The government has missed its own targets for the creation and conversion of child care spaces, while the waiting list in the network has grown to nearly 52,000 children over the past year.
In October 2020, the Legault government announced its intention to transform 3,500 of the 70,000 unsubsidized daycare spaces into subsidized spaces over a two-year period. But on Tuesday, the Minister for the Family, Mathieu Lacombe, confirmed that his teams had only managed to convert half of these places, or 1,767, in two years.
Asked by Liberal MP Jennifer Maccarone, the minister also confirmed that the government had managed to create, net, 1,930 places by March 31, far from the target of 5,000 to 7,000 places that it had set itself. last year.
“Indeed, we did not reach the target we had set for ourselves. During the summer, we will be able to make up a lot of these places,” said Mr. Lacombe. In a scrum last week, the minister said he was hopeful of adding 10,000 spaces to the network. “I think in the next few months, let’s say during the summer, we’ll be able to catch up,” he said.
Mathieu Lacombe also acknowledged that the waiting list for a place in daycare has grown over the past year. Between December 31, 2020 and December 31, 2021, 686 children were added to it.
However, the Coalition avenir Québec had argued in 2018 that the creation of 4-year-old kindergartens would “free up 50,000 places and reduce the waiting list”, recalled Ms. Maccarone.
“There is indeed an increase in children on the waiting list,” agreed Mr. Lacombe. He attributed this increase to the “slowdown in the creation of spaces between 2014 and 2018” and to the numerous closures of family daycare centers since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Between March 31, 2021 and March 31, 2022, a total of 1,253 home care spaces were lost, according to figures provided to the appropriations study.
Slow network conversion
Facing the Minister, PQ MP Véronique Hivon expressed concern about the slow conversion of unsubsidized places to places that are, particularly in the context where Quebec has improved the tax credit for childcare costs.
“Why is there no timeline for the network conversion? “, she asked the minister. Mr. Lacombe did not answer the question.
According to Ms. Hivon, Quebec should redirect the amounts allocated to the tax credit — $1.1 billion over five years — to speed up the conversion of places and put an end to a “two-speed” system. The arrival of the tax measure worries her all the more because she believes that it has led to an increase in fees in non-subsidized private daycares.
In addition, the tax credit adds “a layer of inequity,” according to Ms. Hivon, since it benefits families with higher incomes more. The difference the credit makes is $1.28 a day for a family earning $40,000, but $16.85 a day for a household earning $175,000, she illustrated. However, the improvement of this credit “was presented as a measure of equity”, she recalled.
Minister Lacombe called his colleague’s position “incoherent”. “If we convert a place [au tarif unique] $8.70, it’s the same logic: the savings will be greater for families with higher incomes,” he pointed out.
Mr. Lacombe said he did not know how many unsubsidized private daycares had raised their fees after the tax credit came into effect. He refused to link the rate increase to the arrival of this measure.
“The reason why there is an increase in prices in the non-subsidized private sector is that we, as a government, have chosen to increase the salaries of educators,” he said, emphasizing that neither the Parti Québécois nor the Liberal Party had done the same.
“To counter these effects, we made an improvement to the tax credit,” he continued. And this one “proves useful to fight the increase of the tariffs”, although that was not “the initial objective”. According to Mr. Lacombe, the increase in fees in non-subsidized private daycares has mainly made it possible to “avoid the closures” of several daycare services.