The Legault government is suffering another setback in the saga of access to daycare for asylum seekers: the latter will be able to send their children to CPEs until the Supreme Court decides whether or not to hear the case.
In a judgment rendered Thursday, the Court of Appeal rejected the arguments of the Attorney General of Quebec who asked to suspend the decision rendered on February 7 and which allowed asylum seekers to once again send their children to the services of subsidized child care, at $9/day.
In its argument, the government argued that authorizing some 8,000 asylum-seeking children — which in reality number 6,600 according to the evidence filed in court — to attend CPEs would swell the waiting list, which is already 32 000 people. This basin would add “pressure on a network already under pressure,” its lawyers argued, since it would have forced the government to move more quickly to build infrastructure.
Siding with the respondent’s lawyers in the case, Judge Lori Renée Weitzman found that the addition of this pool does not cause “irreparable harm”. “Clearly, the figures provided by [le gouvernement] demonstrate that the system has some catching up to do and the evidence does not allow us to believe that this backlog would be filled before the Supreme Court rules on this matter.”
On February 7, the Court of Appeal concluded that excluding asylum seekers from daycare “constitutes discrimination based on sex.” She thus rejected the government of Quebec, which contested a judgment of the Superior Court rendered in May 2022 and which had also ruled in favor of the asylum seekers.
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