National Capital Region child care activists have a good reason to celebrate. With 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.
“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.”
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.
“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,” said Silas.
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