Universal, affordable, high quality child care is finally within reach thanks to a new federal plan, but Ontario’s Conservatives are dragging their feet and have not signed onto the federal plan.

Parents need safe, high quality child care that meets their family’s needs. Child care workers need secure, good jobs where they can provide excellent care. And children deserve quality care.

The federal government’s national child care plan, laid out in the 2021 federal budget this past April, pledged roughly $30 billion over five years to help build a Canada-wide system of early learning and child care.

Public investments in child care pay for themselves. Women are the frontlines of the workforce, but especially during COVID-19, we saw them being pushed out and relegated to stay at home because of a lack of child care.

The plan would translate into making child care more affordable, including $10-a-day child care in regulated spaces for children under six years old by 2026, additional spaces in high-quality, not-for-profit centres and fees for regulated spaces cut in half by the end of 2022, while supporting wages and working conditions of child care workers.

But, in order for this plan to work, provinces need to get on board.

Quebec, British Columbia, Nova Scotia, Yukon, Prince Edward Island, Saskatchewan, Newfoundland and Labrador and Manitoba have already adopted it, bringing families in these provinces closer to the promise of learning services and affordable, accessible and quality early child care.

Ontario needs to sign on to the federal government’s child care plan immediately.

Add your voice today and tell your local MPP, Premier Doug Ford and Ontario Education Minister Stephen Lecce that Ontario needs universal child care

 

Source: Unifor