Quebec’s universal daycare system has been in place for twenty years, and yet high-quality care remains elusive.
While child-care research is plentiful, not all of it is created equal. The most rigorous academic research shows that the Quebec model struggles with the provision of high-quality child care. One such peer- reviewed study by economists Michael Baker, Jonathan Gruber, and Kevin Milligan in 2005 found that “children were worse off in the years following the introduction of the universal child care program.”1 In 2015, the same economists conducted another study concluding that “negative non-cognitive effects persisted to school ages, and also that cohorts with increased child care access subsequently had worse health, lower life satisfaction, and higher crime rates later in life.”2Another economist, Steven Lehrer, decided to test the findings of Baker, Gruber, and Milligan, thinking that he would not be able to replicate the results. Instead, he concluded, “The main result we found was that Baker, Gruber and Milligan’s work is 100 per cent correct. It’s robust.”3
Université du Québec à Montréal economist Pierre Fortin acknowledges the problem with low-quality care in Quebec but blames it on the problem of having “two tiers.”4 He writes, “The high-performance early childhood centres’ (CPE [Centres de la petite enfance]) network has been demonstrated to deliver positive cognitive, health and behavioural results on average, and to be effective in reducing the vulnerability of children of all income classes, but it absorbs only 1/3 of children.”5 Non-CPE care is blamed for low quality within the system. Yet two decades after implementation, non-CPE care is a necessity within Quebec’s system because of the inability to access the CPE spots.