Opposition Education critic Barry Petten says parents are scrambling due to what he calls the province’s daycare crisis.

Petten says his office receives calls on a daily basis from parents who are desperately looking for available child care spaces or who are on lengthy waitlists.

The brand new childcare centre in Happy Valley-Goose Bay is set to close this month because of staffing shortages. The new facility has 60 child care spaces.

Barry Petten says affordability is the only aspect of childcare that the provincial government has addressed with $10 dollar a day child care, but accessibility continues to be a huge challenge for many families.

He says government was supposed to release a new wage grid for early childhood educators on January 1, but nothing has come of it.

The province says workers will receive increased pay retroactive to the beginning of the year, but ECEs are growing increasingly impatient with the delay.

In the meantime, Petten says he knows of one family who has been on the wait list for child care since 2019, while a doctor he knows cannot go back to work because they can’t find a child care space.