Quebec’s public childcare is crumbling, workers and families are paying the price

Early childhood centres (CPE) in Quebec are struggling with a dearth of qualified staff, broken services and long waiting lists. It is estimated that there is a shortage of over 60,000 educational childcare spots in the Service de garde éducatif à l'enfance (SGEEs) in the province.

Three years ago, François Legault's government pledged to create 37,000 subsidized childcare spots by March 2025. There is still a shortfall of nearly 15,000.

What's more, the Minister for the Family speaks of “subsidized” spots, not “open” ones. These are not necessarily new spots (except in the case of CPEs), but rather private spots converted into subsidized spots.

However, using the private sector instead of the public sector to make up for the lack of spots is problematic. In fact, the quality of services is not the same in the private sector. The latest report by the Auditor General of Quebec on SGEEs shows that 30% of daycare centres fail to meet the minimum educational quality threshold set by the Ministry. This failure rate rises to 60% when looking at private daycares alone.

In 2021, the Ministry received six times as many complaints from parents with children in private daycares as from parents with children in public daycares.

Profit or education?

The Ministry of the Family's criteria for subsidizing private day-care centres are slim. The companies running the daycares must send their budgets to the Ministry and promise not to charge parents any additional fees. Once the subsidy has been approved, the Ministry does not carry out any follow-up monitoring.

Myriam Lavoie-Moore, a researcher at the Institut de Recherche et d'informations socioéconomiques (IRIS), opposes this funding model. “If they comply with the Child Care Services Act, these private companies have two choices: either they limit their profits, or they reduce quality by cutting back on child safety or food service, for example.” 

These private daycares also use employment agencies to fill empty positions. The Fédération de la santé et des services sociaux of the Confederation des services nationaux (CSN) denounces this in a press release: “Rather than offering rewarding conditions to CPE workers, this government is rushing to create spots on the fly, by recruiting unqualified staff, who leave the field after a few months because they don't have the necessary tools to meet the challenges of this profession.”

In recent years, however, there has been a decline in the qualifications of workers. In February 2024, the CAQ adopted a change to the law. The new regulation stipulates that one worker in two must now be qualified. This ratio even drops to 1 in 3 during the opening and closing hours of day-care centers.

Before CPEs were daycare centres run by the people

In the late 1960s, private daycare centres dominated the Quebec landscape. At the same time, the labor movement was gaining in strength, with central labor bodies such as the CSN and Fédération des travailleurs et travailleuses du Québec (FTQ) taking a growing interest in politics. This period also marked a turning point for the women's struggle, with women determined to enter the workforce and expand their rights and freedoms.

It was against this fiery backdrop that union and women's movement activists set up a network of a hundred or so “popular day-care centres” in Quebec's poor and working-class neighbourhoods. These independently-run daycare centres were run by assemblies where parents and workers had their say. Administrators were elected by these assemblies.

Their mission was to offer free services that responded directly to the needs of their communities. Thanks to their mobilization, the network obtained funding from the Quebec government that it devoted entirely to education, without any profit incentive.

This model gave tens of thousands of families access to childcare services that were previously out of their reach. But with the introduction of the CPE Act in 1997, the Quebec state absorbed these daycare centres. Little by little, the government stripped workers and parents of the power to manage their children's education, while eroding working conditions for childcare workers.