As we know, the establishment of the subsidized network of childcare centers (CPE) in Quebec, under a PQ government, has completely transformed family dynamics by offering an educational program to the children who attend them and by facilitating reconciliation. work-family.
Does anyone remember these three pillars of the 1997 programme: accessibility, universality and quality of service? It is embarrassing, in 2022, to remember them when we see what the governments that succeeded the Parti Québécois have done.
The Liberal government slowed the development of CPEs and opened the floodgates to the development of commercial daycares, thus contributing to the failure of the network’s development.
Between 2009 and 2016, the number of unsubsidized daycare spaces increased from 7,000 to 55,000. In 2022, this number is over 68,000.
The CAQ, for its part, was thinking of rectifying the situation with the establishment of 4-year-old kindergarten, but the waiting list continues to grow. My son and his spouse have four little ones who go to an unsubsidized daycare service. Each week, they must pay 800 dollars, compared to 174 dollars if the four children attended a CPE. When you apply the tax credits, they end up paying a weekly amount of $520. It is exorbitant!
Accessibility, universality and quality of service, these three pillars erected in 1997, have now collapsed, at least the first two, since the quality of service is present in non-subsidized child care centres.
On the eve of the launch of the election campaign, the parties will proclaim loud and clear that with regard to early childhood, equity will be there. Bla-bla-bla, fairness you say? In the case of the small family I’m talking about, and there are many others in this situation, when the four children reach kindergarten 5 years old, the parents will have paid $182,400, $118,560 after applying tax credits.
Is that the equity the Liberal Party is talking about, which wants to convert non-subsidized spaces into subsidized spaces? While it was he who set the table for the chaotic situation that the network is currently experiencing!
Is it a 100% subsidized network that the CAQ is talking about? But for when? Other generations may benefit from it.
The impending elections bring forth all sorts of promises. We are dangled with a very bright future in the area of early childhood, and in those of health, education, climate change…
Do we really believe it? And those very ones who hold the microphone with deployed throat to make beautiful promises to us, do they believe in it?