By Ruby Pratka
Local Journalism Initiative
If your child’s daycare opened half an hour late on Monday, you’re not alone. Thousands of in-home daycare centres across the province opened late as members of the Fédération des intervenantes en petite enfance du Québec (FIPEQ), a CSQ-affiliated union which represents 12,000 educators in subsidized in-home and public daycare centres, sought to put pressure on the provincial government to reach a satisfactory collective agreement. Public daycare centres staffed by FIPEQ members are expected to open late on Fridays starting Nov. 15.
Union representatives say they have been working without a collective agreement since April 2023. They are calling for salary increases above inflation over the next three years, additional vacation and training days and the possibility to hire more support staff and special education technicians.
They say entry-level educators in particular (whose starting salary is $21.60/hour) struggle to make ends meet, and current salaries and working conditions make it hard for public daycare centres to attract and keep early-career educators. The union wants the lowest pay grade eliminated and other pay grades increased by $2.86/hour retroactive to April 2023, inflation + 3 per cent retroactive to April 2024 and inflation + 4 per cent in 2025. “There’s a lack of places in daycare centres, so we can’t allow ourselves to lose any educators,” said FIPEQ-CSQ vice president Sylvi Boisclair. “We need to protect our centres from inflation so they stay open.”
FIPEQ-CSQ president Anne-Marie Bellerose made a connection between working conditions for educators and a May 2024 auditor general’s report that stated that over 40 per cent of day-care centres (public, private and in-home) failed provincial quality evaluations.
“We understand that parents are worried about late openings, but it’s high time that the government chooses to concern itself with early childhood education,” said Bellerose at a press conference in Montreal. “We’re the first link in the chain of the education system, and we work with children during a crucial period in their development that will affect them for the rest of their lives. However, the network has been neglected to the extent that the auditor general’s office is worried about the quality of service.”
Bellerose said government subsidies to cover operating expenses also need to go up. Some subsidized daycare centres may leave the public system and go private if a solution can’t be found, she said.
The FIPEQ-CSQ is not the only early childhood educators’ union raising concerns about pay and working conditions. Daycare educators at a CSN-affiliated union are also in negotiations, and recently voted to launch a five-day strike “when the time is right.”
Bellerose said the Treasury Board “didn’t necessarily have a negative attitude” at the table, but negotiations were progressing extremely slowly. She added that the union had invited Treasury Board secretary Sonia LeBel to spend a day at a daycare centre “so she can see what it’s like.” Their invitation had not received a response as of this writing.
“We know parents are going to have to deal with repercussions. We’re all aware of that – we’re all moms here, so we’re going through the same thing. But if [parents] want service tomorrow, next year, five years from now, for their grandkids, we need to act now,” she said.