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.
The massively popular program has been a win for everyone involved: it offers high-quality early education to toddlers; good, unionized jobs to childcare workers; has helped close the gender pay gap; affords young families crucial support in the earliest years of their children’s lives and has been a financial boon to the government. It’s been so popular that now the model is being built up across the rest of Canada.
Perhaps ironically, Quebec’s approach was partly inspired by the groundbreaking research into early childhood coming out of the US – that providing high-quality education early on was not just socially good but a smart economic investment.
“The best way to reduce social inequalities is to invest in small children very early in their lives,” said Nathalie Bigras, a retired professor at Université du Québec à Montréal who spent her career researching Quebec’s childcare. “And this is something that you [Americans] told us.”
Now, as the US faces its own growing childcare crisis – an unaffordable patchwork of care that varies wildly in quality and accessibility – what can it learn from Quebec? Plenty, experts say.
On the ground floor of a redbrick school that also houses an adult education center, Les Trottinettes (“The Scooters”) is a CPE that serves 26 kids from nine months to five years old. It’s part of a network of five CPEs in Verdun, a traditionally working-class, though rapidly gentrifying, neighborhood of Montreal.
Asylum seekers who are single parents can enroll their children here while they take French language classes and continuing education courses upstairs.
Across two big rooms with a maze of different play stations, children paint bright colors at small easels. There’s a water table, a sand box, wooden construction blocks, colorful bricks, a quiet reading nook and lots of well-loved, sturdy wooden furniture. With open-ended questions, Les Trottinettes educators encourage kids to plan their play intentions, develop them through action and then reflect on how their project went.
“You can learn so much about a society by studying its approach to early childhood,” said Stéphane Trudel, a trained sociologist and the general manager of Les Trottinettes. “We’re at the frontline of social inequalities, of gender inequalities, of cultural clashes.” Yet he finds that very few anthropologists or journalists are interested in it. “It’s a blind spot,” he said.
Trudel credits research from the US as having influenced Quebec’s approach to early childhood education. American research spanning child welfare, psychological development, nutrition, education and economics was extensively cited in the 1991 report that led to Quebec’s new family policy. And even in terms of pedagogy, Les Trotinette’s curriculum, for instance, is based on HighScope, an approach started in Michigan designed to close the opportunity gap for low-income families.
HighScope’s longitudinal study, conducted by the Nobel prize-winning economist James Heckman, found lasting intergenerational benefits to high-quality early childhood education, calculating an estimated C$12.90 return for every C$1 invested – from success in school, higher earning over decades, reduced crime and use of social assistance programs.
The roots of Quebec’s childcare model go back decades, to the French-speaking province’s “Quiet Revolution” in the 1960s, which booted the Catholic church out of state institutions and made them more secular and egalitarian. Marriage went out of fashion and rates plummeted, leading to dire poverty among children of single mothers.
Social movements, feminist activists, labor unions and single-parent family associations demanded new policies, such as parental leave and universal childcare, to address the new family structures. Later, in 1997, the secessionist Parti Québécois government enacted the new family policy as part of an effort to restructure the social safety net and eliminate the budget deficit.
The crown jewel of this new policy was the creation of the centres de la petite enfance (CPE), an autonomous network of subsidized childcare centers, offering high-quality, low-cost care (C$5 at the time), with unionized staff and parent-led governance.
“It’s the parents who run the show,” said Pauline Marois, the architect of Quebec’s family policy who was also Quebec’s first female premier, and is now chancellor of Université du Québec à Montréal. She said she helped craft the CPE model in collaboration with existing community daycare networks, run by parents and neighborhood organizations, like Les Trottinettes.
Marois described the key ingredients for this public system’s success as investment into educational programs, universal access through low fees and high parental involvement – because no institution could protect children’s interests better than their parents.
Parent-run boards set the curriculum, manage the day-to-day operations, the hiring and training of staff, while the state sets laws on staff training, child ratios, quality control and by covering the majority of the cost.
Marois called the creation of CPEs a “complete revolution” and one of the biggest social changes the province had experienced in the past three decades.
It might seem like a public childcare network offering high-quality education, homemade meals and help for children with special needs for about C$10 a day would be expensive for taxpayers, but it actually generates a profit, said Pierre Fortin, an emeritus economist at Université de Quebec at Montreal.
“The system pays for itself – it brings women into the workplace and they pay taxes,” said Fortin, a leading expert on the economics of subsidized childcare. “You get more money flowing into government coffers.” This extra tax revenue actually exceeds what the government initially paid to establish the universal childcare system, he said.
Fortin, who has written papers showing how this policy creates “fiscal surpluses”, attributes women’s growing labor force participation directly to the introduction of low-fee childcare.
