Parents want accessible, affordable child care. Providing child care workers with the supports they need will go a long way to solving our critical retention and recruitment problem.

This legislation would create an advisory committee solely dedicated to supporting workers in the child care sector and would help make child care workers’ concerns and voices heard. The legislation will allow the advisory committee to immediately get to work on addressing some of the biggest challenges facing workers in the sector, including: increased wages; minimum work standards; career advancement opportunities; recruitment strategies; immigration considerations; enhanced collective bargaining.

We need a real plan and a real strategy to ensure families have child care that they can rely on, because a chronically underfunded child care sector is simply inexcusable.

Passing this bill will be an important step towards a better future for the hard-working ECEs and RECEs in this province who are caring for our generation.

I also want to thank my co-sponsors, MPP Bell, MPP Karpoche and MPP Pasma, for supporting me in this bill.