OTTAWA — Child-care advocates and researchers say a new study suggesting negative outcomes for children in Quebec’s care system makes too many leaps in its conclusions and may misrepresent the real picture.
The study suggests that children who go through Quebec’s low-cost, child-care system may do well academically, but have worse outcomes when it comes to health, life satisfaction and crime rates compared with their counterparts in other provinces who don’t have access to the same type of system.
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Researchers who have looked at the Quebec model point to what they believe are flaws in how the study came to conclusions that could mislead Canadians thinking about child care during this election.
Experts say the authors link child care to the behavioural outcomes of all children in the province, even though at least half of them weren’t in the low-cost daycare program.
The study posted online Monday marked the second time the researchers tried to measure the quality of the Quebec system and the second time they stoked controversy with their results.
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Complicating matters this time is that the study landed in the midst of a federal campaign, in which the N-D-P has made creation of a national child-care program on the Quebec model a key part of its platform.
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