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To most parents in the US, where the average cost of childcare is $1,000 per month and can reach more than $2,000 a month in some states, the idea of paying so little sounds impossible. But it’s happening – north of the US border in Quebec, Canada, where Freeman’s three-year-old daughter, Grace, attends a subsidized early childhood education center (centres de la petite enfance, known by its acronym CPE), for C$9.35, or less than $7 a day.
As soon as she found out that she was pregnant, Freeman, a social worker, placed her daughter on a handful of waiting lists through a government website. Now she can drop her daughter off for up to 10 hours a day, between 6am and 6pm, five days a week, all year round. In addition to childcare, Grace sees a speech therapist at the CPE. A daily menu of the home-cooked meals and snacks is posted at the building’s entrance every morning; meals are on a monthly rotation with seasonal changes and locally sourced produce when available.
All this is possible because in 1997, Quebec lawmakers enacted a universal childcare program as part of an effort to give equal opportunities to all children – especially kids from low-income families – to get young mothers back to work and to increase the government’s tax revenue and eliminate the province’s budget deficit.
The massively popular program has been a win for everyone involved: it offers high-quality early education to toddlers; good, unionized jobs to childcare workers; has helped close the gender pay gap; affords young families crucial support in the earliest years of their children’s lives and has been a financial boon to the government. It’s been so popular that now the model is being built up across the rest of Canada.
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The roots of Quebec’s childcare model go back decades, to the French-speaking province’s “Quiet Revolution” in the 1960s, which booted the Catholic church out of state institutions and made them more secular and egalitarian. Marriage went out of fashion and rates plummeted, leading to dire poverty among children of single mothers.
Social movements, feminist activists, labor unions and single-parent family associations demanded new policies, such as parental leave and universal childcare, to address the new family structures. Later, in 1997, the secessionist Parti Québécois government enacted the new family policy as part of an effort to restructure the social safety net and eliminate the budget deficit.
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Today, Quebec has among the highest female labor force participation rates in the world right next to Sweden, while the US lags more than 10% behind. In addition, the gender pay gap – the difference between the earnings of men and women – is smaller in Quebec, where women typically earn 91 cents on the male dollar, than the US, where women earn just 85 cents.
Measuring the causal impact of Quebec’s subsidized childcare on factors such as poverty and social assistance is an imprecise science, but Fortin points out that the number of single-parent families on social assistance in Quebec plummeted by more than 50% in the decade following the reform. Today, Fortin calculated exclusively for the Guardian, that Quebec has 75% fewer single-parent families on social assistance than it did in 1996.
It’s also had a tremendous impact on childhood wellbeing. In 1996, child poverty rates across Canada were at an all-time high and children in Quebec were among the worst off. Today, it’s the opposite. According to the most recent figures, Quebec’s child poverty rate was 44% lower than all other Canadian provinces.
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By mid-2024, six of Canada’s 13 jurisdictions hit the C$10-a-day goal, and others cut fees by half, according to the Childcare Resource and Research Unit. In March, days before stepping down as prime minister, Justin Trudeau committed another C$37bn in funding to federal childcare until 2031 to “lock in” his flagship policy as “a foundational building block of what it means to be Canadian”.
Asked if she thinks the US could build up a universal childcare system like Quebec, Martha Friendly, executive director of the Childcare Resource and Research Unit and lifelong advocate for universal high-quality childcare on both sides of the border, is blunt. “No,” she said. “There isn’t even healthcare.”
But others are less pessimistic. Elliot Haspel, an early childhood and education policy expert and author of Crawling Behind: America’s Child Care Crisis and How to Fix It, disagrees: “Canada has shown that you can go from a market-based system to a publicly supported system, if you’re willing to put in substantial amounts of money.”
Haspel said that Canadian lawmakers had a “fundamental flip” in attitude: “They turned childcare from being a welfare service for low-income families to a core part of the social infrastructure,” like schools, roads and fire departments. “That, I think, is really exciting.”
That’s the kind of mental flip that would need to happen in the US, which has some of the highest childcare costs in the world, yet ranks 40th out of 41 high-income countries on policies like paid parental leave and affordable, accessible and high-quality childcare. Half of Americans live in “childcare deserts”, and workers – mostly women of color – are underpaid.
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