I'm trying to remember if I really wrote that it's “the jewel in the crown”, because we are still struggling with the CPEs because they had so many cutbacks. We can say they are better than the for-profits in terms of quality.
With regard to school readiness—which, if I understand correctly, was your other question—we noticed that children who were in a CPE had an advantage. The problem is that the children who most need this kind of a setting are under-represented. Vulnerable populations are less likely to have a space in the CPE. The effect that the CPE could have for their school readiness is very, very weak, because they are not in very good settings.
I did a study about pre-kindergarten. We have full-time pre-kindergarten now, and I wanted to see if the quality of the pre-kindergarten did have an impact on school readiness in a population of children from socially disadvantaged backgrounds. I realized most of them.... Twenty per cent were not in child care before going to maternelle 5 ans. Of those who were in child care, a very small proportion were in the CPEs, and the others were in for-profit and family-based care. We have seen in our studies within the Quebec longitudinal study something interesting, which is that if you look at an upper socio-economic class and a lower socio-economic class and you look at the quality of the CPEs, you see that they're not very different, but if you go into for-profit day cares, they're lower. There is a big quality difference. As well, for home-based care, there's a big quality difference.
What I'm saying is that we need to work on creating more CPEs and, coming back to access, get the children who most benefit from these better settings to be there, because that will narrow the gap. The gap is still there between children from affluent—