On the question about Quebec's child care program, I would suggest that the changes made to that program were not as much a result of fiscal constraints as opposed to fiscal choices. The Quebec government chose to reduce the amount of public funding for the universal child care centres—les centres de la petite enfance—and family, home-based child care and, instead, put more public money toward providing tax credits for families who access the for-profit private sector.
A lot of money is still being paid out, but it's not going toward boosting universal access; it's going toward supporting the for-profit child care industry. That was the mistake, in our opinion. But for those families who are fortunate to be able to access child care under les centres de la petite enfance, it is still much more affordable in Quebec than in the rest of Canada.
We're looking for an affordable child care program. We're not saying it should be free, necessarily, but that it should be affordable. We think the best way to finance a system is to provide direct public funding to the providers of the child care services, as Quebec has done in the case of les centres de la petite enfance. Then, whatever fees would be collected from parents would go to the government to help subsidize the cost, as opposed to the other way round—of giving money in the form of subsidy to parents. The latter doesn't create child care spaces, but gives parents the money to go into the child care market to try to purchase services. Those services, unfortunately, are not as high quality because they're not directly funded through public funds.