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The Conversation

In 2021, the Government of Canada committed to providing sustained funding to provinces and territories to expand access to more affordable child care. The ultimate goal is to create a Canada-wide early learning and child care plan to drive economic growth, support women’s workforce participation, and give every Canadian child a head start. Achieving these objectives requires a qualified early childhood education workforce. The early childhood education workforce is large, with 300,000 plus members representing more than1% of the working population. Workforce members can be found in many sectors, including licensed child care, health, education, family support, and settlement services. Every Canadian jurisdiction has legislation governing the provision of regulated, or licensed,1 child care services. This report focuses on those working in child care centres or group care. It provides a status report on today’s child care workforce and the challenges it faces, along with promising practices. It concludes with a series of recommendations. The intent is to draw attention to the centrality of educators in creating Canada’s newest social program and the policies and resources they require to make it a success.

Excerpt: "International Women’s Day gives us a moment of reflection on the status of women recognizing that achieving decent work conditions and gender equality in the workplace remain a challenge. The United Nations Day for Women’s Rights and International Peace declared on March 8th – this year’s theme is Invest in women: Accelerate progress. Early Learning and Child Care will see further progress if we invest more in the educators. On this International Women’s Day, we turn our lens to the working conditions of educators in early learning and child care recognizing that educators still earn less than the provincial average with extremely low rates of unionization. Progress is being made in the working conditions with the introduction of publicly funded pension plans in some early learning programs. The addition of over 80,000 new spaces under Canada-Wide Early Learning and Child Care Agreements (CWELCC) has created $ 10.00 per day affordable spaces for families. With a central focus on affordability and expansion of access, CWELCC has largely ignored the growing workforce crisis. With cursory attention to the working conditions of educators in some jurisdictions, many increases in licensed spaces are not operational due staff shortages."

Excerpt: "This is not another column about wages in licensed child care. Instead, we take a step outside that inner circle to consider the people who train early childhood educators. College faculty are not a group that earns ready sympathy. Two months off in the summer! Time off at Christmas and mid-term breaks! Those breaks exist, but many college teachers spend them grading papers, preparing for the next semester, doing research to stay relevant in their field, or teaching an extra class. The job is year-round. The pay is not. The high tuition students pay for higher education frequently buys them an instructor working on contract, moving from college to college, classroom to classroom, trying to make two or three sessional placements add up to a living wage."

Excerpt: "School classes were cancelled and child care centres closed this week as public sector workers launched a series of indefinite strikes across Quebec. The buildup has been a long time coming. As far back as February 2022 Montreal’s downtown was filled with workers from several unions, warning they were ready to launch a general strike unless the government made a “respectable” offer. About half of Quebec’s child care workforce is unionized. For educators working in the province’s publicly managed child care sector this is their second work stoppage in three years. Rotating strikes in the fall of 2021 ended with an agreement that provided signing bonuses and wage increases between 12.5 and 18 per cent over three years."

Excerpt: "For the past 50 years, the Temporary Foreign Workers (TFW) program has supplied Canadian employers with low-cost migrant labour. Temporary work permits are well known in the agriculture, home and health care sectors. Child care has more recently joined the list, with governments in Quebec and Nova Scotia actively recruiting early child educators (ECEs) from overseas, along with a massive surge in requests from employers to hire foreign-trained staff. Worker advocates charge the sudden expansion will take pressure off governments and child care providers to address low wages. For the first time ever the early childhood workforce has some bargaining power thanks to federal investment and agreements with the provinces and territories to lower parent fees and expand access. ECEs are in high demand, but rather than negotiating with provinces to increase earnings to attract and retain educators, Ottawa has loosened the rules which curbed TFW abuses and expanded the number of migrant workers that employers can hire."

Excerpt: "But it’s a lot. Money is obviously needed to run your life and take care of the people you love. It provides the necessities of food, shelter, education. It can also buy time, such as ordering take-out instead of making a meal. Stress is reduced when you’re not worried about bill payments. Your social connections are sustained when you can meet friends for dinner or buy that present your daughter needs to attend her friend’s birthday party. In short, money buys the things that make life easier and more satisfying but that relationship isn't entirely linear. Research suggests that individual satisfaction with personal earnings depends on how it compares with others. This may be why, despite government efforts to peg the earning of early childhood educators (ECEs) working in licensed child care to a living wage (the wage needed to cover basic expenses and participate in community life), staff are still exiting the workplace, and new grads avoid it as a career path."

Excerpt: "What’s the problem with the early childhood workforce? Frankly, we don’t know. The common buzz is educators are underpaid, overworked and dropping out. Officials respond with money for wages, tuition supports, workshops, etcetera, completely unaware of the impacts. This is why a handful of children’s services managers in Ontario decided to pool their resources and put some data into their decision-making. As managers of children’s services including child care, EarlyON family centres, special needs resourcing and more, regional officials have contact with operators, not educators. If they are to develop policies for the workforce, they need to understand it better."

The Conversation