Three months after announcing the creation of places in childcare services “at the most sacred”, Quebec has received project proposals that exceed by three times its expectations.
In October, the Minister of Families, Mathieu Lacombe, undertook to carry out the development of the network of daycare services in Quebec by adding 18,000 new places, including 1,000 in Aboriginal communities. Impatient, Prime Minister François Legault had said he wanted to start the construction sites “at the most sacred”. For this, his government had undertaken to break down a series of locks which slowed down the authorization of new places.
Then, “we asked promoters, CPEs, daycare centers to submit projects, and we received three times more than what we asked for,” Minister Lacombe said Thursday in an interview with the Duty.
The enthusiasm for new projects testifies, according to the elected official, to the fact that “the network is extremely mobilized”. “Of course, there is a work of analysis of the files which means that many must be dismissed, but the mobilization is exceptional”, he rejoiced.
This “mobilized” network, however, several parents have struggled to access for years. In this period of a pandemic, it is also the cost of contradictory and changing instructions about the COVID-19.
“In the holiday season […], Public Health has actually changed its recommendations a few times in a short time. That’s what created some confusion, which wasn’t in bad faith, but it’s still the end result, there was some confusion. We quickly corrected it afterwards, ”acknowledged Minister Lacombe.
On December 30, Public Health ended mandatory isolation after contact with a case of COVID-19 in daycare. She reversed her decision on January 4, before correcting the situation again on January 12, reducing the isolation to five days. Most of the information came out in the media, with the subject of daycare services often not having been discussed at a press conference.
In the context, “should there have been a press briefing? I don’t know,” replies Mr. Lacombe. “But the bottom line is that it works well. The educators and principals got what they asked for and today, one month after the holiday season, the situation is going well. On Thursday, the Minister of Families said he had been informed of the closure of two facilities and of less than twenty outbreaks out of 3,500 facilities in Quebec.
A 100% subsidized network
In February 2021, Mathieu Lacombe caused a stir by declaring to Radio-Canada that the development of early childhood centers (CPE) “does not work.[ait] more “. He said he had done “everything he could” and advocated for changes.
“It didn’t surprise anyone in our network that I said that. But it was perceived by some columnists as if it were an admission of weakness or an acknowledgment of powerlessness when, on the contrary, it was a lucid observation, shared by people in the field. [et] an acknowledgment of ambition, to say: ‘we’re going to solve this problem’”, he says today.
The Minister is now heading for a “100% subsidized” network, accessible, and which corrects the weaknesses of the CPE project presented by Pauline Marois 25 years ago. “I don’t think he [le projet de Mme Marois] had major flaws,” the minister believes. “The problems we are experiencing today, I think they are essentially linked to political decisions that were taken for financial or ideological reasons. For example, when the door was opened to unsubsidized daycares,” he adds.
Mme Marois agrees. ” In the case of [l’ex-premier ministre libéral Philippe] Couillard, he knew that the network was expensive and for that reason, he did not want to support it. Except that the sums invested have such a positive return, both on the economic and social aspect”, she lamented in an interview with The duty. She herself paid the price for the network’s lack of accessibility: of her nine grandchildren, only two were able to attend a CPE.
Moreover, she notes that it is still today women who “pay the price for the inertia” of the Couillard government. “Who demonstrated that the lack of places is the women who pay the price? she asks, highlighting the work of “My place at work”. The movement, launched in response to the shortage of places in childcare services in Quebec, has as its main poster child a young mother, Myriam Lapointe-Gagnon.
“The pandemic has illustrated the fact that we still have work to do for equality”, continues Mme Marois. “When I listened to women say, ‘I can’t go back to teaching, because I have young children. [et pas de place en garderie]”, I said to myself: “do they have a father, these children?” This is where we see that the weight is still on women. »