What is the purpose of commemorative days? They offer an opportunity to express gratitude, but they’re also a moment to reflect on how well we as a society are meeting our promises.
Members of CUPE Ontario are grateful to child care workers and early childhood educators every single day – for their skill and patience creating environments that allow the youngest learners to thrive; for their determination and contribution to the labour movement; for their roles as linchpins in communities.
But this Child Care Worker and Early Childhood Educator (ECE) Appreciation Day demands more than gratitude. The Federal government first introduced the Canada Wide Early Learning and Child Care Plan in 2021 to lower child care fees and expand child care access to families and ensure a thriving child care sector. In Ontario, the rollout out of this plan, in the hands of the Ford Conservatives, remains a deeply uneven and unfinished project, which has largely left ECEs and child care workers behind.
It is that frustrating lack of fulfilment that makes this Child Care Worker and Early Educator Appreciation Day a difficult one. So those workers and allies are joining Child Care Now in organizing a “10 Days for $10-a-Day Child Care,” November 20 to 30. These ten days of action will both celebrate progress on affordable child care and continue to push for a system that supports decent work for ECEs and child care workers. CUPE Ontario and the Social Service Workers Coordinating Committee (SSWCC) are deeply proud to be supporting this incredibly important initiative.
The week of action will look different across the country, because child care looks different across the country. The mood may be more celebratory in Nova Scotia, where child care workers are experiencing more support as part of a publicly funded system with a wage grid, benefits and a defined benefit pension plan; and in British Columbia, the home of the $10-a-day child care campaign.
In Doug Ford’s Ontario, however, there is no wage grid, benefits, or pension plan as part of CWELCC. Instead, the Ford Conservatives want to allow rampant privatization and child care operators brazenly run anti-union campaigns to undermine worker power. Ontario’s week of action will both acknowledge the work it is has taken to make the progress that we’ve seen and call for much better for families, children and the child care workforce.
Despite models elsewhere in the country that show us what we can have in a well funded and well organized public system, some private interest groups are already weaponizing our provincial government’s half-finished, half-delivered system.
Just this week, a small group of for-profit child care owners descended on Queen’s Park with their message to end the $10-a-day program. They want to destroy what could be a truly equitable system that provides great learning and good jobs. And they want to push us backwards by inviting more profit-motivated businesses into the space. Their rationale: they can’t make enough money off the public system.
We say that’s a good thing. Profit doesn’t belong anywhere near child care.
The Ford Conservatives have made no secret of their preference for private and for-profit child care operators, going so far as to ask the federal government to lift the current cap on the participation of for-profit providers. They’ve used this model before. They anemically fund public services and then, when those services don’t meet public expectations, they follow through with privatization.
We’ve seen this script, we’ve seen the outcome, and we reject it.
That is why, on this Child Care Worker and Early Childhood Educator Appreciation Day, we are focusing our energy not on gratitude, but on the coming days of action to defend the $10-a-day system. We’ll fight for good jobs, push back against those who’d make a quick buck on the backs of our children, lift up workers doing the hard job of organizing a better future, and advocate for the continued investment in affordable, accessible, and high-quality child care for all. And we won’t stop until the day that we meet those promises.
