Lack of child care holding women back in Nova Scotia

“The schools are closed, summer camps are mostly cancelled and when child-care centres open in a week, they’ll operate at just 50 per cent of their capacity.

Nova Scotia’s NDP says the provincial Liberal government simply doesn’t understand the struggles working families face as the province reopens its economy.

. . .

Had the province deemed it a priority, child care would have been moved up in the queue to make sure those details were finalized in time to allow the centres to reopen along with other economic sectors last Friday.

The New Democrats’ business critic, Claudia Chender, said the rapid increase in unemployment among women highlights the need for the province to address the concerns her party is hearing from parents, early childhood educators and community groups.

‘More and more women and families will be facing difficult decisions about returning to work in the coming days when they have no child-care options, especially for school-age children,’ Chender said.

Nationally, the May jobs picture didn’t look much different from Nova Scotia’s. There were almost 290,000 jobs created across Canada last month, but two-thirds of them went to men.

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Claudia Chender MLA