Ontario providers

[cfred]

Thanks Bright Sparks....and welcome back! Glad to hear you're still in school (and loving it) though. And yep...utter bullshit indeed! You're not wrong.

The Ministry has noticed us now, and has lifted the Home Visitor : Provider cap, which was our aim. This will bring about lots more affordable opportunities for providers to affiliate with agencies in the future, IF THEY NEED OR WANT TO. Some ICPs think this doesn't pertain to them, being independent. But it's sure nice to have some options in the event of a national childcare policy. Last night, on Twitter, OCBCC (Ontario Coalition for Better Childcare - aka Carolyn Ferns) and the CRRU (aka Martha Friendly) hosted a 'Twitter Storm' protesting the new regulations (including ours) and calling on the province to participate in a national childcare policy. Hundreds of people turned up, all of them tweeting. This is happening all over the country. And if you don't know who Carolyn Ferns and Martha Friendly are, they are about as high as you can get in childcare advocacy...and politicians listen to them. They have a LOT of influence and media attention.

I can't predict the future, however, I've had a brief foray on the inside of all this stuff now. I can say with certainty that the advocates are continuing to gain momentum. As you tell me that you've turned away 17 people, I can probably list 20 more people with similar stories. We're all experiencing that. This is the shortage CICPO predicted. Parents are furious and now have a vested interested in aligning with childcare advocates, thereby adding more voices. We're seeing a new upswing of negative media attention, which doesn't help us at all.

So, at the end of the day, we need this regulatory change. If a national childcare policy comes into effect, the only way to participate in the industry will be licensing. The only way to keep licensing affordable for providers is to remove the cap so we don't have to pay out so much for the extra 'soft services' that many of us don't need. By the way, Ontario is the only province to have this cap We'll never get the ratios changed. That's completely off the table. But we can at least get this....and we worked damned hard for the past 18 mos to get this far, to help everyone in this field.

We're approaching the media again. Heidi suggests that we all share the video with everyone to get as many eyes on quality independent childcare as possible, as the ECE gurus send out their negativity. This SHOWS everyone what quality childcare looks like. Share it via social media on FB, Twitter, with paper editors, etc....everyone. We need people to see that we ARE high quality.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YTo8ZDT3N8o