Through the chair, thank you very much for the question.
I think there is a lot more work that we need to do to get this national child care program rolled out properly. The wage floor issue is a critical one for us in Ontario, and I know it's affecting other provinces as well.
What happened in Ontario was that it took a long time to get the wage floor set, and it continues to be very low. The dollar amount undervalues the work of early childhood education and child care workers. We have workers continuing to struggle through poverty. The cost of living and the wage floor don't match at all. People are struggling to pay their rent. We know that staff are accessing food banks. We know that staff in child care are looking at eviction notices because they can't pay their rent. The problem is that there is just not enough being done to push at the provincial level to move the wages up.
We are seeing that we actually can't create the spaces that were intended through the strategy because we can't hire people. We are really struggling to recruit and retain individuals in child care. We're seeing a huge downswing in the number of people applying and entering at the college level into the child care field. Certainly when they're getting out of it, they're looking at the wages, they're looking at their rent and they're thinking that they can't afford to work in the child care sector.
We are not drawing people in. Someone mentioned the health care sector earlier. It's experiencing its own particular challenges. The child care sector is far lower paid than the health care sector. The challenges are very real.
I worry that the expansion of the child care strategy and rolling it out as it was intended and designed will take a lot longer or not happen at all. We're already starting to see non-profit child care providers looking at closing down, not stepping up to open additional spaces, or shutting down their infant care programs, which are so critical within the child care sector, because they can't afford to operate. They can't hire people and they can't pay the bills.
The rollout of the funding formula is not working in Ontario. It needs to change and it needs to change faster than planned. Right now, we don't know what it's going to look like for 2024. We're still waiting for information from the Ontario government.