ECE Exodus

Listen to the story:

Imagine this:  

You find a career you’re passionate about. It’s important work that supports your community, boosts the economy, and shapes future generations. You invest your time and money into completing your post-secondary education, and you enter the workforce. The job is physically and mentally demanding. You come home exhausted every day, but you can’t rest. You head to your second job because the full-time job that you are trained for doesn’t pay enough to cover your bills. You love and believe in the work, but how long will that sustain you? 

This is the reality for thousands of early childhood educators (ECEs) in Manitoba. 

The ECE Lifecycle  

Manitoba has three Early Learning and Child Care classifications, as outlined by the Government of Manitoba’s webpage on the Classification of Early Childhood Educators and Child Care Assistants: child care assistant (CCA), early childhood educator II (ECE II), and early childhood educator III (ECE III). 

It takes a very specific type of person to work in child care. The Government of Manitoba’s Careers in Early Learning and Child Care webpage says an ECE must be warm, nurturing, responsive, and enthusiastic about engaging a child’s learning.  

The same webpage describes Manitoba ECEs as having specific post-secondary training in guiding and supporting early childhood development and ensuring the health, safety, and well-being of the children in their care. They work with children between the ages of 12 weeks and 12 years old and provide nurturing, engaging, and age-appropriate environments for children to explore and learn through a child-centred, play-based approach. 

The first six years of a child’s life have a critical effect on their future, with 90 per cent of their brain developing by age five, and ECEs can have a meaningful and positive impact on their learning and development. However, society has little appreciation or understanding of what they do. The work is mentally and physically demanding, and the pay is low. But people don’t go into the child care field for money or recognition; they do it because they love it. The job is a calling, and Maria Legal answered. 

The Zealous  

Legal is a five-minute walk from the child care centre she works at. This close location and her virtual classes make it easier for her to balance work and school with her responsibilities as a mother and wife — another appeal of the program. 

Legal first started at the centre as an office administrator but quickly fell in love with child care, prompting her to pursue her post-secondary education. After graduating with her ECE II, she plans to pursue her ECE III classification to receive the specialized training that will allow her to work as the director of a child care centre. 

“Right now, I’m doing half the stuff that an ECE III is doing,” Legal says, referring to her administrative role. “I’m basically a CCA with director duties.” 

Although Legal is still a student with less than two years in the child care field, she’s not unaware of the struggles ECEs are facing.  

“I can see how easily one can burn out,” she says. “It’s [from] not being paid well, not being afforded sick time or vacation time because there’s no one else to step in for you.” Legal also attributes the burnout to a lack of appreciation for and understanding of their work from others. “They think that we’re just basically babysitters, when … we do go to school to learn about childhood development, about the different domains of development, and how to look out for children,” she says. “Like, it’s more than just playing.” 

To receive classification in Manitoba, ECE IIs must complete an early childhood education degree or diploma with a minimum of 1800-2000 study hours and 520 practicum hours. Assiniboine College’s accelerated program takes 18 months to complete instead of the usual two years, allowing students to enter the workforce faster. But even this fast track can’t keep up with the demand. Legal’s instructor told her class of 20 that by the time they graduate, more ECEs will have left the field than they can replace.  

The Weary 

However challenging the work may be, she finds it incredibly rewarding. “Even when you have a hard day or you’re struggling, there’s always something that happens … where you’re just like, ‘This is why I do this,’” she says. 

Despite how much May enjoys the job, it wasn’t long after she started that she began to notice some issues. Two things stood out to her the most. “Pay was not very good,” May says. “So that can be defeating in itself.” Much like Legal, May also feels like her work is underappreciated and misunderstood. “Sometimes the parents make you feel that way, like we’re just babysitting their kids when we’re doing so much more than that,” she says. 

These two issues led May to consider leaving the child care field in 2019, just two years after entering the workforce. She even had a job lined up, but the hours didn’t work out, so she continued in her role as an ECE for a few more years. She considered leaving the field again in early 2024 when she and her husband began talking about starting a family. The low wages were her main concern, but she didn’t want to put her life on hold either. “We could definitely swing it with what we [are making] now, but we wanted to be in a better place,” May says. 

Manitoba’s Early Learning and Child Care Wage Grid provides guidance to non-profit child care centres to develop equitable and competitive salary scales. It’s up to the centres’ board of directors to establish the wages. Starting and target hourly wage is broken down by position and classification, and then again by the number of child care spaces at a centre. An entry-level ECE II’s suggested starting hourly wage is $21.30, while an ECE II with two years of experience or more has a suggested starting hourly wage of $22.79. That’s a difference of only $1.49.  

