B.C. daycare worker dismayed by changes to provincial nominee program, warns of worker shortages

A daycare worker in Nanaimo, B.C., is speaking out against recent changes made to B.C.’s provincial nominee program that now exclude her job from a possible pathway to permanent residency.

Akash Kaur says early childhood education assistants (ECEAs) like her are a critical component of B.C.’s child-care system, and the jobs are necessary to keep daycares open for working parents. 

“They are really in need of child-care workers,” said Kaur, an employee at Tiny Hoppers daycare.

“But if they keep doing this, I don’t think so many people are going to get involved in this career.”

The provincial nominee program is a way for provinces and territories to prioritize jobs and sectors that lack workers by nominating potential immigrants with specific skills, education and work experience. Each province and territory has its own requirements, and they also set the number of people that can be nominated each year.

Recently, the B.C. government changed the in-demand occupations it was prioritizing.

Early childhood educators (ECEs) are still on the list under the “education” heading. But early childhood educator assistants, who work under the supervision of ECEs, are no longer a part of the program.

“Certified ECEs remain a priority occupation because that is where the shortage is most acute and where the credential requirements take longest to meet,” said the Ministry of Post-Secondary Education and Future Skills in a written statement.

“Childcare workers are essential. That is why the B.C. PNP is focusing on growing the certified ECE workforce, the role with the deepest shortage and the highest training requirement.”

‘I love children’

Becoming a full ECE takes about a year of study, including several weeks of unpaid internships. B.C.’s daycare licensing requirements usually require at least one ECE on staff, in various ratios to ECEAs depending on the age of the children.

Kaur says she came to Canada as a student in 2020. When she learned that ECEAs were part of the B.C.’s provincial nominee program, she took the course to pursue that career as a pathway to permanent residency.

“I love children, they make my day so better,” Kaur said. “When I’m working here, I don’t think much about my situation. I just play and be happy.”

Currently, Kaur says, she’s on a work permit that expires next year. She says she had also applied for express entry — a different permanent residency pathway — but in the past she didn’t have enough points.

She adds there have not been any recent draws — the federal government slashed the number of immigrants in the past two years, including the provincial nominee program.

‘Lowest paid and most precarious’ workers affected

Sonya Boyce, a researcher with the Coalition of Childcare Advocates of B.C., says the change will affect a lot of low-income immigrant women in the daycare sector.

“Racialized immigrant women are making up a bigger and bigger part of the workforce, and on top of that, they’re overrepresented in the lowest paid and most precarious parts of the sector,” Boyce told CBC News.

Boyce agrees with Early Childhood Educators of B.C. that the province’s daycare strategy should be more reliant on fully-trained ECEs, but she says there needs to be more support for ECEAs — many of them immigrant women — to upgrade their skills.

Kaur says she and many of her colleagues hope to do just that, but not having permanent residency means she would have to pay three times more in tuition than domestic students who also have access to grants and scholarships.

“We all want to be an educator, we don’t want to be an assistant for whole life because there’s a gap in pay as well,” Kaur said. “But we can only do it if we get our immigration done, we can have more opportunity to study.”

Staffing shortages

Boyce says the change is likely to affect the entire daycare sector in the province, which is already struggling to find qualified workers.

Linia Park, Kaur’s manager at Tiny Hoppers, says the change is likely to affect her daycare as well because so many of her employees are immigrant women.

“We’re seeing less and less people being applying for a position like an ECE program or even ECEA …. because it is a high stress job,” Park said.

“Not a lot of people stay in this field. But a lot of our immigrants, they work hard. They come here because they’ve given everything up to get here. So they’ll put in the hours, they will put in the hard work.”