Pay Equity for Early Childhood Educators - Question Period

CLAUDIA CHENDER: My question is for the Premier.

All early childhood educators in Nova Scotia have the same professional training and credentials, regardless of whether they work in a licensed child care centre or a prePrimary classroom. However, most ECEs working in licensed child care are paid far less than their colleagues in pre-Primary.

ECEs are frontline workers who helped restart Nova Scotia’s economy and made it possible for businesses and public services to reopen. Given that the government sets both fees and wages in child care, will the Premier demonstrate his commitment to pay equity by ensuring funding is adequate to provide all early childhood educators fair compensation?

HON. DEREK MOMBOURQUETTE: I think it is important to recognize two things - when we came into government, our ECEs were the lowest paid in the country, and that is why we invested in the wage floor to ensure that we could support their wages. This budget that we just tabled also has $75 million towards a sector that continues to support the sector whether it is through wages, training, and other education opportunities for the sector.

As a government, we are one of the few jurisdictions to ensure that we continued to fund the sector during the pandemic to ensure that when we could open back up, that the centres were available. I’m happy to report that 98 per cent of them are open.

CLAUDIA CHENDER: Wage floors came in a long time ago. They were a great step. It is time for the next step.

Recruitment and retention of qualified ECEs has been a long-term challenge. What we are talking about today is a big part of that challenge.

The implementation of pre-Primary has intensified worker shortages. Those working in pre-Primary have access to affordable health and dental benefits, which are not available to most ECEs working in licensed child care. Extending health and dental to all ECEs is a small step the government could take to recognize the value of the work they do and the instability caused in the sector by the introduction of pre-Primary.

Mr. Speaker, will the minister commit to providing affordable health and dental benefits to all ECEs as is already done for ECEs in pre-Primary?

DEREK MOMBOURQUETTE: There are a couple of pieces to that question. I’ll say this: that pre-Primary has been a huge success. We have implemented the last piece. We now have 900 additional staff working within the system, supporting those four-year olds. As we all know, only 25 per cent of those four-year-olds were accessing some form of early childhood education leading into school.

I know that there are hundreds of people enrolled in the programs across the province to get into the sector. They see a future for this. I’ll make the same commitment that I made during debate last evening, that we are fully engaged with our federal counterparts on a universal system and what supports may be there. I plan on meeting with a number of the stakeholders in the coming week to continue the conversations about what we can do to support the sector.