Wages for ECE IIs don’t meaningfully increase unless they become supervisors, assistant directors, or directors. But for ECEs like May who have no desire to work in management, pay increases are minimal, and there’s little room for growth. This further encourages them to look for work outside of child care. “I feel like I’ve hit my cap,” May says. “I just want to grow somewhere else.” 

May recently announced her pregnancy and has since stopped looking for work. She plans to continue her job hunt when she returns from maternity leave. 

The Displaced 

Like most ECEs, Cullen went into the child care field because she loved working with children. “I loved being able to watch children learn,” she says. “When you can see the learning happening and the light bulb go off and that ‘ah-ha’ moment.” 

With over 25 years of experience in the field, Cullen dealt with many of the issues still present today. Her biggest challenge during her time as director was staffing. “We could never get ahead,” she says. “It was just a revolving door.” 

Retaining staff was difficult, but recruiting staff in a rural community could be even harder. The centre mostly needed CCAs, and many of the ones recruited were brand new to the field and completely unaware of the demands of the job. On top of this, the pay was low, and Cullen was often embarrassed by how inaccurately it reflected the work.  

“Uproot your whole life, move to a small town, work for us with potentially backbreaking work, or work that’s going to be hard on your heart, and you still might have to have a second or third job to pay your rent.” Cullen says. “In my heart that never felt good, because I knew they were worth more. I knew what the job was worth.” 

Things got a lot worse in the field during the COVID-19 pandemic. Child care centres were designated as essential, and navigating the constantly changing policies while already short-staffed was incredibly stressful for Cullen. They decided to close the centre on March 13, 2020, for the first three weeks of the pandemic, to protect the families and staff. When they opened again, some of their CCAs decided not to come back. 

 “I think [they] had that realization of ‘Whew, these three weeks have been pretty stress-free.’ And so they chose not to return,” Cullen says. “They left the sector themselves.” 

The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic had lasting effects on Cullen’s mental health. From 2020-2022 she was in survival mode. When the chaos that the pandemic caused started to lighten up, she realized she wasn’t okay. She was going through the motions at work, and when she went home, she would stare at the ceiling for hours and beat herself up for not doing the things she knew were good for her mental health. “I couldn’t. I physically couldn’t,” she says. She would go to bed early but still have to drag herself out of bed in the mornings, and she dreaded going to work. 

When she spoke to her counsellor about how she felt, they told her she was experiencing burnout. According to the International Classification of Diseases – 11th Edition (ICD-11), burnout comes from “chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed” and consists of three components: negative feelings about your job, exhaustion, and reduced confidence and effectiveness in your work.    

The diagnosis brought Cullen a great sense of relief. “I just started to cry because I thought, ‘Thank God it’s something, like thank God.’ I didn’t know what was wrong with me,” she says. Her counsellor suggested she speak with her doctor about going on stress leave. Her doctor confirmed she was experiencing burnout and gave her until the end of the week to wrap things up at her job before taking four weeks off.   

After her stress leave, it was a conversation with her husband about pensions that became the catalyst for her exit from the child care field. “I was approaching 50 and my husband and I talked about retirement. He’s like, ‘Well, I think we should work till 60, right? Our pensions will be better.’ And I thought, ‘How could I do this for 12 more years?’” Cullen says. She decided then that if a new job opportunity came along, she would take it. In 2023, an ECE instructor position at Assiniboine College came up, and she went for it. “It just felt like it was right. It felt like it was meant to be.” 

Since her experience with burnout, Cullen has been a fierce advocate for the mental health and well-being of ECEs. She talks a lot with her students about the importance of boundaries and putting yourself first. She tells them, “You are in a field where you are a caregiver, but that doesn’t mean you have to give to the point of depleting yourself,” and asks them, “If you’re [not] showing up at least an 80 per cent version of yourself, is that fair to the children?” 

Empty Promises or Good Intentions? 

Over the past few years, the Government of Manitoba and the federal government have implemented several changes to Manitoba’s Early Learning and Child Care sector in an effort to make improvements. 

On August 9, 2021, the Government of Manitoba and the federal government signed the Canada-Wide Early Learning and Child Care Agreement. This agreement provided $1.2 billion in federal funding between 2021-2026 to create $10-a-day daycare. While this significantly reduced the cost of child care for families, it also overwhelmed the waitlists. Some centres have waitlists of over a thousand children. This has made it even harder for parents to find child care and has caused additional stress for the staff, who have to turn away desperate parents. 

