National Capital Region child care activists have a good reason to celebrate.
With the announcement of the reopening of Garderie Tunney’s Daycare, child care activists and advocates learned that even in a pandemic, they can organize and mobilize to achieve important victories.
The daycare had to shut down last fall when it ran out of options to pay nearly $14,000 in commercial rent to its landlord, the federal government.
Parents across the National Capital Region, child care advocates, and members of PSAC-NCR joined together to raise the issue in a series of actions organized online and in-person in the early winter.
“PSAC members in the NCR are facing a lot of complex challenges around child care right now,” said Alex Silas, REVP for the region. “The closure of Tunney’s was a bit of a lightning rod, but so has been the policy change at the Treasury Board to no longer allow parents to use 699 leave to cover emergency child care situations. Folks are seeing less, not more options for child care in a pandemic and that makes no sense right now.”
- Are you a PSAC member affected by the change in 699 leave? Attend this workshop to learn more.
But the situation for Early Childhood Educators has been quite difficult during the pandemic as well, with these workers being ineligible for pandemic pay, struggling with educator-child ratios and new health and safety measures, as well as the news that ECEs are not on the priority list for Ontario’s vaccine roll-out. Even as schools shut down, child care centres continued to operate without dramatically increased protections.
Amanda Quance, who organizes with Child Care Now Ottawa indicated that the federal government “needs to immediately inject at least $2 billion into recovery funds for Canada’s child care sector, while it develops a serious policy for building a real national child care system.”
While the news of Garderie Tunney’s Daycare reopening has invigorated child care activists and is a much-needed victory, there is still much more work to do.
“The reopening of Tunney’s is great, that’s 67 more child care spaces back in our region,” said Silas. “But we still have serious concerns over the 699 leave policy change that’s making it harder for parents right now with schools going virtual and closing and opening. It’s pretty chaotic especially for parents of younger kids.”
“We need to fight back on every front of the issue, but this week we learned that child care activists and PSAC-NCR members together can push right now and win.”