If the old adage is correct and prostitution is the world’s first profession, childcare must be the second. Long before the days of professional childcare, parents have struggled to balance raising their children and supporting their families.
In this day and age, many families struggle with the search for affordable, adequate childcare. After all, this decision dictates the well-being of your child; not anyone can be trusted with such a duty. Complaints of all sorts commonly surface about inadequate child care, whether it be unsatisfactory education, overfull daycare centers, or even cases of child abuse. In a market where demand exceeds supply, waiting lists for professional child care centers are far from short.
Another common complaint is the affordability of childcare services. Child care has an uncanny ability to burn a hole in parents’ pockets. In our sputtering economy, it becomes essential for parents to reenter the workforce not long after having children. Not all families have the funds to allow for one working parent and one stay-at-home parent, and naturally, daycare is the most convenient alternative.
However, professional child care centers cannot keep up with the growing number of parents who require care for their children. Rising costs force parents to turn to unregistered and unregulated home care services, sometimes sacrificing quality and safety for cost — not necessarily a sacrifice parents should be making with regard to their children.
Taking this into account, it may appear that childcare should be a pertinent concern in decision-making circles; however, it is not. The Canadian government remains engaged in a long and mostly fruitless debate over publicly-funded, subsidized child care. The only province to make headway on this front has been Quebec, which has had subsidized, provincial daycare since 1997.
Quebec’s current policy offers childcare for $7 a day across the board to families of all social classes, under a waitlist program open to all Quebec citizens. Under a $2.2 billion dollar budget, the province of Quebec plans to decrease the unemployment rate, improve child development and create opportunities for lower socioeconomic classes.
The province has promised to provide universal childcare by 2016, in lieu of their current program which often involves long wait times for parents in need of health care. The province is already well on its way towards increasing the number of subsidized child care locations: they now number at over 230 000, compared to only 77 000 when the program began.
Though Quebec’s program has incited envy from parents across the rest of Canada — many of whom foot thousands of dollars a month to afford adequate child care services — the province’s subsidized child care system faces hard critics.
In this day and age, many families struggle with the search for affordable, adequate childcare.
One of the leading critiques introduces the sacrifice of quality for quantity. With a subsidized daycare program coming into effect in Quebec, the demand for child care has skyrocketed. Parents across the province have crawled out of the woodwork in search of $7 a day childcare. The problem arises in the quantity of available resources — there are only a limited number of professional daycare centers that the province can subsidize.
This results in over-capacitated daycares overflowing with disproportionate child-to-carer ratios, and capitulation to homecare centers, which have been heavily criticized for paying insufficient attention to children. In recent years, multiple child deaths have been reported due to inattention in home daycares — not a reassuring fact for parents.
Not only does the high demand for subsidized childcare force parents to turn to home care, it also pushes professional centers beyond their maximum capacity. With childcare institutions stretched to the maximum, successful development and educational benefits to the child can be lost.
In 2011, the National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth (NLSCY), a research survey studying a range of youth across Canada, concluded that children in subsidized daycares below school age perform inadequately compared to their counterparts in other provinces with unregulated daycares — an astonishing result under a policy that strives to increase children’s educational development. According to the NLSCY, Quebec’s subsidized child care may do more harm than good.
Another problem stemming from excess demand for Quebec’s child care services is unbearably long waiting lists. Parents are sometimes forced to wait beyond a year for daycare openings, or take spots that are inconveniently distant from their homes and work. Though the province’s upcoming policy changes attempt to fix these issues, many Quebecois remain skeptical.
One of the most outspoken critics of Quebec’s child care programs is none other than Prime Minister Stephen Harper. The Conservative PM has firmly established his stance on universal health care: in his view, it is simply not beneficial to Canadians. After scraping the budget to expand subsidized child care across all provinces, Harper plans to provide child care subsidies in other formats.
“We took money from bureaucrats and lobbyists and gave it to the real experts on child care, and their names are mom and dad!” Harper said in a keynote address on June 10, 2011, regarding his Universal Child Care Benefit policy, which aims to provide families with $100 a month for every child under six. However, Harper — firmly entrenched in his own conservative economic policies — refuses to entertain the idea of truly universal child care.
Amid persistent complaints on the subject of universal, subsidized childcare, Quebec has produced outstanding and underpublicized results. The benefits of subsidized daycare in Quebec are substantial, and ultimately outweigh the risks.
