WINNIPEG -- Manitoba's Conservative party is promising to put a dent in the province's long wait list for child-care spots by boosting funding for home-based daycares.

Candidate Ian Wishart said if the party is elected on April 19, it will help fund 550 new home daycare spaces this year. The Conservatives would increase funding for licenced homes by about 70 per cent for infants and toddlers and by 15 per cent for school-age children, he said.

They would also review regulations necessary for daycare operators to make the rules less cumbersome and would work with schools to establish daycare centres, he said.

"It's clear old approaches have not worked and it's time for some new approaches," Wishart said Thursday.

Manitoba has some of the lowest daycare fees in Canada, but there is a huge shortage of spaces. There are about 12,000 children currently on a wait list.

Susan Prentice, a sociology professor at the University of Manitoba who specializes in child care, said focusing on home daycares would do little to help those in need.

Prentice said the number of home daycares nationwide has declined steadily. Manitoba has roughly 400 home daycares and it's unlikely the Tories would be able to buck the national trend and boost that number by 20 per cent in a year, she said.

People who do operate a home daycare tend to do so only for a few years, which makes it a less stable form of child care, she added.

"Putting the stress on family home child care is not the preferred way to think about responding to the child-care needs of most Manitobans," Prentice said. "It's really tinkering with the margins of the problem and not addressing the core of the issue of access."

Last year, Wishart said the Conservatives were interested in creating more licenced private daycare spaces as a way to improve accessibility for parents. The idea was sharply criticized by the Canadian Union for Public Employees, which suggested that putting child care into the hands of for-profit operators would "increase fees, reduce wages and cut corners."

At the child-care announcement Thursday, Wishart said he wasn't there to talk about private, for-profit centres.

"We're not particularly today making any announcements that relate to them. There has always been the opportunity for for-profit (centres), but the ones we are talking about today are the in-home ones."

While the backlog for spaces has grown during the NDP's 17 years in office, the party is promising to expand daycare spaces and lower fees if it's re-elected.

In January, Premier Greg Selinger said his party would phase out the minimum $2-a-day fee for low-income earners and would lower fees that can range up to $28 a day for other families, so they would spend no more than 10 per cent of their income on child care.

The party has also said it would build more spaces in schools and retain good workers by increasing wages for early childhood educators.

The Conservatives "have not presented a real plan for accessible childcare," the party said in a statement.

"We believe in supporting home-based daycare, but you can't eliminate a 12,000 space wait list four spaces at a time."

The Liberals have said they would bring in all-day kindergarten to take some of the pressure off daycares. The party has also said it would look at attaching daycares to senior's centres and creating an income-based fee structure.