The agreement also promised to create 23,000 new full-time spaces for children zero to six years old in regulated non-profit centres by March 31, 2026. What the agreement seemingly fails to consider is the additional ECEs and CCAs this will require from a workforce that, according to the Manitoba Child Care Association, is already 1000 ECEs short of supporting current child care spaces.  

According to the Manitoba Education and Early Childhood Learning 2023-24 annual report, there were over double the number of CCAs to ECEs in 2024 when in Manitoba, at least two-thirds of staff at licensed child care centres with kids six and under are required to have an ECE classification. The Manitoba Child Care Association’s Roadmap to a Quality Early Learning Child Care System estimates that roughly 30 per cent of centres don’t have enough certified ECEs to meet provincial requirements. On top of that, the Roadmap estimates the child care workforce will need an additional 3,000 ECEs to support the 23,000 child care spaces committed to by the provincial and federal governments — a number that’s impossible to meet with an already understaffed and depleting workforce. 

To address the staffing shortage, the Canadian and Manitoba governments announced in a June 2023 news release an investment of over $24 million to develop and expand ECE and CCA training programs over three years. Five post-secondary institutions, including RRC Polytech and Assiniboine College, received the funding. Over the three-year period, the funding will create an estimated 998 program seats and 2,000 new student admissions.  

The Government of Manitoba’s ECE Tuition Reimbursement program for recognized ECE programs has also been a popular recruitment strategy with students like Legal. The program allows qualifying part-time or full-time students to receive up to $5,000 towards their tuition per school year. In a February 2025 news release, the provincial government claims the program has provided over $6.1 million in tuition reimbursement and has supported over 510 ECE students since January 2025.  

In an effort to help retain current ECEs, the Manitoba government announced a 2.75 per cent increase to the wage grid in July 2024, but for many, this still isn’t enough. The Manitoba Child Care Association publishes an annual Market Competitive Salary Guideline Scale that recommends salary wages for ECEs and CCAs that are competitive with jobs requiring a similar level of responsibility and training. Its recommendations have routinely been higher than the provincial government’s own wage grid. For example, while the Manitoba Wage Grid lists an entry-level ECE II’s suggested starting hourly wage at $21.30, the 2023-2024 Market Competitive Salary Guideline Scale lists the suggested minimum wage for an ECE at $25.97. 

Cullen is adamant that increased pay is an important step in strengthening Manitoba’s child care system. Unfortunately, it’s often sidestepped in favour of cheaper or flashier changes. “‘Oh, how about we open 23,000 new spaces?’ No, pay staff more. ‘How about we let you have pizza days?’ No, pay staff more. ‘How about we give you two extra professional development days a year?’ No. Pay us more,” she says. “Stop filtering this money through weird things and just pay the staff more.” 

On March 6, 2025, the Government of Canada announced in a news release that agreements had been reached with 11 of the 13 provinces, including Manitoba, to extend the current Canada-Wide Early Learning and Child Care Agreements until March 31, 2031. The extended agreements will provide $36.8 billion in funding toward creating more child care spaces, reducing waitlists, and hiring more ECEs. Manitoba will get $1.9 billion of that funding. But will these investments be enough to encourage more people to enter and remain in the child care field? 

The Consequences 

Around the time of Cullen’s burnout, she sent a letter to the Minister of Education. In it, she asked them to imagine sending their own children to a child care centre where the staff are tired, resentful, working multiple jobs, and on the brink of burnout. “Are those the people you want looking after your children?” she wrote. “No. So how do we fix the hearts of our caregivers? We need them fully in the game.” 

ECEs are the backbone of Canada’s early learning and child care sector, and when they’re short-staffed, underpaid, underappreciated, overtired, and checked out, the quality of care they provide suffers. 

The Manitoba Child Care Association’s webpage on quality and compensation says that “quality early learning and child care is best provided by consistent, sensitive, responsive, well trained, and well compensated educators.” It also says that children benefit from “consistent caregivers and long-term relationships.”  

High-quality, accessible, affordable, and inclusive child care is essential. It supports women in the workforce, provides consistent care and education to children during their most formative years, and helps boost the economy. But a quality early learning and child care sector requires a strong workforce, and a strong workforce requires recognition, prioritization, and investment from the federal and provincial governments. 

We all depend on someone who depends on child care. Together, let’s demand an early learning and child care system that we can all be proud of.