The University of Ottawa is without an on-campus daycare for the first time in decades after the Bernadette Child Care Centre closed this spring, leaving dozens of families searching for new childcare arrangements.
The daycare was forced to close in April after plans moved ahead to demolish the Brooks Complex, where the centre had operated for years, as part of a major campus redevelopment. Parents and advocates say the loss has made it significantly harder for student parents to balance school, work and raising young children.
“It was providing an essential service for the 49 families who used Bernadette,” said Natalie Bruvels, who chaired the daycare’s board when it closed. “To lose it is a massive disruption in people’s lives.”
Bruvels said the majority of families using the daycare were University of Ottawa students.
“It sent everybody, but especially the students, into a very stressful situation,” she said. “It was also very disruptive to the children themselves, who had formed close relationships with the staff at the centre.”
Bruvels said there had been hope the daycare could remain on campus.
Last fall, she said, the board was working with university officials to relocate the daycare to a property at 200 Lees Ave., a site she believed could have accommodated the centre and even allowed it to expand. But those discussions ended abruptly in December.
“We were told there were safety concerns,” Bruvels said. “But we never really received clarification.”
She said the sudden end to those discussions left the board with too little time to find another suitable location before it had to vacate Brooks.
In addition to housing a daycare, the Brooks Complex was also a student residence. The university provided space to the daycare rent-free, but the residence dorms have been vacant since 2018 after the school closed them because of mould and construction defects, calling the building “unfit for habitation.”
Today, parts of the sprawling complex along King Edward Avenue are boarded up. Weeds are growing through cracked concrete, and sections of the property remain closed off as preparations continue for its planned demolition later this summer.
The university plans to redevelop the Brooks site along with other areas of campus into a project that will include 2,600 residence beds, new classrooms and a dining hall. All phases of the project are expected to be completed by 2032, according to the school.
“This is the largest construction project undertaken in the University of Ottawa’s history and the largest student residence project currently underway in Canada,” university spokesperson Jesse Robichaud said in a statement to the Ottawa Citizen.
Robichaud said the daycare’s closure was “an unfortunate consequence” of the Brooks redevelopment.
He said the university had worked since 2021 to help the daycare find another location, exploring several potential sites on and near campus.
“We engaged in extensive conversations with the City of Ottawa and other property owners to thoroughly assess several alternative sites, both on campus and near the main campus,” Robichaud said.
“We were disappointed to conclude that there are no available spaces on campus suitable for running a childcare service in the short and medium term.”
The university added that it had established a working group to examine longer-term childcare needs, including the possibility of creating permanent childcare spaces on campus.
In the meantime, the university said, it has provided financial assistance to affected students and signed an agreement with Andrew Fleck Children’s Services that will progressively reserve 24 additional childcare spaces beginning in September, building on 10 spaces already provided to families affected by the closure.
The university said the Andrew Fleck agreement would provide 34 childcare spaces for members of the university community, “greater than” the number of university-affiliated families served by Bernadette at the time it closed.
But Bruvels says the university’s math doesn’t add up.
She said Bernadette had licensed capacity for 49 children before it shut down and added the Andrew Fleck spaces were spread across off-campus locations rather than replacing the university’s only on-campus daycare.
“If the university’s framing the 34 spaces as progress, it’s less than what we had a few months ago,” she said. “More importantly, it’s not on campus.”
She said on-campus childcare could not simply be replaced by spaces scattered across the city because many parents walked their children to daycare before heading to class or to work.
For Carolina Sena, that convenience disappeared almost overnight.
Her two-year-old son attended Bernadette and, like many parents, she believed the daycare would be relocated as the Brooks redevelopment project moved forward.
“I never thought it was going to close,” she said. “I thought it would be relocated.”
Instead, she found herself searching for childcare in the middle of the spring.
“We looked everywhere,” Sena said. “March and April is not a good time to find daycare.”
With help from Bernadette staff, Sena eventually secured a space for her son at a Glebe daycare. She describes it as a wonderful daycare, but one that involves a long daily commute.
“What used to be a 10-minute walk is now a bus ride with a stroller,” she said. “It’s stressful.”
Sena is still hoping to find a spot closer to her home, but waitlists for daycares in Sandy Hill remain long.
As the Brooks Complex awaits demolition, Bruvels hopes the university does not lose sight of the families who have depended on the daycare.
“The demand has been there for years,” she said. “Forty-nine spaces was nowhere near enough and we definitely need a daycare on this campus.”
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