To begin, the province of Quebec now serves 70 per cent of children with subsidized daycare. In a 15 year period, this is a profound achievement. The province has promised to achieve a space for every child by 2016, and is well on its way. Quebec has demonstrated that the development of infrastructure in the childcare sector is possible; however, it will take hard work, a sizeable chunk of the province’s budget, and a long-term mindset.
But statistics have already begun to speak to Quebec’s success. In the last 10 years, child poverty in the province has been reduced by 50 per cent. To put it simply, in the last decade, the number of children living below the national poverty line has been cut in half. The connection lies in the increased number of adults able to enter the workforce, increasing family incomes, resulting in better socioeconomic conditions for growing children.
As the first Canadian province to implement universal child care, Quebec is still on the learning curve.
The full essence of this phenomenon cannot be observed until this generation of universal child care children grow into adults. Studies of a quantitative as well as qualitative nature have shown that impoverished children have high chances of remaining in poverty into adulthood. It will be interesting to see the effects that subsidized child care may have in the long-term. With fewer children raised in impoverished households, will the coming decades see a decrease in Quebecois poverty at large?
Since the province introduced its policy of universal child care in 1997, Quebecois public school test scores have gone from some of the lowest to some of the highest in Canada. The effects of subsidized childcare on education are just beginning to be seen.
Women have also been empowered by these policies, to the benefit of the Quebecois economy. Though gender roles are becoming progressively less prominent in parenting, some traditions have yet to subside: according to Statistics Canada, in 2009, mothers accounted for 88 per cent of stay-at-home parents in the country. In modern Canada, women still commonly trade their place in the workforce and the pursuit of higher education in order to stay at home with their children.
Since the introduction of subsidized child care in Quebec, the province now has more women enrolled in postsecondary education than any other province in Canada. Quebec also has an outstanding 74 per cent of women with children under age six in the workforce. Not only is this increase in gender equality beneficial to women, it also has substantial economic benefits: it can be said that Quebec’s $2.2 billion dollar childcare budget has been heavily funded by the increase of women in the labour force. Tax benefits from working mothers cover almost 40 per cent of the total cost of the child care program. Essentially, the program is funding half of itself.
Quebec’s child care program does have its flaws — waiting lists, unbalanced carer to child ratios, commutes to the daycares. However, the program has only been in effect for 15 years, and its full repercussions cannot yet be accurately observed. As the first Canadian province to implement universal child care into their budget, Quebec is still on the learning curve. A program like this is not a short-term plan; it will take time to perfect.
Take Finland, for example; arguably the most developed universal child care provider, with some of the highest literacy scores and education levels in the world. Finland provides universal child care for children between the ages of 18 months and five years, when Finnish children begin elementary school.
Though we now tend to think of this system as utopian, the benefits derived from Finland’s universal child care program did not happen overnight: The nation’s first policies introducing subsidized child care were introduced in the early 1970s, but Finland did not achieve full universal childcare until 1990. Only after decades of hard work and perseverance have the full benefits of the program been observed.
Quebec is already beginning to detect flaws in the system, and make revisions accordingly. In September of this year, the province announced that in 2014 they will be opening an online waiting list database. Parents will no longer be forced to seek out daycares themselves; instead, the database will find the closest, most suitable daycare for them with the shortest waiting list, hopefully reducing commutes for parents and making it easier for parents to find open spots.
The benefits of subsidized daycare in Quebec are substantial, and ultimately outweigh the risks.
Like any successful social program, Quebec’s system will take time to fully develop. Instead of focusing on the harsh critiques, we should focus on the positive benefits achieved in only 15 years. In its short lifespan, Quebec has made admirable progress toward a universal child care system that has significant social and economic effects on families of all socioeconomic classes across the province.
The benefits derived from foreign universal child care policies and Quebec’s new system have gone exceptionally unnoticed in Canada. Many Canadians are unaware that any kind of subsidized child care exists anywhere in the country, and Stephen Harper’s child care budget is ultimately ineffective when parents foot thousands a month on daycare services.
An aging population requires a greater workforce, and more babies that need caring for. As proven in Quebec, subsidized childcare can be an answer to these problems. So, why is this so underpublicized, if not condemned, by Canadian decision-makers? Maybe this is a product of the neoliberal ideology embedded in our conservative government to privatize and commodify everything, with no concern toward the ever-increasing inequality in our country — or maybe childcare is simply not on the agenda.
Whatever the cause of such lack of attention to the possible benefits of subsidized childcare, it is undeniable that Quebec’s system has made significant social and economic improvements to the province, and should be considered a viable option for the rest of Canada.
