Thousands hit the streets against proposed sliding scale for daycare

Watch above: Thousands showed up on Sunday to protest against a proposed Quebec law indexing daycare costs. Billy Shields reports.

MONTREAL — Thousands of people gathered at Place des Festivals to protest a law proposed by the provincial Liberal government to index the cost of daycare to household income.

“We cannot understand why they come to the only program that is actually profitable for the province,” said Gina Gasparrini, the President of the Quebec Association of CPEs (home-based daycares). “For every dollar they spend in daycare, it generates a dollar fifty.”

READ MORE: Should universally subsidized daycare end in Quebec? The Liberals think so

It remains unclear exactly what the new law would entail, but a recent report by the French-language newspaper Le Devoir indicated that while the minimum fee for daycare would go from $7 to $8, in the highest household income bracket of above $200,000, it would go up to $20 a day.

“The middle class is being taxed twice,” said Christine Fiocco, a mother of four who drove in from Repentigny. “People with lesser incomes probably are going to struggle with this as well.”

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Working women also fear how this could have an impact on their lives.

“I think it’ll keep some women at home, or working less hours in order to keep their kids at home,” said Jennifer Prevost, who has a child in daycare.

That fear is not unfounded. A working paper published in May 2012 by the Université de Sherbrooke found that universal access to low-fee child care in Quebec encouraged “nearly 70,000 more mothers to hold jobs than if no such program had existed — an increase of 3.8 per cent in women employment.”

READ MORE: Quebec daycare workers rally against sliding-scale fee model

One of the demonstrators at the gathering was Camil Bouchard, a former MNA who proposed overhauling the system back in the 1990s while he was a social researcher at the Université du Québec à Montréal.

Bouchard said he originally proposed reforms as a way to stimulate the economy. Now he fears those reforms are close to being reversed.

“There is a fiscal problem. There is a budget problem,” he said. “It’s not for the parents to fulfill the needs of all the budget problems of the province.”

If passed, the law is scheduled to take effect April 1, according to reports.