Almost a year ago to the day, Myriam Lapointe-Gagnon, a resident of Cacouna, mother of a baby a few months old, alarmed by the impossibility of finding daycare for her baby, founded a Facebook group entitled “My place at work “. She invited young parents, and especially young mothers stuck at home for lack of space in daycare, to share their concerns. The initiative quickly gained momentum: thousands of parents joined the group and a petition of 18,500 names was submitted to the National Assembly in June 2021. Then there was the public consultation on the services educational childcare centres, the preparation of Bill 1 aimed at completing the network, and now, on Sunday, a rally will take place in front of the National Assembly to denounce the persistence of the shortage of daycare places.
Over the months, the tone of the activists of Ma place au travail has hardened, reflecting the intensification of the precariousness experienced by young parents. Women, especially, have suffered: studies, careers have had to be interrupted or abandoned, debts have accumulated, situations of economic dependence have been created and the list has not changed. More than 51,000 children registered at the one-stop registration desk are still waiting for a place in daycare.
The Minister of Families, Mathieu Lacombe, still promises to create 37,000 new subsidized places by 2025 to complete the network, but in the meantime, it is everyday life, here and now, that is wearing families out. You have to put out a thousand fires every day, between childcare, work and life, which never ceases to be more expensive.
On this subject, it is generalized inflation which, today, is on everyone’s lips. It could be underlined in this respect that it would have been desirable for all eyes to turn earlier to the threat hanging over households caught by the throat by the explosion in the cost of living. After all, many people were already struggling to make ends meet long before the record inflation we worry about these days — especially after two years of health crisis. The housing crisis was no less alarming last summer, nor the summer before, as was the increase in demand for food banks, very clear since the spring of 2020. Better late than never, we say . Especially since the elastic reaches the end of its resilience.
Thus, consumer prices reached their strongest rise since 1991 last month, according to Statistics Canada. Along with fuel, the grocery bill has ballooned the most, and things are expected to get even worse. However, data provided by the INSPQ at the end of January 2022 show that 20% of adults in Quebec live in a household struggling with food insecurity — an upward trend, if we compare the situation before pandemic. Unsurprisingly, the health crisis has exacerbated the factors that lead to food insecurity, among already vulnerable families, of course, but also among people who never before had to worry about food. Next year, at the same date, will the bellies grow bigger?
Add to that the perpetual skyrocketing of rents and the ever more absurd scarcity of affordable housing, in Montreal as elsewhere in Quebec, in Rimouski, for example, where the vacancy rate has just plummeted to 0.2% – in the fourth rank among the lowest rates in Quebec. A crisis, moreover, which we no longer know how to talk about in order to get people to listen and to get the government to act.
In fact, with the Legault government, it’s always the same thing: in the face of the material difficulties encountered by people who get by on a modest salary, who get by with a narrow margin of maneuver, we respond with calls for patience . There is no point in panicking, we will legislate, budget, propose. Just wait a few weeks, a few months, a few years. Wait to see the next budget. You will see how much your government is committed to providing you with less lean days. After the next elections.
This is exactly what is happening when Minister Lacombe promises the completion of the daycare network by 2025, while brushing aside the possibility of offering an emergency benefit to parents who are reaching the end of their Quebec Parental Insurance Plan (QPIP) benefits.
This is also what is revealed when the Minister of Finance, Eric Girard, offers families earning less than the average income a special (and one-time) allowance of $400 to cope with the rising cost of living, but without considering measures that would allow people who experience precariousness to sustainably get their heads above water. One in ten people in Quebec are already struggling to meet their needs as defined by the Market Basket Measure (MBM). It’s a safe bet that the $400 for the month of January is already far away and that the emergencies, the deficiencies, are multiplying.
This is what the farsightedness of a government that directs for the bosses and the wealthy looks like: the short term, the meals of the days to come, the next rent that is approaching, it is as if it did not exist. We never seem to realize that it is in the present, here and now, that people find themselves trapped between a thousand fires and that the flames do damage that is there to last.