I would say it would be to avoid the big refundable tax credit system that Quebec instituted in 2009. In 2008 and starting in 2009, it decided to enlarge the refundable tax credit for parents who were sending their children to a private garderie so that the net cost after tax credit would be similar to the $7 a day fee that they had to pay in the licensed subsidized sector so that there would be full competition between the private garderies and the non-profit sector.
The incentive for the government to do that is, for example, that, if you look at 2016, it paid on average $45 to any CPE or early childhood centre non-profit, but only $21, or 60% of $35, is the refundable tax credit, which is the daily cost in a private garderie. The government pays 60% of that in a refundable tax credit to the parents so it makes a profit of $24—$45 minus $21—when a parent decides to go to a private garderie instead of a CPE.
I said that the government was pushing people toward the private garderies. The problem with the private garderies is that they have been universally, and by many studies, calibrated as giving just average or totally inadequate services to the population as opposed to the CPE system, where about half of the centres have been measured as giving good to excellent quality services, with the rest giving average quality services.
This is what we would have to avoid. The problem, of course, is to what extent here our government can contribute to financing a national child care system by imposing some constraints on the provinces. Of course, just as in the Canada Health Act, there could be some dispositions, some clauses, that would help to avoid that trap, because in Quebec it's really a low-quality trap we're in now.