The waiting list for a daycare place continues to grow in Quebec despite the new places created, according to the most recent data obtained by The Canadian Press.
The update of the dashboard of the Ministry of Family, of which the press agency obtained a copy, indicates that the number of children waiting for a place has jumped by 3,724 over the past year to reach 37,260.
However, since October 2021, 20,436 subsidized places have been created in the network, or 16,887 new places and 3,549 place conversions, according to government data.
The increase in the number of children waiting can be explained by the arrival of thousands of asylum seekers, suggest figures from the Ministry of Immigration (MIFI) and the Institute of Statistics of Quebec (ISQ) .
The MIFI noted that between 2021 and 2022, 5,901 children aged 0 to 4 from immigrant backgrounds were added to the waiting list. Among these children, 80% are asylum seekers (4730).
Asylum seekers do not have access to subsidized places, only unsubsidized places. The waiting list, also known as Place 0-5, includes all types of child care centers.
In 2022, the Superior Court ruled that asylum seekers had the right to send their children to subsidized daycare, but the Legault government appealed the judgment.
He then explained that the judgment led to the disappearance of the criteria for admission to the reduced contribution, which could have the effect of giving access, for example, to residents of other provinces.
A petition launched by Québec solidaire, and signed by nearly 2,000 people, highlighted last spring that subsidized childcare services are “an important integration tool” for newcomers.
The petition asked the government to recognize the need to include families waiting for their applications to be processed and families without status to the subsidized childcare network.
The figure of 37,260 in the dashboard does not include the 44,647 children on the list who do not immediately need a place, nor the 29,612 pre-registered pregnant women.
Called to react, the office of the Minister of Families, Suzanne Roy, declared: “Each family waiting for a place is one family too many. Our goal is to complete the network and make it fairer. »