The Data Confirms … We Have a Problem

A new report from United Way Centraide Canada should get the attention of policymakers, employers and boards across the country. This report focuses primarily on Canada’s nonprofit care economy: the community organizations and workers providing social, care and support services to children, older adults, people with disabilities, newcomers and people experiencing poverty or homelessness.

We often hear that we need more workforce data before we can fully understand the challenges facing healthcare, community services and the broader care economy. While this is not the healthcare workforce that I normally write about, many of the pressures are strikingly familiar.

An important message in Making the Case for the Care Economy: A Data Roadmap for Canada’s Nonprofit Labour Force is that “The sector has more evidence than it often uses.”

Data is collected by different organizations, for different purposes, and often sits in disconnected systems. There certainly are gaps. And none of the data is perfect. But the report makes a compelling case that we already know enough to act. And the numbers are difficult to ignore.

The Warning Signs Are Clear

In key community-care occupations, vacancies have increased 140% since 2015.

Over the same period, health occupation vacancies increased 173%. By comparison, vacancies across occupations outside community care and health increased by only 4%. This is not one profession or one region distorting the picture. Vacancies at least doubled across every major community-care occupation group examined in the report.

Looking ahead, 45% of the occupations most closely associated with nonprofit care are projected to face a strong labour-shortage risk by 2033. Among other occupations, that figure is just 6%.

Then there is retention: 26% of workers in social services say they are likely to leave their job within six months.

At the same time, community nonprofit workers earn approximately 31% less than the economy-wide average, and wage growth in core care occupations has lagged behind the broader labour market.

Demand is also rising: more than 70% of charities report that demand for their services exceeds their capacity.

And one of the report’s most striking findings is outside the paid workforce entirely. Declining volunteer participation in social services is estimated to have resulted in the loss of approximately $7 billion in annual volunteer capacity, equivalent to roughly 115,000 full-time positions.

Taken together, these are not isolated workforce indicators; they are signals from a system under growing pressure.

What Might Workforce Instability Be Costing?

The United Way report does not attempt to calculate the national cost of employee turnover. But this is exactly where I think we need to push the analysis further.

The report identifies the social assistance industry, which employed more than 531,000 Canadians in 2021, as a useful, although imperfect, proxy for the community-care workforce. It also reports that 26% of social-services workers say they are likely or very likely to voluntarily leave their job within six months.

That does not mean 26% will actually leave. Intention to leave and actual turnover are not the same thing. But it does point to a significant retention risk.

So let’s do a simple thought experiment. Note: these are rough illustrative estimates by Raesoleil, not figures produced by United Way Centraide Canada. The two figures also come from different but overlapping populations, so this is a scenario designed to illustrate scale, not an estimate of actual national turnover.

Suppose replacing a departing care worker costs an organization just $15,000, using a deliberately conservative illustrative replacement-cost assumption from Work Institute.

If 26% of a 531,000-person workforce were considering leaving, that would represent approximately 138,000 workers. Now assume that only a fraction of those stated intentions translated into actual departures:

If just one-quarter actually left, that would mean approximately 34,500 departures, with replacement costs of about $518 million.
If half actually left, that would mean approximately 69,000 departures, with replacement costs of just over $1 billion.
If three-quarters actually left, the replacement cost would approach $1.6 billion.

These are not definitive national estimates. They are intended to show the possible order of magnitude.

And importantly, the $15,000 figure is only a conservative replacement-cost proxy. Replacement costs can include advertising, screening, management time, onboarding, orientation, training and lost productivity while a new employee becomes fully effective.

High turnover can also create additional organizational costs through overtime, agency or temporary staffing, absenteeism and burnout, increased workload on remaining employees, and greater supervisory and management time spent managing workforce instability. And even that still does not capture the broader social and economic consequences, including:

reduced or cancelled services
downstream costs when care and community services are unavailable
increased risk to client safety, service quality and outcomes
additional turnover when already-strained employees absorb more work
increasing pressure on governments and funders to sustain an unstable system

The full cost is therefore almost certainly larger than the conservative replacement-cost estimates suggest. And this is happening while vacancies in key community-care occupations have already increased 140% since 2015. So we are dealing with an existing vacancy problem, a significant retention risk, and a projected shortage problem happening at the same time.

We may not yet be able to put one precise national price tag on that instability. But even conservative scenarios suggest that replacing only a fraction of the workers who are considering leaving could cost hundreds of millions of dollars, and potentially more than $1 billion.

And that is before we begin to account for the cost of the vacancies that already exist.

Workforce instability is not simply an HR problem. It is an economic problem.

The Data is Not the Problem

One of the strongest conclusions in the United Way report is that we do not need to wait for perfect data before moving forward. Other workforce strategies have succeeded by using available evidence to estimate gaps, identify pressure points and guide action.

That should be our mindset here as well. Canada could spend years refining definitions, building datasets and commissioning new studies. We already know enough to begin:

demand exceeds capacity
vacancies are rising
compensation is falling behind
many workers are considering leaving
turnover and vacancies carry very real costs.

So What Should Happen Next?

