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Excerpt: "With wage increases planned for early childhood educators and the provincewide availability of full-day kindergarten this fall, your government is ensuring that every child in Ontario has the best possible start in life. It will implement Achieving Excellence, a plan to take public education in Ontario from great to excellent by continually improving learning, so that young people are prepared to lead in the global economy."

Excerpt: "Beginning July 2014, hundreds of thousands of Ontario families will receive another increase of up to $100 per child annually to their Ontario Child Benefit (OCB) payment. As a result of the 2013 and 2014 increases, an estimated 90,000 additional children in 46,000 more families are eligible for the OCB for the first time. With these increases, the benefit has more than doubled since 2008."

Excerpt: "The Childcare Establishment Locator lets you find contact information of all Québec childcare centres and daycare centres and see their location on a map. The locator indicates childcare services in operation and under development that the ministère de la Famille has authorized and that are expected to open within the next 18 months. The locator is updated every week."

Excerpt: "Booster seats will be mandatory for children under age seven, effective June 27. To help encourage parents to comply with the change, Saskatchewan Government Insurance (SGI) and Canadian Tire are working together to support child safety, offering coupons for a free booster seat to drivers when they’re caught without one."

Presented by Kerry McCuaig, June 23, 2014, Ringsted, Denmark.

Nordic leaders gathered in Copenhagen on June 23 to discuss how to create a good life for children through quality early childhood education. The Nordic approach of a good life, presents a different starting point to policy and program development. Kerry McCuaig with the Atkinson Centre attended the conference to share some Canadian innovations in ECE delivery and monitoring with participants.

Excerpt: "Education Minister Don Morgan announced that more than 500 new spaces are being allocated in eleven communities across Saskatchewan."

Minister Lafferty tabled a Junior Kindergarten Information Kit that provides background on Junior Kindergarten, the Government of the Northwest Territories’ (GNWT) financial investment in the education system, dedicated funding for Inclusive Schooling and the NWT’s Pupil-Teacher Ratio (PTR). The information kit also looked at the projected impact of implementing Junior Kindergarten on the two Yellowknife school boards, Yellowknife Catholic Schools (YCS) and Yellowknife Education District No. 1.

OCUFA: Professor Glen Jones on Higher Education and the 2014 provincial election.

Excerpt: "Can Ontario's universal full-day kindergarten program help to level the playing field? The list of possibilities is long: closing the gap of language experience of kids living in poverty, reaching all vulnerable kids, including those in the middle class, contributing support to families who need child care, and ensuring that care and education are combined in high quality programs that boost overall child development as well as academic skills and economic success. Research has shown that many of these goals can be accomplished by high quality universal early childhood programs."

Excerpt: "The bidding for child care in the Ontario election campaign started at $269-million with the Liberals, dropped to $100-million by the NDP and vanished by the time it got to the Tories. Surprisingly advocates don’t ask the NDP leader why she killed the budget to come back with $169-million less than what was initially on the table."

Excerpt: "On May 2, 2014, the Federal Court of Appeal unanimously upheld the findings of the Federal Court concerning an employer's obligation to provide workplace accommodation for an employee's childcare needs in Canada (Attorney General) v. Johnstone, a case that has garnered significant media attention. As the first decision from an appellate-level court on this issue in more than a decade, this ruling serves as the most authoritative statement to date on a difficult issue that has generated a lot of uncertainty for workplace participants."

Excerpt: "Last weekend, 83 kindergarten teachers graduated with their Bachelor of Education degree, which was an important milestone in the successful transition to a public full-day kindergarten program in our Island school system, says Education and Early Childhood Development Minister Alan McIsaac."