Canada plans to open thousands of new kindergartens by 2026

By 2026, Canada has planned to create 146,000 new kindergarten places and tens of thousands of new jobs for child care workers. According to Canadian law, the younger the children, the more adults there have to be. In Ontario, for example, there is one kindergarten teacher for every eight children under the age of six.

The Canadian Federation of Child Care estimates that a minimum of 38,000 new child care workers will need to be hired across the country. However, Ontario, the most populous province in the country, has not yet signed an agreement with the federal government on a commitment to expand the preschool system, so future Ontario kindergarten teachers are not included in that number.

But Canadians don't want to work in existing daycare. Back in 2013, Child Care Canada, an independent research organization, found that a quarter of kindergarten workers planned to change careers within three years, and 63% of employers could not find new caregivers to fill vacancies.

Watch a video about an immigrant woman working in a municipal daycare in Canada six years ago. Go to Youtube to watch the first part of the video.

During the pandemic, many educators left the profession altogether or began to look after other people's children privately. This is due to the fact that first all kindergartens were closed and then opened with very high requirements for cleanliness and safety:

• feed each child separately;
• everything the children have taken in their mouths, quickly take away and disinfect so that another child does not come into contact with the saliva;
• thoroughly disinfect all things and surfaces several times a day;
• wear not only a mask, but also a protective screen.

In addition, no one rushed to vaccinate or regularly test caregivers for COVID-19. All educators were at risk, since young children in Canada were not vaccinated at that time. While teachers were vaccinated in an organized way, kindergarten teachers received the vaccine on a routine basis. Also, most daycare workers were not paid for forced leave during the lockdown, nor were they paid sick pay.

Kindergarten workers were paid a little more than minimum wage, $15 to $20 CAD per hour. The Association of Early Childhood Educators of Ontario (AECEO) conducted a survey and found that 60% of kindergarten workers felt that their pay was not commensurate with the job they were doing, and 68% complained of severe fatigue.

As a result, by February 2021, employment in this sector had fallen by 21 percent. Many kindergarten employees left to work as teaching assistants and after-school caregivers in schools, where minimum wages started at $22 CAD per hour.

From the perspective of parents of young children, the situation looks even worse. Almost 100,000 women quit their jobs at the beginning of the pandemic and did not return until March 2021. There were ten times fewer men who quit their jobs.

Now only 58.4% of children under five years old in Canada attend kindergarten. More than half of kindergartens in Canada are private. The monthly cost of even one child is comparable to the rent of a home. The national average monthly spending per child in 2020 was $995 CAD. In an expensive city like Toronto, the average parent spent $1,866 CAD per child per month. And in the provinces, some employers, attracting employees, built their own daycare.

What do the different provinces of Canada intend to change?

Thanks to $149.9 million CAD in federal funding, two paid professional development days for staff will soon be introduced in licensed day care centres in Ontario.

The province of New Brunswick has pledged to increase the hourly rate for daycare workers to $23.47 CAD per hour.

The province of Quebec has promised to increase the salaries of qualified preschool teachers by 12% over three years and to upgrade the qualifications of 7,000 educators by 2026, and to hire 18,000 new ones. The province will pay stipends to those who go on to study to become preschool teachers.

The province of Manitoba is looking to create 23,000 new kindergarten places over the next five years. This will require between 4,600 and 6,000 new kindergarten workers.

The province of Nova Scotia will create 9,500 kindergarten places and increase the number of nursery school places by at least 10 percent. By 2022-2023, there will be 350 new places in public nurseries.

The province of British Columbia has changed the terms of its immigration program: there will now be specific raffles for kindergarten teachers. We can assume that other provinces will soon follow B.C.'s lead.