Karen wrote:

As a parent and an employee of the child care system since 1990, it makes me cringe to hear the province promoting more child care spaces as their first priority. The current department continues to emphasize new initiatives and more spaces but has failed to stabilize the existing system and ignores the long term staff who have stayed in the field for very low wages and for the most part, no pension. There is supposed to be a plan implemented this fall for pensions that we have been told nothing about yet outside of the press release. If it is delivered in a matching contribution from the employer, we will be unable to participate. My own center is struggling financially just to operate, (due to the present system of grants and maximum fees in this province), and the fact that we have a lot of long term staff trained beyond requirements that we do not receive any additional funding support for. In general, the whole field’s wages have yet to meet a marketplace standard dating back to 2007, but the province thinks it is exciting to add more spaces to this? Many centers are struggling to maintain their trained staff and turnover has always been an issue. This scares any center director from adding more spaces to their license, because that means more staff are required and may be hard to come by. Yikes!

These comments originally appeared in relation to a Government issued a news release entitled “Province Continues to Add Child-Care Spaces: Eastman Centre Could Double Capacity” which, in turn, relates to a 2010-2011 Resolution “Shortage Of Childcare”. Click here to access that post.  

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