“In my entire career, my greatest pride is to have created the CPE,” says Pauline Marois in a telephone interview with The Press.
The creation of these daycare services in 1997, when she was Minister of Families and Children, combined with the Quebec Parental Insurance Plan (QPIP), caused “a change in culture,” she summarizes. She.
Whether it is the participation rate of women in the labor market, the wealth of families, the involvement of fathers with their children, notes Mme Marois, the CPE and the RQAP, as well as full-time kindergarten at age 5, have changed everything.
We are far from the time when housewives accused her of stealing their children, back then, notes Mme Marois. “I had demonstrations by mothers with strollers in front of the National Assembly! »
PHOTO CHARLES WILLIAM PELLETIER, ARCHIVES SPECIAL COLLABORATION
Pauline Marois
Without being a killjoy, we point out that many parents have great difficulty finding a place in childcare, that daycare centers are no longer as popular, with private daycares having notably been favored by governments after his.
She knows it too well. “I had four children, all of whom became parents. Only one of them found a place in a CPE, my other three had to enroll my grandchildren in a private daycare,” where the quality of services is lower, she notes.
The Auditor General does not prove him wrong: in her 2002-2023 annual report, the failure rate in the evaluation of educational quality was 60% for subsidized and unsubsidized daycares, compared to 20% for CPEs .
Mme Marois emphasizes that she generally remains very shy before giving her opinion, on the one hand because of her lack of appetite for controversies and, on the other hand, because she says she suffered from the interventions of the first ministers who preceded her.
“I’ve done a few outings, I do a little more on early childhood policies, but I do it with reserve, without pulling any punches, even if I should, sometimes! »
So she starts, as it is a subject that continues to be close to her heart. We must, she says, complete the network of CPEs, return to a ratio of two-thirds of specialized educators, create a sufficient number of places and develop, as a matter of priority, 4-year-old kindergartens in disadvantaged areas.
The Legault government, she notes, has given priority to the development of CPEs, but in fact, she regrets, for all kinds of bureaucratic considerations, the opening of a daycare is much faster than the creation of a CPE. She believes that the government should provide more support and encouragement to these establishments.
Because numerous studies demonstrate the superiority of CPEs, which are “the subject of fewer complaints than private daycares”.
The childcare network, as in other sectors, is suffering from shortages, we note. And salaries, particularly in Montreal where apartments are so expensive, are not likely to attract the next generation. “At the top of the scale, salaries are relatively decent,” replies Mme Marois, but valorization of this work remains necessary. »
Generous leave for a good start
Marie Gendron, President and CEO of the Parental Insurance Management Council, points out that according to a UNICEF study, Quebec is at 4e rank – among 42 countries studied – in terms of family policy. The rest of Canada does not arrive until the 27the rank*.
This means that during this week’s conference, Quebec “will be on the lookout for the best in the world,” but being “more in the category of “example to follow” than “lessons to take.” ””.
In 2020, Quebec, she said, took its logic a little further by making sure to involve fathers more. Until then, when it came to shareable weeks of parental leave, women took almost all of them.
By establishing a significant incentive – four more weeks if the father takes more weeks – “we went from only 8% of parents who divided the shareable weeks in 2019 to 40% in 2024”.
And that is crucial, says Mme Gendron, “because when the father is involved in the first days of life, when he packs the diaper bag, he remains involved in parental tasks” for good, even if we are not yet at one 50/50 sharing of tasks.
*Where do rich countries stand on childcare, a Focus on QuebecAnna Gromada and Dominic Richardson, UNICEF, 2021