Last October, the Quebec government committed to creating nearly 40 thousand new subsidized daycare places by 2025. On Sunday, the family minister announced the province is close to hitting its target, ahead of schedule.
Family Minister Mathieu Lacombe announced nearly 14,000 spots have already been created across the province — over 600 of them in Montreal.
The Quebec government committed to investing $3 billion into the province’s subsidized daycare program, with the hope of creating 37,000 spots by 2025.
At the time, more than 50,000 names were on a waiting list with a critical shortage of daycare workers. While working to build new subsidized daycare centres, both the family minister and labour minister announced plans last month to hire 18,000 new daycare educators and upgrade the skills of 7,000 current ones.
Families will also be able to access the ministry’s website containing information about where new daycares are being built and when spots will be available.
Lacombe says they are working to create spots as quickly as possible.
“We gave the CPE and the daycare a huge amount of places of subsidized spots to develop in only 60 days,” he says. “In the past the delay could be as long as long as 10 months.”
In a statement to Global News, the CSQ, the union representing subsidized daycare workers, says although the creation of new spots is good news there is still concern over a shortage of educators, despite ambitious plans announced last month to recruit new workers and train them efficiently.
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