Quebec’s innovative early childhood education and care policy and its weaknesses

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Résumé (français)

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Résumé (anglais)

Adopting a public policy perspective, family policy expert Pierre Lefebvre describes the $5-per-day child care program in Quebec and argues that much of the current debate about the future of this policy is tainted by wishful thinking. This state of mind, he suggests, is preventing the government and parents from facing important weaknesses, notably the fact that the policy favours higher income families, is unfair to families who choose to care for their children themselves or do not use nonparental child care, and is not well suited to parents working part time or nonstandard hours. Lefebvre also observes that the services provided to children are overall of mediocre quality and insufficiently dedicated to helping vulnerable children. He observes that Quebec has always provided more support for families than have the other provinces, but that the tradeoffs brought about by the reforms that introduced the $5 a-day-policy in 1997 lack transparency in terms of the real cost of the service and have distorted parents’ child care choices. He concludes by proposing alternatives measures to deal with equity and efficiency issues, among them full-day public kindergarten for four-year-olds; more flexibility and diversity in child care services; home care allowances for parents of children under the age of three who do not use subsidized child care services; and increased resources for part-day preschool programs dedicated to at-risk children.