Good morning.
I am a full professor in the department of economics at the Université du Québec à Montréal. I specialize in the economics of education and work.
I am happy to be with you today.
My research over the last 15 years has focused exclusively on children and families and on inequality and how it is transmitted from generation to generation. In all my studies, I pay particular attention to large-scale programs and interventions that have an influence on the development of children and families. To do this, I use high quality microdata and causal inference techniques to establish a causal connection between those interventions and children's development or families' welfare.
I have done several studies on numerous subjects, including Quebec's prenatal nutrition program and reduced-contribution childcare programs. I have also looked at the federal reform of parental leave, class size, and the effect of repeating a school year on children's development and academic success. Many subjects have therefore been studied, and when the pandemic happened, I was contacted to do studies that dealt more with children's development in the context of the pandemic.
At the beginning of the pandemic, I set about reading everything that was written about the repercussions of school closings on children and youth. In this regard, I observed that we had a huge amount of information about what was going to happen. We were not working in a total void. There had been events in the past from which lessons could be learned. We had seen that when schools were closed, learning disparities grew. In general, those for whom it is easy will continue to find it easy and get good results, and those for whom it is harder will fall behind; the longer the schools are closed, the farther behind they will be.
We had estimated that the gap between the strongest and weakest would grow by 30% as a result of the closings that took place in the spring of 2020, at the start of the pandemic. That article was published in the summer of 2020, during the pandemic, in “Canadian Public Policy/Analyse de politiques”, which is a serious journal in Canada. Studies then multiplied all over, and confirmed that performance gaps were growing.
In the middle of it all, I became the co‑director of the Observatoire pour l'éducation et la santé des enfants, which is based at the Hôpital Sainte-Justine here in Montreal. That observatory was created to monitor children's development during the pandemic and to evaluate various strategies or interventions that could be used to mitigate the effects of the pandemic, and especially of lockdowns, on children.
One of the studies we conducted was done in collaboration with Quebec's ministère de l'Éducation. We had 10,000 Quebec children take a standardized test to learn their level of knowledge of French, and specifically in reading. The test we used in June 2021 was exactly the same as the one that had been used by the Government of Quebec in June 2019. We were therefore able to do a real apples to apples comparison. Approximately 10,000 children took the test in June 2021, and we observed that the strongest 20%, the ones for whom things were very easy, were still just as successful on the test, while the weakest children had fallen well behind. Those results were confirmed by the recent results we have seen in Quebec, in the departmental examinations that took place in June 2022. So that is no surprise. We were expecting it. I did a number of media appearances in April 2020 to try to alert people to the importance of thinking carefully about closing schools and making sure it was a good practice.
Other studies have been done by people at the Observatoire that relate more to mental health, but we have really observed repercussions on mental health everywhere in the world. The hospital data we have here, from Sainte-Justine and elsewhere in Quebec, indicates a rise in visits associated with suicide attempts or suicidal ideation. In fact, that data was updated yesterday in Quebec, and we see that this trend is continuing. We therefore see a deterioration in our young people's mental health. We also see a decline in physical activity and a rise in time spent in front of screens and eating junk food.
I think my five minutes' speaking time is up, but I could continue talking about this subject for a long time. Overall, the effects on children of the pandemic and the measures that we chose to implement in Canada are not negligible.