When the job is well done, it must be said.
The Minister of Families, Mathieu Lacombe, is proposing the most important reform of day care centers since the creation of the network by Pauline Marois, 25 years ago.
Mr. Lacombe is tackling the lack of places, the dysfunctional management of waiting lists, arbitrary admission criteria, the problem of access for children from disadvantaged backgrounds and laxity in the face of unregulated childcare. Among others. Not to mention the recent announcements to pay for part of the training of educators.
The strength of the reform is therefore its ambition. Every problem is addressed, and every stone has been turned to find a suitable solution.
But unfortunately, parents and their little ones are not at the end of their troubles. Because there are more than 17,800 caveats to this reform. That is, the number of qualified educators and other employees who will have to be found within three years to provide the missing places in the network.
The hardest part is yet to come.
Three pitfalls lie in wait for Mr. Lacombe.
The first is recruiting. Quebec wants to add 37,000 places, but there is already a shortage of educators for the current places. And there is nothing to predict a craze for the profession. Enrollment in college education has plummeted and demographics will exacerbate this shortage.
François Legault recognizes that their salary will have to be increased, but working conditions will be just as important. The pressure is enormous for the current negotiations with the unionized educators of the CPEs. Quebec has no choice, the agreement must be generous enough to attract new candidates.
The second pitfall is the private sector. Quebec will soon increase the tax credit for non-subsidized private daycare centers. For Mr. Lacombe, it is a question of fairness – parents resort to these daycares for lack of choice and pay a higher price in spite of themselves. The measure is intended to be transitional, while waiting for the shortage of places to be absorbed and for more private places to be repatriated to the subsidized network. However, the conversion is proceeding very slowly – at the current rate it will take half a century. We will therefore have to monitor the mechanics of the tax credit, which will be made public in the coming weeks.
Finally, the last pitfall is found in the concrete application of the sometimes imprecise objectives of the reform.
The best example is the access point to childcare places (La Place 0-5), managed by an NPO. Right now, parents don’t know if they’re number one or one hundred and fifty-third on a daycare waiting list. And the establishments themselves bypass this list.
The Ministry of the Family will manage this counter itself. The lists will be transparent – parents will know their rank. And children from disadvantaged backgrounds will be given priority. But what will the quotas be for these children? Is there a risk of creating ghettos? And what exactly will this portal look like?
To find out, the Ministry recognizes that it will take at least two years.
It is normal that the reform does not yet contain these details. These technical aspects are usually specified in regulations following the adoption of a law. But with Quebec’s past failures in computer science, skepticism is a normal reflex …
***
Even if he is still far from being able to conclude on success, Mr. Lacombe can congratulate himself on the progress made.
His career reminds me a little of that of Simon Jolin-Barrette. In both cases, the start of the mandate was difficult.
Mr. Jolin-Barrette was bogged down with the foreign workers and students program. Mr. Lacombe, himself, sinned by inaction. After a discreet start to his mandate, he made an awkward exit to deplore the failure to create places for which he was nevertheless responsible.
Both have learned from their mistakes. They look like ghosts today.
On Thursday, Mr. Jolin-Barrette presented another tough bill, this time to reform family law. And Mr. Lacombe unveiled his plan for daycare.
The announcement is all the better received as nobody foresaw it barely a year ago.
At the start of its mandate, the Coalition d’avenir Québec only had four-year-old kindergarten. Then there was the Ma place au travail movement. And a devastating report from the Auditor General on the creation and allocation of spaces. And the pressure from citizens who complained about two things to their deputy: the difficulty of access to family doctors and daycare spaces.
Mr. Lacombe took the opportunity to make the child care issue a new priority for his government.
But for parents, this is still very theoretical.
I wrote that Mr. Lacombe had done a good job, but he is very far from finished. He’s barely starting. The essential remains to be done to make this reform a reality, which for the moment only exists on paper.
Basically, it’s a project for a second term. A part of the next electoral program.