Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Some days it is difficult to sit here and hear what we hear about Quebec child care. I want to say very firmly that, in Quebec, we have a universal service that meets the needs of the majority of Quebec parents, and of which we are very proud. What is more, we want to keep it as it is.
You should know that this service was not built in a day. My oldest child is 35 now, and even before he had come into the world, we were already fighting to get child care. A number of battles had to be fought, men and women together, for us to get what we have today. The battle went on for a long time; a large number of people were involved and it arose from a very specific need: men and women with children who wanted to work and who wanted a service that was well set up, where children could receive an education, and where they were safe. It was a social choice.
A social choice means that the majority of people in a given place decided what was good for their children. If nine other provinces and the territories decide that they do not want child care service, more power to them. But in Quebec, we chose what we thought was good for us. And never, ever, will I accept your coming here and telling us that we have a discriminatory system. If you want to talk about discrimination, I can give you many more relevant examples than children.
By and large, we are educated and informed people. We love children, and so there is no way we would put them in a system that you are daring to call mediocre. When you say that, you insult everyone in Quebec. Now, that is nothing new, neither here nor elsewhere in Canada. But at least in the interest of being fair and equitable, you should be able to recognize what most people and most credible institutions in Canada and around the world record recognize, that in Quebec, we have just about the best system of child care there is. The system is so well regarded that some MPs are holding it up as a model and submitting it as such to the House.
Of course, in any model, adjustments have to be made here and there. It is a universal system -- I am going to keep calling it universal --, but that does not mean that it works for 50% of the children, as someone here said; it means that it is accessible to everyone.
Of course there are problems with spaces. We are working on it. We would like to get to the point where all children have access. However, you will surely agree that a system like that is not put into place overnight. So it is universal in the sense that everyone has access and in the sense that the first come is the first served, precisely to prevent discrimination. People have access whether they are on welfare or whether they are lawyers or teachers. That is what universality is for us.
So if you want to look it up in a dictionary, go ahead. But coming up with your own definition to denigrate the system is not going to fly.
All I want to say here in that we have our system, we put it into place and it works for us. If you want to use it as a model, go ahead. If you do not want to use it as a model, do what you like. But we want to keep it, and we are going to do everything we can to keep it.
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
