Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, yesterday we had a federal Minister here to celebrate the NWT achieving an average cost of $10aday child care. Unfortunately, this drive to lower fees has pushed this sector to the brink, especially in regional centres of the NWT such as Yellowknife and Inuvik.
The feds and the GNWT seem to have gone about this backwards based on a poor understanding of the struggles and challenges within the child care sector. By treating staff wages and organizational viability as an afterthought, it implies that the problem that we're trying to solve is that these daycares are gouging parents so we just have to force them to charge less. But this couldn't be further from the truth. Our child care providers are usually nonprofits or else small familybased day homes. It doesn't matter how affordable spaces are, if the spaces don't exist.
What we hear from child care providers, which have formed a joint advocacy organization called the Early Childhood Association in response to these threats, is that the number one concern is attracting and retaining staff. Staff are paid significantly less than comparable positions in our communities in early childhood learning, whether that's in the schools or in the government, and those providers that have been trying to increase staff wages are now being penalized and losing money, and they're faced with the choice of either shutting down or renouncing all government funding.
Now we're seeing in other provinces revolving closures of daycares, providers walking away from the funding, and parents suffering the consequences with even higher fees than ever. Now, GNWT has responded to some of these challenges by saying okay, we'll give you topups for staff wages but now we have to dictate how much you can pay each of your staff. So we're increasingly trying to micromanage these operations and saying well, we've worked out the finances for each provider to ensure, don't worry, you're going to be financially viable and sustainable. We just haven't shared those numbers with them yet. So providers could be forgiven for wondering well, why doesn't ECE just take over these programs if they're the ones that know best? Why don't they just show the sector how these programs can be run so cheaply and efficiently according to the GNWT's formulas that haven't been shared with us yet? Mr. Speaker, I ask for unanimous consent to conclude my statement.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. So at the root of this problem is that we've negotiated an agreement with the federal government in a rush based on incomplete numbers and not to mention that it doesn't take inflation into account, we're locked into this $10 a day, because it's a round number, but we have a limited pool of money from the feds that is not enough to spread around to keep daycares afloat. So I understand that a new agreement's being negotiated with the feds, so I see this as an opportunity to fully include the Early Childhood Association
Member from Yellowknife North, your time is up. Members' statements. Member from Mackenzie Delta.
