The number of childcare places is decreasing in Quebec

Photo: Olivier Zuida Le Devoir The Legault government committed in 2021 to creating 37,000 subsidized spaces in the child care network by March 2025.

Patrice Bergeron – The Canadian Press in Quebec City

Published at 8:43 a.m. Updated at 7:30 p.m.

• Quebec City

The number of spaces in Quebec’s child care network is decreasing, despite the commitment made by the Legault government in 2021.

At the end of August, there were 304,084 spaces in all types of child care, subsidized or not, a net decrease compared to May, 304,359, according to data from the Ministry of Families dashboard.

It’s a slight decrease, but it goes against the trend the government wants.

“We’ve regressed,” lamented PQ critic for Families, Joël Arseneau, in an interview with The Canadian Press.

The most significant reduction was recorded in subsidized family daycare services, 853, which the creation of spaces in early childhood centres (286) and subsidized daycares (281) could not compensate for.

At the same time last year, the government had nevertheless created spaces and reduced the waiting list by 1,681 children.

The PQ opposition is concerned about this stagnation, since the government committed in 2021 to creating 37,000 subsidized spaces in the network by March 2025, at a cost of $3 billion. This corresponded to the number of children on the waiting list at the time.

Premier François Legault had even shown his impatience and eagerness at the time by suggesting that he found the deadline too far away.

According to Mr. Arseneau, the Coalition avenir Québec (CAQ) seems to have underestimated the scale of the project.

He noted that the government says it has created 18,790 places in total as of last August, while 34,055 children are still on the waiting list. In May, there were 31,783 on the same list.

“We're not close to eliminating the waiting list,” he lamented.

The dashboard for the development of the child care network shows a commitment completion rate of 95%, considering 18,394 spaces at the “in progress” stage—a measure that the opposition finds imprecise because it does not indicate the progress of opening these spaces.

In September, the Minister of Families, Suzanne Roy, assured the House that 25,000 spaces had indeed been created to date and that the 12,000 missing to reach the target would be created by March 31st next year.

Read also

• The CAQ is still far from its commitment to create 37,000 subsidized daycare spaces
• Daycares bring in three times more to mothers than they cost the government
• The quality of Quebec daycare services is plummeting