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Quebec provides universal childcare for less than $7 a day. Here’s what the US can learn. (www.theguardian.com)

submitted 3 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

3 comments fedilink hide all child comments

When asked how much she pays for childcare, Leah Freeman chuckles and says she isn’t sure. “It’s like C$93 (about $67) every two weeks or something. I barely see it leaving my bank account,” she said.

To most parents in the US, where the average cost of childcare is $1,000 per month and can reach more than $2,000 a month in some states, the idea of paying so little sounds impossible. But it’s happening – north of the US border in Quebec, Canada, where Freeman’s three-year-old daughter, Grace, attends a subsidized early childhood education center (centres de la petite enfance, known by its acronym CPE), for C$9.35, or less than $7 a day.

As soon as she found out that she was pregnant, Freeman, a social worker, placed her daughter on a handful of waiting lists through a government website. Now she can drop her daughter off for up to 10 hours a day, between 6am and 6pm, five days a week, all year round. In addition to childcare, Grace sees a speech therapist at the CPE. A daily menu of the home-cooked meals and snacks is posted at the building’s entrance every morning; meals are on a monthly rotation with seasonal changes and locally sourced produce when available.

The irony being this system was created because of U.S. research into the benefits of early-childhood education.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Yeah and there’s major problems (mostly political one) like old crumbling buildings, moss and lack of financial help from the gouvernement.

They buy places (50$/day and up) from private kindergarten because they don’t want to invest to have enough places in the public service.

I’m not saying that’s not a cool system, I’m saying that it’s dying because of neoliberal law makers

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 days ago

You're not wrong.

Yeah the conservatives have fucked up our whole public care system. They bottleneck and sabotage to make it look like it's not working, while subsidizing the private side at 100x the cost.