Daycares: Quebec wants educators for 40 hours a week

The Legault government wants to make daycare educators work more.

In the midst of negotiations for the renewal of collective agreements, Treasury Board President Sonia LeBel said Wednesday they’d like to see 40-hour weeks, rather than the current 32 to 35 hours.

“I would be very happy if we could reach an agreement at 40 hours a week,” she said during question period.

“It would solve a lot of problems for my colleague,” she added, referring to the Minister of Families, Suzanne Roy, who is struggling with labour shortages in the network.

“If the educators’ union tells me: ‘Ms. LeBel, we sign at 40 o’clock,’ I think, it will go faster.”

“There are some who work 40 hours a week, so it’s definitely simpler,” added Families Minister Suzanne Roy in an interview with The Canadian Press.

The President of the Treasury Board was responding to a Canadian study that makes Quebec’s early childhood education system look bad compared to that of other provinces.

In this comparative report on early childhood education in the provinces and territories, Quebec is no longer the model to follow, but rather Prince Edward Island now pays its educators the best.

Sonia LeBel insisted on “rectifying the facts” because, according to her, “it’s inaccurate” and we must “compare apples to apples.”

With the current offers on the table, an educator in Quebec would earn more than $32 an hour, compared to $30 in Prince Edward Island, the president of the Treasury Board argued.

In addition, educators on the Island work 40 hours a week, while workers here work less.

“When we bring them all back on the basis of 40 hours, educators, annually, in Quebec, make more than $4,000 more than those in Prince Edward Island,” she said.

Negotiations are continuing very slowly for the new employment contracts for educators. Pressure tactics are planned by the CSQ and the CSN in November.

In addition, even though the number of spaces has decreased in the daycare network in Quebec recently, Suzanne Roy assured Wednesday that the government will reach its target set in 2021: to create 37,000 new subsidized spaces by March 2025.

The Parti Québécois (PQ) was concerned about the data from the Ministry of Families’ dashboard at the end of August. We learned that there were 304,084 spaces in all types of childcare services, subsidized or not, a net decrease compared to May, 304,359.

The largest reduction was recorded in subsidized home childcare services, 853, which were not offset by the creation of spaces in childcare centres (286) and subsidized daycares (281).

“It’s often in August, before the start of the school year, that some (home childcare providers) decide to retire, to go to a community service or to a CPE,” said Ms. Roy, to be reassuring. She assured that the waiting list of children registered for childcare was constantly decreasing for a 10th consecutive month.

However, between March and May, it increased from 28,831 to 31,783, and even from June to August, from 33,172 to 34,055, according to data from his ministry.

As of August 30, the CAQ government had created 18,790 spaces out of the 37,000 it had promised. No less than 18,394 others were “in progress” – a measure that the opposition finds imprecise because it does not indicate the progress of the opening of these places.

–This report by La Presse Canadienne was translated by CityNews