CUPE Ontario and the Social Service Workers Coordinating Committee enthusiastically welcomed yesterday’s announcement by the federal government regarding the extension of the federal child care program until 2031 and applaud the move by the outgoing Trudeau government.
CUPE members, along with millions of other Canadians, are only too aware of the looming threat of a Conservative government led by Pierre Poilievre, a politician who makes no secret of his innate hostility to public services – like a federally funded system of child care. Even the possibility of a Poilievre government supplies sufficient reason for the urgency behind yesterday’s news.
With this announcement, the future of $10-a-day child care is assured in Ontario and the nearly $17 billion dollar allocated for Early Learning and Child Care in the province will give more families access to high-quality, affordable child care in predominantly public and not-for-profit centres.
We congratulate the dedicated CUPE members who played such a big role in this achievement. CUPE child care workers across the province mobilized to help make today’s news a reality. They worked with allies in CUPE, other unions and across the labour movement, with public and not-for-profit child care providers, and with organizations like Ontario Coalition for Better Child Care. Together, they sent a definitive and undeniable message to the Ford Conservatives: that Ontarians demanded affordable, high-quality child care and the countless benefits it delivers to families, children and communities.
As trade unionists and as public sector workers, we know there is still work ahead to ensure the future and the vision of $10-a-day child care. We know that it must include a better deal for child care workers – one that values the vital work they and provides secure jobs, better wages, benefits and a pension.
We are ready to take on that work: to see an end to children and parents waitlisted for affordable care; towards a workforce strategy to deal with the worsening shortage of child care workers; and to limit the role of private child care operators within the publicly funded Early Learning and Child Care system.
CUPE members can always be counted on to defend affordable, accessible, and high quality child care, now and for the future. And as workers, we will hold our provincial government accountable and fight on the federal level to ensure adequate investments in our communities.
Our next opportunity to do just that will come with the impending federal election. As CUPE members, we will do all we can to ensure working people vote for politicians who know that programs like $10-a-day child care are good for communities and offer key measures to deal with the affordability crisis.
