The Ministry of the Family modified on the sly its count of places in family daycare services last year after noting a “methodological bias” perpetuated for years. A gap has thus widened between the official reports and the number of “real” places available in the network, showing a total of more than 24,000 false places reported in 2020.
” [La] situation has been corrected to represent the actual number of places available in RSGE [pour responsables d’un service de garde éducatif en milieu familial] in the network,” said the ministry’s press relations officer, Esther Chouinard, by email to To have to. However, no trace of this change in methodology appears in the department’s annual reports and other public communications.
“When the indicators change, it becomes difficult for researchers and journalists to determine whether our public services are efficient, because they can no longer assess the impact of programs over time,” laments ENAP professor Étienne Charbonneau, Accountability Specialist.
The duty made this discovery in the wake of the publication of his article on the loss of more than 24,000 places in family daycare since 2018. The Minister of Families, Suzanne Roy, reacted to the news by arguing that the number of 24,000 was inaccurate even though it came from his own department’s data. In response to questions from To have tothe department finally revealed that it had changed its methodology last year to correct past mistakes.
Thus, of the approximately 92,000 places recorded in the ministry’s 2018 annual report, only 86% were “real”, argues the Ministry of the Family. Taking into account the change in methodology, the drop is therefore 12,737 places in four years.
In the eyes of Professor Charbonneau, this process lacked transparency and the department should have made this change public in its annual reports. “Normally, you should continue to apply the old calculation method and start the new one in parallel, then display the results of these two methods in the annual reports,” he explains. He adds that the ministry should have displayed the number of actual places and the number of “undistributed” places, explaining why the old measure was faulty.
“Undistributed” places
The data used in the annual reports from 2015 to 2020 contains so-called “unallocated” places, i.e. places for which a budget was reserved, but which are not actually available, the ministry explained by email. .
“After an analysis of the situation, it turned out that this data did not really represent the number of places offered in the childcare services network, since several of these places were not offered due to the absence of interested RSGEs. This is not the first time that the ministry has discreetly changed its methodology: last September, Radio-Canada revealed that the number of children waiting for a place in daycare on the ministry’s site had fallen from 52,000 to 34,000 in just a few days. Not thanks to the creation of new places in the network, but because the ministry decided to exclude from the list 18,000 children because they did not need a place urgently.
“Government lesson” to be learned
Before the election of the CAQ in 2018, the Ministry of the Family had as boss the liberal Luc Fortin. The latter claims to have been made aware of the problem with the data in the spring of 2018. “Just before I left, the senior public service had spoken to me about this, it was becoming an issue. »
The places were then counted in the statistics, even if there were no educators “to use them”, he recalls. “These were theoretical places. »
In some regions, this could even “distort” the portrait of needs, according to him. “It meant that the government did not need to create places. In short, he says, “it’s a very good thing that it’s fixed.”
The former minister assures that the data was not inflated at the time for political reasons. ” On the contrary. I raised the problem and we had to correct the situation. The data, he said, was presented this way for “administrative considerations”.
Luc Fortin adds that the data on the places available are not those that are under pressure. “The political issue is the waiting list. The number of places is secondary. »
Mr. Fortin also mentions that he was not Minister of Families for very long. During Philippe Couillard’s tenure, three succeeded each other in this position: Francine Charbonneau, Sébastien Proulx and himself.
His predecessor, Sébastien Proulx, “has no recollection” of problems with the ministry’s data. “I was at the Family for just one year. I don’t want to sound like I’m shoveling this forward, but I had the Department of Education at the same time. He adds that if “the state realizes that the data it shares is not official”, “there is a governmental lesson in that”.
The day after the publication of the article by To have to of the 24,000 places, the Liberal opposition had called on the government of François Legault to act to counter the decline of the RSGEs. “The crisis in home child care was predictable. The Caquiste government knew that the establishment of 4-year-old kindergarten could lead to the loss of more than 13,000 places in a family environment, “denounced in writing the spokesperson for the official opposition for the family and deputy for Robert-Baldwin, Brigitte Garceau. “We must act, it is urgent! »