United Way Centraide Canada closes the report with seven recommendations to strengthen the national evidence base and coordinate how it is used:

Create a clear national picture of the nonprofit care workforce
Use consistent methods to identify nonprofit-relevant workers
Track a small set of workforce and job-quality indicators over time
Invest in analytical capacity
Use the evidence to inform UWCC’s labour force strategy
Create a collaborative space to move the work forward
Protect strong existing datasets and invest where real gaps remain

Those are important foundations. But better evidence only matters if it changes decisions.

I would add five actions for governments, boards, employers and leaders that can begin now.

1. Use the data we already have and connect it

Canada does not need more disconnected data collection. We need the institutions and organizations already responsible for collecting, analyzing and disseminating workforce information to work together.

Bring the data together.
Agree on the measures that matter.
Establish shared baselines.
Make the information accessible and useful to the people making decisions.

There will always be opportunities to improve the data. But the goal should be better decisions, not simply better reports. And we don’t want a lack of data to hold us back any longer. Let’s get to action.

2. Boards can start asking different questions

Boards have an important role in changing how workforce sustainability is viewed. If you are on a Board of Directors, ask your organization(s) to start attaching dollars to workforce instability:

What is turnover costing?
What are vacancies costing?
What are overtime, absenteeism, agency staffing and repeated recruitment costing?

Then establish baselines to compare and bring those measures into regular governance conversations.

Hold leaders accountable not simply for financial and operational results, but for the leadership behaviours that shape conditions of work. Where leadership behaviours need to improve, support that improvement through coaching and development, not blame.

Retention should be prioritized and treated as an organizational performance indicator. If leadership, culture and employee experience improve, we should expect to see measurable improvement in retention.

3. Invest in the conditions that make people want to stay

Wellbeing cannot be reduced to wellness programs that ask employees to cope better with unhealthy environments. Organizations need to invest in the conditions of work themselves. That means leadership development, better communication, flexibility, trust and psychological safety.

It also means allowing meaningful employee involvement in decisions that affect them, real recognition and gratitude, building supportive teams and managers. Organizations do not need to implement everything at once. Tangible strategies already exist.

Start somewhere. Set a baseline. Measure what changes. Coach leaders. Learn. Improve.

Then keep going.

4. Change how we value this work and these workers

For too long, investments in workforce wellbeing have been framed primarily as a cost. Something organizations should do if budgets allow. Something “nice to have.”

We need to think about this differently. Not only is it the right thing to do – there is also a compelling financial argument. Poor conditions of work show up in turnover, vacancies, absenteeism, overtime, disability, recruitment costs, lost productivity and reduced service capacity.

Conversely, there is growing evidence that investments in leadership, wellbeing and healthier workplace cultures can produce measurable returns.

So instead of asking: “Can we afford to invest in our workforce?”

We should be asking: “Can we afford not to?”

This also requires changing how we talk about care work itself.

Workers are not simply labour costs to be managed. They create value by delivering crucial services that our health, social and community systems depend on. And when we fail to create conditions that allow them to stay and thrive, there is a cost to organizations, governments, communities and ultimately all of us.

Wellbeing is not separate from performance – it is one of the conditions that makes performance possible.

If we want organizations to think differently about workforce investment, governments also need to create the conditions that support that shift.

5. Governments need to set the tone at the top

Federal, provincial, territorial and local governments all shape the environments in which these care organizations operate.

The tone at the top shapes what organizations and workers understand to be valued. So do funding models, incentives, performance measures and the outcomes leaders are held accountable for. Governments should engage employers, workers, researchers and communities in the right conversations and provide the guidance, resources and infrastructure that make improvement possible.

We need to reward and incent the behaviours and outcomes we want to see. We also need to be careful not to create systems that punish organizations for acknowledging workforce problems.

If we want employers to openly examine turnover, culture, psychological safety and leadership practices, they need to know that identifying a problem is the beginning of improvement, not an invitation to blame.

We will not build a sustainable care workforce through compliance alone – it needs to be built collaboratively.

Let’s Begin

The United Way Centraide Canada report makes a strong case that Canada already has more workforce evidence than we sometimes acknowledge.

We may also know enough to stop studying some of these problems as though they are new. The data is telling us something. The people working in these systems have been telling us something for years.

The question now is: how do we move from evidence to action?

Are leaders, employers, boards, and governments prepared to lead a different approach to this workforce challenge?

Raesoleil’s calculations above are illustrative estimates designed to demonstrate the potential scale of workforce replacement costs. They are not findings of United Way Centraide Canada and should not be interpreted as a definitive estimate of the economic cost of turnover in Canada’s nonprofit care workforce.

Source: United Way Centraide Canada, Making the Case for the Care Economy: A Data Roadmap for Canada’s Nonprofit Labour Force, August 2026, accessed on Sept 9, 2026 at: https://www.unitedway.ca/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/MakingtheCasefortheCareEconomy.pdf

Work Institute estimates that replacing a single employee can cost 33% or more of their annual salary – they use a value of $15K US per employee departure to simplify the calculation for illustrative purposes. This paper uses $15,000 as a deliberately conservative illustrative Canadian-dollar assumption inspired by the Work Institute benchmark. Work Institute 2020 Retention Report, accessed on Sept 10, 2026 at: https://info.workinstitute.com/hubfs/2020%20Retention%20Report/Work%20Institutes%202020%20Retention%20Report.pdf