Child care workers advocate for better wages in Queen’s Park rally

Child care advocates and workers rallied on the front lawn of Queen’s Park Thursday, urging the Ford government to hike wages for early childhood educators to help recruit more workers to the sector.

The rally was part of the Canada-wide Day of Action for Early Learning and Childcare. Carolyn Ferns with the Ontario Coalition for Better Child Care said hundreds of thousands of families are stuck on waitlists for affordable child care – a crisis being driven by the workforce shortage.

While the national childcare program will reduce fees for families to $10/day by 2026, daycare operators say the provincial funding formula doesn’t cover all of their expenses or provide proper compensation for workers.

The province announced an increase to the wage floor for a Registered Early Childhood Educator (RECE) from $20 per hour to $23.84 per hour. It’s expected to rise to $25.86 by 2025.

Ferns said it’s not enough to recruit and retain workers.

“When you look at it, the majority of childcare workers don’t even qualify for those new wage funds. It only goes to register ECEs, other staff and programs don’t get that money. And for here in Toronto, that wage floor is still more than $1 less than a living wage. So it’s not enough to recruit and retain workers in the sector,” said Ferns.

“It’s too little, it’s too late, it continues to undermine the morale and the dignity in the profession,” said Athina Basiliadis, child care worker.

They are calling for a publicly funded salary scale with a wage grid that starts at $30 to $40 an hour for RECEs and at least $25 per hour for other non registered staff.

“We need them to be able to choose where they are hired based on their passion, not just on where they might be able to pay the bills or begin to pay the bills. We need to change work and childcare to somewhere that they can make a living and make a life,” said Ferns.

In response to this request, Education Minister Stephen Lecce, during Question Period, said, “We’re gonna keep increasing spaces, decreasing fees, support the workers, increase their wages, every single year.”

“People are leaving the field in droves and we actually don’t have enough staff in our centres to ensure we are able to provide care for our families,” said Basiliadis.

“It’s a sector that’s dying and if we don’t start putting more money into the sector … we’re going to see the sector completely collapse,” she added.

The rally comes as a new report from City Hall warned Toronto would not meet its target for new daycare spaces by 2026.

The city set a target back in 2017 to create 30,000 new childcare spaces by the end of 2026 for a total of 70,000 spaces. According to the report, just under 4,600 new spots were added over the last five years.

Earlier this month, the largest child care operator in the GTA, the YMCA of Greater Toronto, warned it’s child care spaces across Toronto were in jeopardy as it’s been desperately searching for ECEs.

Currently, only 18,000 kids are enrolled in it’s 35,000 available licensed spaces because of the staffing shortage.