I think much of your question has been covered, however, I'd like to add some clarification.

Being self - employed and paying into EI does not give you the same coverage you have when contributing as an employee. Before signing up for it, make sure it's actually beneficial for you to have based on your personal situation.

http://www.servicecanada.gc.ca/eng/s...ew/index.shtml

EI for the self-employed does not cover instances where you have no clients. When you have no children you will not receive EI. All businesses have times when they are booming and times when they are lean. This is not a payment to cover the lean times.

What it does give you is maternity benefits, parental benefits, sickness benefits, compassionate care benefits and some income if you have to quit your business to care for a critically ill child of your own.

So for me, I am mid 40's now and single so the maternity benefits are no good to me. Likewise, the parental benefits are less helpful since mine are late teens. Although the compassionate care benefits might be nice, with my extended family in another country, the reality is it will fall to my siblings to provide that as I can't leave my life here for weeks on end, even in this situation. As you can see, the benefits for me, are none but you have to assess if payment gives you any coverage you would use based on your situation.


In terms of the percentage of home expenses, the it varies depending on the set up.

What we are meant to do is for shared family/daycare space, work out what square footage is used for the day care as a percentage of the entire home. Then multiply that by (hours of business / 24 hours in a day) and multiply by (days open per week/7 days a week).

So - I have a split level. Every single room in my house is used by the day care and the family.

100% x (12 hours a day open/24 hours a day) x (open 5 days a week out of the seven day)
100% x (12/24) x (5/7) = 35%

So for a home which shares every single square foot of the property with day care and which is open 12 hours a day during the week but closed at weekends, the max the tax man would expect to see is a claim of 35%. Many would be less than that.

The only time it would be higher, is if you had square footage which was completely dedicated to the day care and never used by the family as then you wouldn't be dividing those cost by number of days a week you are open and hours per day you are open. Every hour of every day that day care space would be solely for day care and unoccupied after closing. In that situation, you would take your entire sq footage and divide it by the day care square footage and use that percentage to determine how much of your home expenses could be written off against the day care.

You might find this helpful. It's produced by CRA and is a guide for what you can claim when using your home for day care. http://www.cra-arc.gc.ca/E/pub/tg/p134/p134-13e.pdf