Shortage of childcare spaces | The false good idea of ​​the service

This Saturday, parents, especially mothers, will demonstrate in front of the National Assembly to denounce the lack of childcare places and demand an emergency benefit.

At the origin of this demonstration, there is the Ma place au travail organization, a citizen movement founded a year ago by Myriam Lapointe-Gagnon, a mother from Bas-Saint-Laurent.

As the months went by, the movement got organized and the list of its demands grew longer. The Minister of Families, Mathieu Lacombe, responded favorably to the majority of them. Its Bill 1 provides, among other things, for an investment of $3 billion for the creation, by 2025, of 17,000 new places, the conversion of non-subsidized places into subsidized places, as well as the hiring of nearly 18,000 educators. Currently, an estimated 37,000 families have immediate child care needs.

However, in recent days, the debate has become highly politicized, with the opposition parties calling for a debate on guaranteed access to childcare services, while Québec solidaire supports Myriam Lapointe-Gagnon’s movement and demands a benefit monthly emergency allowance of $870 to compensate parents who are unable to return to work after their parental leave due to lack of child care space.

At first glance, this benefit may seem like a good idea. We understand, in part, the reasoning that defends it: in a heterosexual couple, it is the women who lose the most when one of the two parents has to stay at home, their salary often being lower. The loss of income translates into a loss of autonomy, not to mention the consequences on professional development. We are betting that a benefit could give them a certain financial autonomy.

For the tax expert Luc Godbout, it is however obvious that this is an “illusion of autonomy”. According to him, the benefit has perverse effects, the most important of which is to encourage the parent with the lowest salary (often the mother) to stay at home.

Catherine Haeck, professor of economics at UQAM and director of the Quebec Interuniversity Center for Social Statistics, shares this opinion and believes that such a measure would only help a tiny part of parents. However, she underlines, nothing in the statistics indicates for the moment an increase in the number of women having left work to stay at home. This service could encourage them to do so. It should be added that this benefit is reminiscent of the Harper government’s PUGE and Mario Dumont’s ADQ proposals. Both argued for free choice in childcare, an approach denounced by many feminists at the time.

There are other options than the CPE for childcare, starting with private daycares. Parents are entitled to a refundable tax credit that covers between 67% and 78% of the value of childcare expenses, depending on family income. You can also have your child cared for at home since the tax credit applies to home care costs. This is without counting that parents can also deduct childcare costs from their federal income, which also grants an allowance for young children.

Of course, all of this does not immediately create new child care spaces. Quebec has also increased the salaries of home educators while reducing the administrative burden of these small businesses. We expect to be able to create 1,000 new spaces per year in the near future.

In short, without minimizing the ordeal experienced by parents who are currently looking for a place, it is not true that women are going through a worse situation than what their mothers were going through at the time. In fact, there have never been so many daycare spaces.

And then, let’s be real. The government is in catch-up mode. He can’t build child care centers in two days. And we cannot expect the number of daycare spaces to follow the migratory movement of Quebecers, which has increased during the pandemic. If a region of Quebec sees the arrival of 50 new families all at once, it may take time for childcare services to adapt to demand.

That said, this Saturday’s demonstration has its raison d’être. We must continue to put pressure on to accelerate the creation of new places in order to achieve the objective of “a place for all”. We must also demand quality childcare services, both public and private. And above all, we must put pressure on men to defend this file too. In 2022, it is not normal that the issue of child custody is defended almost exclusively by women in the public square. And it is even less acceptable for a member who defends the economic conditions of women in the Blue Room to be called “Mother Teresa” by Premier Legault, who will not win points with women by showing so much condescension. The issue of child care spaces concerns everyone.