Quebec understood before many other nations that a daycare center is infinitely more than a place where you drop off your child in the morning and where you pick it up in the evening.
Our daycares contribute to the development of toddlers and equal opportunities.
They contribute to Québec’s economic strength by bringing parents, mostly women, back to the job market.
They are also a place of anchorage in the districts. The children make friends there who often follow them to school. Parents socialize there while the kids look for their mittens or tie their boots. Such places where ties are forged are increasingly rare.
It is this local and community dimension that must be preserved in the vast reform of subsidized daycare centers initiated by the CAQ.
A consultation document, recently obtained by Radio-Canada, sows concern on this subject. The criterion of geographic proximity, which is usually taken into account to allocate daycare places, has been relegated to oblivion in favor of socio-economic criteria.
This raises the specter of parents who do not choose the closest daycare center to their home, but the first where they can find a place. With the heavier routine that this would entail – greenhouse gases as a bonus if it forces parents to take the car.
Yes, it’s early to panic. The document provided to Radio-Canada details the working hypotheses. The current reform will not be applied until 2024. But 25 years after the creation of CPEs, we finally have the opportunity to question the role of subsidized daycares, whether we are talking about CPEs or private daycares.
It is good that these discussions are public and that the debates take place.
The concerns that we are currently hearing are normal. You can’t clean a house without raising dust. And this cleaning, the CAQ has the merit of having started it.
In 1997, Pauline Marois created the CPE network to “contribute to the development and equal opportunities of all children, especially those suffering the harmful effects of poverty”.
In 2020, the Auditor General showed that this is far from always the case.
In Montreal and Laval, children from underprivileged backgrounds are under-represented in CPEs. Yet they are the ones who benefit the most from a quality childcare service.
The same is true for children with disabilities and autism. In short, our network is failing to help those who need it most.
This is what the CAQ is attacking and it is to its credit.
Subsidized daycares currently have their own admission criteria. These must be approved by Quebec, but there is abuse. Some day care centers select children based on their religion. In others, you have to be “recommended” by the board of directors to obtain a place. Hello arbitrator.
Quebec is proposing to replace this with a points system managed by the Ministère de la Famille. It would favor immigrant, single-parent and disadvantaged families as well as children with special needs. The idea is good. But if it is desirable to integrate disabled and autistic children, the means will have to follow to do it adequately.
It is also clear that beyond socio-economic criteria, daycare centers must be accessible to parents who live nearby. Nor should the door be closed to middle-class parents who both work and need places.
Which brings us to the main thing. The fact that we are debating who should have access to subsidized child care is the symptom of a more serious problem: the lack of spaces.
The good news: Quebec is aware of this and is working on it. The government has created 8,941 subsidized spaces over the past year and the CAQ has committed to converting no less than 56,000 non-subsidized spaces into subsidized spaces by 2027.
Several projects are therefore underway to improve our daycare centres. It’s better this way. It remains to bring them to fruition, making sure that the good ideas do not lead to perverse effects.