Daycare workers protest at Quebec's National Assembly as centres close for the day

Montreal -

Unsubsidized private daycare closed down for the day Wednesday as several workers held a deomonstration in front of the Quebec legislature.  

Owners of unsubsidized private daycares have been complaining for years that they are not on a level playing field with other daycares that offer subsidized spaces.

With the latest wage increases for workers in child care centres and those offered in the current collective agreement negotiations, unsubsidized private child care centres feel they can no longer keep up and fear losing their staff.

The coalition representing them is now calling for a conversion plan for all unsubsidized private child care centres and they want a date for the process to begin.

"That's why we're demonstrating today: so that the work can move forward quickly, and not wait until the next election to be able to convert," said Marie-Claude Collin, president of the Coalition des garderies privées non subventionnées, in an interview.

"Time is of the essence," she added.

"There are daycares that have closed. We have 33 in less than a year that have gone bankrupt. And there are others that are desperate. If nothing happens today, there are others that will close and go out of business."

Quebec's ministry for families, for its part, is faced with a lack of places, with a large waiting list of parents who want to have a place in a centre de petite enfance or public CPE. The priority is to develop new spaces for these children, in order to meet the most pressing demands.

The government recently launched a call for projects to allocate 17,000 subsidized spaces throughout Quebec.

It has also simplified the process for a CPE project, reducing the number of steps from 17 to 9, in order to speed up the process.

Collin is aware of the problem: "With the conversion [that her coalition is asking for], you don't create new spaces. So we have to wait again," she said.

The temporary closure of these private, unsubsidized daycare centres was only for Wednesday. But the coalition is not ruling out other days of closure in protest. 

This report by The Canadian Press was first published in French on Nov. 10, 2021.