Right, I will speak a little slower.
Quebec has a rich history of 25 years of lessons, successes and challenges in connection with its child care services. In Quebec, there is virtually no further debate about the wisdom of offering low-cost child care. Nonetheless, the network faces other challenges that are well documented, such as the shortage of spaces, the quality of care, and problems recruiting and retaining staff. Since these problems have been well documented already, today I want to talk about three lessons from Quebec's experience in connection with its child care services network that are less well known.
The first lesson to note is that not all child care services are daycares.
In the Fall Economic Statement 2020, Chrystia Freeland said: "Just as Saskatchewan once showed Canada the way on health care..., Quebec can show us the way on child care." The deputy prime minister wanted to draw on the Quebec model for creating a national child care network. In its original form, the Quebec model is not a system in which most services are offered in daycares; rather, as Mr. Fortin said, services are offered in CPEs, early childhood centres. It is important to understand that "daycares" and "CPEs" are not synonyms, because they do not refer to the same type of child care.
By definition, a daycare is a private for-profit business. Daycares are therefore not central to the Quebec model. I would note, as a brief aside, that there are two types of daycares in Quebec: those that offer subsidized spaces at the same price as the spaces offered in the CPEs, and unsubsidized centres that offer spaces at the market rate, which is well above $10 per day. All CPEs, on the other hand, are created within the social economy and are not operated for profit. By definition, a CPE may therefore not be a daycare.
The difference between a CPE and a daycare is not just semantic, nor is it ideological. As Mr. Fortin said, daycares in Quebec offer lower quality services, as compared to CPEs, even though, overall, Quebec cannot boast that it offers high quality child care services to a majority of children. At the beginning of the 2000s, a study showed that only 27 per cent of child care facilities offered a level of quality ranging from good to excellent; that proportion rose to 35 per cent in CPEs but fell to 14 per cent in daycares.
The second lesson to note is that even when a majority of spaces are offered at low cost, less well-off families have lower access to high quality child care.
Here again, I will somewhat echo what Mr. Fortin has already said. In Quebec, we know that 36 per cent of children under the age of four do not have access to regulated child care, and yet we know very little about these children and the systemic, economic and cultural barriers that impede the families' access to child care.
Nonetheless, the 2020-2021 report of the Auditor General of Quebec to the National Assembly offers some information about the disparities in access to high quality child care for families in Montreal. For example, in the Park-Extension and Saint-Michel neighbourhoods and in the borough of Montreal North, which are extremely disadvantaged, a much higher number of spaces offered is available in daycares than in CPEs. In Westmount, on the other hand, a particularly wealthy Montreal neighbourhood, more spaces are available in CPEs. In simple terms, poor families have greater access to commercial daycares that offer lower quality services, while richer families have have better access to CPEs at present.
The third and final lesson to note is that the positive effect of child care on the economic activity of mothers in Quebec has to be considered in context.
Creating a child care services network was widely and rightly justified by reference to the importance of supporting women's participation in the labour market and the need to achieve equality between the sexes.
While the effect of child care services on mothers' participation in the labour market is undeniable—I am the mother of three children myself and I could not have pursued my doctoral studies and my career if I had not been able to rely on low-cost child care—it must be pointed out that Quebec has a coherent family policy that consists of more than offering low-cost child care.
Since 2006, Quebec has had its own parental benefits program, the Québec Parental Insurance Plan, which offers more accessible and more generous benefits than those offered everywhere else in Canada. The high rate of participation by mothers in the labour market is therefore a result of an institutional context that goes beyond the availability of child care, even though child care is essential.