This year, we had to close one of our day cares in St‑Georges for a few months because we didn't have the staff.
When you close a day care, you alienate part of the French-language education continuum. When children enter our school system, early childhood education plays a very important role in setting up their academic journeys, especially in a minority community. When there isn't a francophone day care, parents send their kids to an anglophone day care. That's where children socialize, meet English-speaking friends and form a new circle, and they end up doing their schooling in English.
As a minority group, we are much harder hit by the shortage than anglophones.
The federal government can help by making programs flexible so that people can keep working while they go after the credits they need. That is very important at a community level. Some of the people we hire have a grade 12 education and they want to take classes, but those classes are only given during the day. It makes no sense. People have to put food on the table, and that means they have to work. If they're working, they can't go to school in the day, so they need some flexibility.
The federal government could even make distance-learning classes available to help people from other countries get their credentials, so we could bring them on board right away.