(Quebec) Faced with a shortage of daycare places that spares Montreal and Laval, but which is glaring in several regions of Quebec, the creation of 37,000 new places is no longer enough to complete the network by 2025, learned The Press. To keep its promise, the Legault government will create a few thousand additional places to what is planned in its “big project for families”. To parents who fear that this objective will not be achieved, Mathieu Lacombe assures that no region will be in deficit at the end of this operation.
Posted at 5:00 a.m.
The challenge is daunting for the Minister of Families. In the most recent update of the coverage rate of the territories of the coordinating offices, which gives an accurate portrait of the deficits and surpluses of daycare places as of December 31, more than 50 indicators are in dark red. This means that their coverage rate is less than 84%.
The territories experiencing this “significant deficit” of daycare spaces are sometimes located in remote regions, such as the Bas-Saint-Laurent, Gaspésie and Îles-de-la-Madeleine, among others, but also in municipalities in outskirts of the metropolis or in large cities of Quebec. Certain boroughs of the capital are for example affected, as are sectors of Trois-Rivières, Sherbrooke, Gatineau, Joliette or Rouyn-Noranda, in particular.
The model for estimating the supply and demand for childcare spaces used by the Ministère de la Famille also calculates the projected coverage rate in 2024. As of December 31, this projection still forecast deficits in several sectors. , but the calculation did not include all of the 37,000 places that the government promises to create nor those that it intends to add to this number. Quebec includes in the calculation the places offered in recognized daycare services, that is to say early childhood centers (CPE), subsidized and unsubsidized daycare centres, as well as family daycare centres.
“Listen to me: it will be balanced in 2025. […] If there is one certainty, if there is one thing I can tell you, it is that we are going to ensure that the whole territory is in balance and if there is a lack of places, we are going add more,” promised Mr. Lacombe to The Press.
The challenge of interregional migration
The Minister for the Family and his teams have also been confronted since the start of the pandemic with the acceleration of the interregional migration of families. This phenomenon partly explains why Quebec will increase the number of places it must create to complete the daycare network.
A surplus of places in Montreal is not transferred to families looking for one in Estrie.
The government must also adopt Bill 1 in the coming days, which gives it additional powers so that every child can have access to an educational childcare service by 2025. This new piece of legislation allows Quebec to create early childhood centers (CPE) in regions where no project has been submitted by the community, despite the shortage of places.
“Bill 1 also sets up regional advisory committees that will be able to tell us upstream if there are large companies setting up shop so that we can develop places before the children be taken from a waiting list,” said the minister.
According to the most up-to-date data, 51,761 children are currently registered with the one-stop access network and are waiting for a desired place.
Completion time of a place
The Minister of Families, Mathieu Lacombe, has also reviewed in recent months the process leading to the creation of new daycare spaces in order to speed up the timeframe for creating them. By simplifying the process, Quebec has set itself the objective of realizing places within 24 months, rather than the 48 months that were necessary before this update. The time frame for creating a place has since dropped to 36 months. While some projects now manage to materialize in 24 months, some still miss the mark.
“It is clear that the pandemic and the overheating in the construction industry and in the real estate market give us some additional challenges to achieve this target. On the other hand, I think that what is important is to see the trend”, justified Mr. Lacombe, underlining that the delay is on the whole decreasing.
In the meantime, parents who are unable to find a place for their child in daycare, united in the organization Ma place au travail, are calling on Quebec to grant them temporary emergency assistance.
The situation is particularly glaring for infants, where the lack of places is greater in the network.
In its latest budget, the Legault government did not grant the financial assistance requested by parents who cannot return to the labor market. “It’s a delicate subject, because I am in solidarity with these parents. I am the same age as them, I was in the same situation as them. I’m from their generation and I want them and me to be the last generation that has had to live with this problem,” he told The Press the Minister of the Family.
“When Pauline Marois and Lucien Bouchard launched the family policy in 1997 and set in motion the construction of the network, there were even more parents waiting [pour une place]. This type of assistance program, which would cost a fortune, has not been granted to parents. People understood that it would take some time for the network to build,” he said.