and provide temporary housing for summer staff.
If our daycare centres need to recruit extra help in summer, they are going to need to be competitive with other employers in their communities — which means paying a living wage and perhaps offering staff housing.
But they sure aren’t going to manage that out of currently available revenues. They are going to need more funding, perhaps even a fair bit of it.
That said, daycare is a pretty small line item on municipal and county budgets.
The solution is pretty simple — just top up the salaries. Pay a living wage. Now, you can’t do that on a user pay basis, but the system already has subsidies baked in.
The very high property values in MNBP make it difficult for young families to own a house — or even rent one — but those same high property values generate a lot more property taxes for Bruce County.
So use that tax windfall to top up the wages of everybody who works in daycare in MNBP. Pay them what they’re worth and suddenly you’d find a lot more people willing to move here and work in that sector.
Making sure that daycare is available to all young parents who need it might be the most important single contribution Bruce County could make to economic development in MNBP.
It would sure be a lot more productive than funding fancy façades and perpendicular signage. A lot of businesses in Tobermory (Lion’s Head too? I wonder…) are closed in the evening, despite the steady foot traffic going by.
They can’t get staff. Why? Because their would-be staff can’t get child care.
Make it easy for young people to move here and economic development will take care of itself.
