You can expand child care space. You can make it affordable for families at $10 per day.
But advocates say if early childhood educators aren't getting compensated enough, and leaving the profession at this rate, space and affordability won't mean much.
The wage floor for ECEs this year is $19 an hour, with annual $1 increases that tops out at $25 an hour.
"It's not enough to make a difference, to really recruit or retain enough staff," said Carolyn Ferns, the policy coordinator with the Ontario Coalition for Better Child Care. "It doesn't make child care competitive with other parts of the sector, or other sectors."
The workforce crisis, she said, has only gotten worse since the $10 a day plan was introduced, at a time where demand for child care is going up because of the lower cost.
"We're absolutely understaffed," said Mandy Koroniak, the director of the county's children's early years division. "There's incredible pressures across the entire system in the province. I can't confirm the extent to which we are understaffed, but we know that programs are experiencing a lot of pressure."
It was enough to prompt rallies across the province this week, touted as an ECE Day of Action.
Ferns said the action was to call attention to the need for a salary scale starting at $30 an hour for registered ECEs, and $25 an hour for non-registered ECE staff members. It also calls for a better strategy when it comes to benefits, pensions, paid sick days and more.
She said the province is working on a workforce strategy, hence the timing of this push, to emphasize the significance of a wage increase.
"The federal government has certainly made this a priority issue for them, and they've been the ones that have led (the way), so that we see fees go down," Ferns said.
"But now to make this program work, and it's going to be a legacy program for both the federal and provincial government, we need to have the wages funded properly."
She said programs have worked to try and increase wages over the years, but in the old system, programs were mostly funded through parent fees.
"Basically, if they wanted to raise wages, they had to raise parent fees," Ferns said. "The challenge was that fees were already unaffordable, so lots of centres, wages kind of stagnated for that reason."
With a Canada-wide system, she said fees are frozen so there aren't mechanisms for child care centres to just up wages on their own. Budgets have to be submitted to municipalities, who operate as system service managers.
This is why she said the push is to governments to provide the solution.
And the solution, Ferns said, needs to be more than some PR campaign that says child care is a great place to work. It actually needs to be made a great place to work, and it starts with fair compensation.
She said strategies like recruitment efforts, media campaigns, free tuition and expanding post-secondary programs to train and graduate more ECEs into the sector, are not enough.
"You can try those things down the road," Ferns said. "But until you deal with the low wages, none of those other strategies are going to work.
"That's what people said overwhelmingly in these consultations that the province did, so we know that they've heard that. The question is did they listen?"
At a time where locally, the Ministry's target is to create 1,721 child care spaces in Guelph and Wellington County from 2022 to 2026, having the staff needed to care for the children filling those spots is key.
"Growth can't be successful, expansion can't be successful without qualified staff to support those spaces," Koroniak said.
"It is going to be one of the most significant challenges to actually meeting that demand for affordable child care in Ontario."
