Thank you very much for this opportunity.
Compass Early Learning and Care is a not-for-profit charitable organization in central Ontario caring for over 3,300 children, from birth to the age of 12. We are led by the values of trusting relationships; safe, caring, joyful spaces; diversity, equity, inclusion and justice; collective intelligence; and lifelong learning.
We recently began a visionary strategic planning process. We began by asking children what kind of world they wanted to live in. Here's what a couple of them said.
Justin, age 7, said, “I want to live in a world where everyone has a job and enough money for a safe place to live and enough food to eat with no worries, and people have to say kind things and not just what they're thinking when they think it.”
Oliver, age 3, said, “I want to live in a world where there is a big city with lots of buildings and houses. My mummy would live there, and my daddy would live there too, and me. My whole family, like my grandma and my grandpa; Debbie, too.” Debbie is their caregiver. “I like flowers, so there would be flowers, and there would be lots of bees. If they sting you, you would be able to fly because they'd put a special spell on you with their stinger.”
These are just two examples of the comments we gathered that demonstrate children's connections to family, community and their caregiver; their empathy and kindness; their connection to the natural world; and their understanding of justice and equity.
Bill C-35 has many parallel values to Compass and to the children that we interviewed. It is a strong beginning, a foundation to embed accessible, affordable, quality early learning and child care as a right for Canadians. To bring them to life, there must be solid structures that will nurture each of these concepts and inspire a groundswell of people to come together and work for the ends and the goals outlined. To create such a system, we will need three things: a stable and sustainable workforce; accessible, affordable child care; and quality programming.
For Bill C-35 to have the impact that it proposes, federal and provincial governments must understand the impact that this child care staffing crisis has, not only on child care but on every other sector in our society. Right now, Compass is working with a group from central Ontario looking at how we can increase child care for medical staff. There's a crisis. We're having hospitals call us to say they need more child care so that they can have their staff. They're all so interconnected, and it starts with child care. People can't work without child care.
A stable and sustainable workforce means that we would need to increase our professional compensation starting at $30 an hour, having a pension plan and benefits. In previous federal government initiatives for workforce strategy, funding was rolled out in Ontario with the provision that not one penny could go to compensation of any kind. It was very explicit. Much of this money went to colleges for free tuition for an ECE diploma. Colleges are now reporting that these graduates are not going into child care. In fact, they are going into higher education. They are going to school boards. They're going to Costco and even to Tim Hortons, because the wages are higher and the responsibility is less.
CWELCC has made a great contribution toward affordable child care. Our families report that they can financially breathe again—a very good thing. Accessibility will be an issue, and it's not an easy issue to address right away. It will take all of us working together to expand our system to accommodate the many families currently on our wait-list and those who are going to join shortly. Every expansion dollar will be needed for quality programs, beautiful spaces and sustainable funding.
We must send a message to for-profit corporations, shareholders and entrepreneurs that Canada is not open for child care business and that, in Canada, children are not for profit. Working together as a child care community, along with the federal, provincial and municipal governments and community partners, we can look back in 20 years and see that our vision is coming to reality.
To do this, the not-for-profit and public sectors will need access to infrastructure loans, support from groups such as Building Blocks for Child Care and support for our home child care expansion, as well as high-quality—