Who does Canada’s care work, and why they are paid as little as possible for it
Canada's care workforce is underpaid. That fact is widely acknowledged and rarely explained. The usual explanations, the sector is labour-intensive and therefore structurally low-margin, or care work is a calling and therefore exempt from normal wage logic, are not explanations at all. They are descriptions of the outcome dressed up as causes. The actual cause is older and less comfortable: care work is underpaid because it was historically performed by women in households without compensation, and the transition of that work into the paid economy has not changed the underlying logic of its valuation. The Canadian Labour Congress's 2026 synthesis puts the paid care economy at a minimum of 13% of GDP and 22% of all employment. Unpaid care, the care of children, aging parents, and people with disabilities performed in households without payment, contributes an estimated C$860 billion annually, or roughly 37% of GDP. That exceeds the combined contribution of manufacturing, wholesale trade, and retail. None of it appears in the national accounts in ways that drive policy or investment decisions.
The workforce that provides paid care in Canada is predominantly female. It is disproportionately composed of Indigenous women, racialized women, immigrant and migrant women, and women with disabilities. This is not incidental. It is the mechanism through which historical devaluation persists into the present. When the work of caring for people was performed primarily by women in households without compensation, it was invisible to economic accounting. When it moved into the paid labour market, it carried its historical wage floor with it. The workers who entered the paid care sector, disproportionately women from communities already subject to wage discrimination, encountered pay structures that had been set when the assumption was that this work cost nothing. That is what the care sector wage gap is. It is not a market outcome. It is a policy legacy.
The economic case for changing this is not primarily about justice, though it is that. It is about whether Canada can build the care workforce its aging population requires. Canada's 65+ population will reach 23% of the total by 2031, up from 17% now. The demand for elder care, home care, long-term care, and associated healthcare services will grow faster than the overall economy for at least two decades regardless of policy choices. This is not a forecast. It is the mechanical consequence of age cohort demographics established decades ago. Every year that passes without a substantial expansion of Canada's care workforce creates a larger gap between what the aging population will need and what the system will be able to provide. And a care workforce that cannot recruit and retain people because the wages are insufficient will not be expanded by political announcement. Only pay that competes with other careers requiring comparable education and skill will expand it.
The childcare evidence is instructive precisely because it was not predicted. Quebec's C$5-a-day programme, begun in 1997, produced a natural experiment that lasted a quarter century before the federal government acted on it. Statistics Canada's analysis documents that Quebec mothers in single-parent families saw employment grow by 31 percentage points between 1997 and 2023, the largest provincial increase in the country. The Centre for Future Work's assessment of the federal C$30 billion ELCC system estimates that it added approximately 110,000 women to the labour force and may have prevented Canada from experiencing a technical recession in the second half of 2023. This was not the expected argument for universal childcare. The expected argument was about children's outcomes and gender equality. The demonstrated argument turns out to be macroeconomic: affordable childcare functions as infrastructure, and infrastructure investment generates returns through economic output, not just through social benefit.
The same logic applies to elder care and has not yet been applied. Canada is building toward an elder care crisis with the same combination of demographic certainty and policy inadequacy that preceded the housing crisis. Home care, the most cost-effective and most preferred form of elder care, is underfunded relative to demand in every province. Long-term care emerged from the pandemic with structural inadequacies visible at the worst possible moment: chronic understaffing, inadequate infection control, and a governance framework that mixed private for-profit, private non-profit, and public ownership in ways that created fragmented accountability. The investments required to avoid replicating this crisis in the 2030s, when the baby boom cohort reaches its highest-need years, need to begin now. Canada has approximately five to eight years to substantially expand its elder care capacity before the demographic curve peaks.
The immigration dimension deserves direct treatment because the federal government's current immigration reduction policy and its care sector ambitions are in active conflict. Canada's care workforce depends heavily on immigrants and temporary foreign workers in personal support, long-term care, and early childhood roles. The decision to cut temporary resident numbers to below 5% of population by 2027 is already producing staffing shortfalls that care sector employers flagged to IRCC in Q1 2026. A government that simultaneously commits to expanding elder care capacity and reduces the immigration pathways through which that capacity could be staffed is not squaring a circle. It is accepting a contradiction that the care system will not be able to absorb quietly.
The federal Sectoral Table on the Care Economy, established in Budget 2024, represents the first time the federal government has formally organized the care economy as a coherent policy domain rather than a collection of separate program lines. The quality of its recommendations, expected in Q3 2026, will indicate whether the government has internalized the infrastructure-investment framing or whether it will continue to treat care expansion as a social expenditure to be calibrated by fiscal constraint rather than by economic return. The demographic mathematics are unforgiving. The window for building ahead of the curve rather than behind it is narrow.