The $30B child care challenge: building a new program from the ground up
CBC
Ottawa has struck child care deals with various provinces — but experts say building a viable national child care system means turning a market into a government program and low-wage child care workers into a new professional class.
The federal government announced in April that it's offering roughly $30 billion over five years to help provinces offset the costs of a national early learning and child care program.
The plan is to halve the cost of child care in the first year and bring daily fees down to $10 a day per child in participating provinces five years from now.
Deals have been struck with every province and territory but Ontario and Nunavut — but those deals are just the start.
"The way child care has evolved in Canada is that it's a market, it's not really a system," said Martha Friendly, executive director of the Childcare Resource and Research Unit, a childcare advocacy group. "The consensus is that the market really doesn't work for child care in different ways."
Friendly said the legacy of private, market-based child care services is low wages for child care workers. Wages still account for 85 to 90 per cent of a non-profit child care provider's total budget, she said.
According to a report by the Childcare Resource and Research Unit, the median annual wage for a Canadian child care worker in 2015 was $34,192; that figure varied from province to province. The median wage was highest in the Northwest Territories at $42,862; New Brunswick child care workers earned the least — an average of $27,817.
Wages in Quebec are now going to be much higher than the 2015 average of $35,022 a year because child care workers in the province walked off the job to protest low pay. In December, the Quebec government agreed to a deal that will see early learning educators get a pay bump of 18 per cent and support staff receive a raise of 12.5 per cent.
"The problem in the child care market situation that we have is that, essentially, the parent fees are pitted against the wages and working conditions of the workforce," Friendly said.
To bring fees down without government help would require cutting already low wages for workers, making staff retention even more problematic.
According to the same report, monthly child care fees in 2018 ranged from a high of $1,207 in Toronto down to $179 a month in Quebec, where a provincial system — much like the one the federal government is trying to build — already exists.
"There are a number of people ... almost all women, young women, who decide that they want to be early childhood educators and they are entering colleges to get certification," said Morna Ballantyne, executive director of Child Care Now.
"The problem is that once they graduate and they ... look around for employment, that's when it really hits them that most places are not paying a living wage. Having been trained, they might go into [child care] but the problem is that they don't stay."
Experts say that a national child care program must be built on a wage grid that establishes minimum wages and sets out how they'll increase over time.
P.E.I.'s Public Schools Branch is looking for 50 substitute bus drivers, and it'll be recruiting at three job fairs on Saturday, June 8. The job fairs are located at the Atlantic Superstore in Montague, Royalty Crossing in Charlottetown, and the bus parking lot of Three Oaks Senior High in Summerside. All three run from 9 a.m. until noon. Dave Gillis, the director of transportation and risk management for the Public Schools Branch, said the number of substitute drivers they're hiring isn't unusual. "We are always looking for more. Our drivers tend to have an older demographic," he said.