Quebec provides universal childcare for less than $7 a day. Here's what the US can learn

[erronis]

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jun/24/quebec-universal-childcare-us-learn
Isabeau Doucet in Montreal

Public childcare network is a win for everyone – kids, parents and the government, and the Quebec model is a shining example

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.

All this is possible because in 1997, Quebec lawmakers enacted a universal childcare program as part of an effort to give equal opportunities to all children – especially kids from low-income families – to get young mothers back to work and to increase the government’s tax revenue and eliminate the province’s budget deficit.

. . .

[Bayard]

1. K&R

[Irish_Dem]

2. Un pays qui se soucie de ses enfants et de ses parents.

[B.See]

3. Indeed. Ahhh

remember when one could read about something America's government and lawmakers did for the GOOD of its people?

Seems so very long ago.

[Irish_Dem]

4. The PutinGOP makes it clear they loathe the American people.

We are suckers and losers.
And we are just going to die anyway.

The GOP doing something good for the American people is an impossibility.
They work for themselves and the billionaires.
And our enemies.

[OMGWTF]

5. I've been saying for 25 years that in my next life I will be Canadian.