The Minister of Families, Mathieu Lacombe, has promised to complete the network of subsidized childcare services by adding 37,000 places by 2025. What he did not tell us is that this development would be based on a greater proportion of private daycare centers to the detriment of early childhood centers (CPE).
The Minister has just announced the creation of 14,000 new subsidized places in the network over the next two years. However, the projects selected relate to 8,000 places in CPEs and 6,000 places in private, for-profit daycare centres. This means that an abnormally high proportion, ie 43% of places, will be offered in facilities operated by private owners. Historically, the Ministry aimed to allocate new places in facilities to CPEs in a proportion of 85%.
During its last call, the ministry received offers for a total of nearly 63,000 places, 35% of which came from CPEs. There were therefore enough CPE projects — that is, 22,000 places — to meet the needs. It must be said that the new “continuous” project call process favored private owners who often only have a banker to convince, while the CPEs, whose operation is community-based, often join forces with community, such as municipalities, schools, CLSCs or CHSLDs.
Minister Lacombe has always maintained that he favors the CPE model. He even tabled an amendment to his Bill 1, currently under study in parliamentary committee, which indicates that in the future, the ministry will be obliged to opt for the CPE model for any new development. of the network. But now, because it was necessary to open new places “to the most sacred”, to use the watchword launched by François Legault in October, private enterprise received the lion’s share.
We cannot accuse the CAQ minister of preferring the CPE model for ideological reasons. He has in hand a Ministry evaluation of the quality of the various daycare services, which confirms the data of independent university studies on the subject: CPEs offer better quality services than subsidized private daycares, which downgrade daycares unsubsidized business.
In this regard, nothing has been settled for these unsubsidized daycares, the poor relation which nevertheless represents almost a quarter of the 300,000 places in the network. The intention is to convert these commercial child care centers into subsidized facilities, but that’s a long shot. Currently, the department is running two small pilot projects.
Meanwhile, paradoxically, the CAQ government is encouraging the consolidation of the private sector. It improved the tax credit paid to parents so that the daily rates of some $40 correspond, after the tax rebate, to the flat rate of $8.50 for subsidized childcare services, at least for certain income brackets. A waste of time: many of these private daycares have instead chosen to raise their rates. It must be said that they are unable to offer competitive remuneration, a situation which has worsened following the last salary increase granted to educators in CPEs. Taken by the throat, many owners have only one wish: to transform their meager livelihood into subsidized daycare.
However, Minister Lacombe must be reminded that the preferred model is that of the CPEs so that educational services for children do not give rise to this right to eternal profit guaranteed by the State.