Today, Quebec has among the highest female labor force participation rates in the world right next to Sweden, while the US lags more than 10% behind. In addition, the gender pay gap – the difference between the earnings of men and women – is smaller in Quebec, where women typically earn 91 cents on the male dollar, than the US, where women earn just 85 cents.
Measuring the causal impact of Quebec’s subsidized childcare on factors such as poverty and social assistance is an imprecise science, but Fortin points out that the number of single-parent families on social assistance in Quebec plummeted by more than 50% in the decade following the reform. Today, Fortin calculated exclusively for the Guardian, that Quebec has 75% fewer single-parent families on social assistance than it did in 1996.
It’s also had a tremendous impact on childhood wellbeing. In 1996, child poverty rates across Canada were at an all-time high and children in Quebec were among the worst off. Today, it’s the opposite. According to the most recent figures, Quebec’s child poverty rate was 44% lower than all other Canadian provinces.
Fortin estimates that poverty in Quebec decreased by more than 60% in two decades, but points out that universal childcare wasn’t implemented in isolation, but alongside other important social policies, such as enhanced parental leave (now up to 55 weeks of paid leave), high rates of education and employment and pay equity legislation.
Scaling up the non-profit daycare network to meet the immediate explosion in demand is where things got tricky.
“We had a big problem – we were victims of our own success,” said Marois.
Waitlists became so long that kids could age into kindergarten before getting a spot. Marois had imposed a moratorium on licenses for for-profit daycares in order to prioritize the CPE network’s expansion. In 2000, the more conservative Liberal party of Quebec came into power in the province, and ended the moratorium, instead favoring tax credits to parents over public investment. This led to a surge of poorly regulated private centers that often failed quality checks. A former minister called this shift the province’s biggest policy mistake in 25 years.
While the long-term positive effects of CPEs have been especially impactful for children from poor families, access remains unequal – low-income families are underrepresented in CPEs and overrepresented in the low-quality for-profit centers. In urban centers like Montreal, disadvantaged neighborhoods have fewer CPE spots available than affluent ones.
Still, the successes of CPEs became a model for the rest of Canada.
In 2021, as the pandemic decimated childcare centers across the country, Canada committed more than C$30bn to build a universal childcare system in partnership with provinces, territories and Indigenous governing bodies, aiming for C$10-a-day care and 250,000 new spaces by 2026.
By mid-2024, six of Canada’s 13 jurisdictions hit the C$10-a-day goal, and others cut fees by half, according to the Childcare Resource and Research Unit. In March, days before stepping down as prime minister, Justin Trudeau committed another C$37bn in funding to federal childcare until 2031 to “lock in” his flagship policy as “a foundational building block of what it means to be Canadian”.
Asked if she thinks the US could build up a universal childcare system like Quebec, Martha Friendly, executive director of the Childcare Resource and Research Unit and lifelong advocate for universal high-quality childcare on both sides of the border, is blunt. “No,” she said. “There isn’t even healthcare.”
But others are less pessimistic. Elliot Haspel, an early childhood and education policy expert and author of Crawling Behind: America’s Child Care Crisis and How to Fix It, disagrees: “Canada has shown that you can go from a market-based system to a publicly supported system, if you’re willing to put in substantial amounts of money.”
Haspel said that Canadian lawmakers had a “fundamental flip” in attitude: “They turned childcare from being a welfare service for low-income families to a core part of the social infrastructure,” like schools, roads and fire departments. “That, I think, is really exciting.”
That’s the kind of mental flip that would need to happen in the US, which has some of the highest childcare costs in the world, yet ranks 40th out of 41 high-income countries on policies like paid parental leave and affordable, accessible and high-quality childcare. Half of Americans live in “childcare deserts”, and workers – mostly women of color – are underpaid.
Some US politicians have tried to take steps towards a better childcare system, but with little success. In 2021, Elizabeth Warren, a senator, proposed a universal childcare bill modeled on the Head Start program. It died in committee. Joe Biden’s Build Back Better Act included hundreds of billions in subsidies for childcare and funding for universal pre-K, but this was cut from the final version of the bill.
Though a federal overhaul of US childcare might not be on the immediate horizon, the number of states offering free pre-K to a majority of their residents has steadily increased over the past two decades, with 37% of US four-year-olds now attending one of these programs. Other states are implementing their own subsidized childcare programs.
In 2022, New Mexico became the first state in the nation to offer free childcare to a majority of families, by amending its state constitution to use 1.25% of fossil fuel revenues to fund early learning and childcare. And in recent years, Massachusetts, Vermont, Washington and other states have implemented new taxes to help fund early learning, childcare and pre-K.
Just as Quebec’s proof-of-concept influenced the creation of Canada’s C$10-a-day system, Haspel sees these states as “interesting testing grounds” for funding early learning and childcare.
“The tricky part is the upfront cost is a lot. You have to identify a funding source” that will last years, Haspel said. “You can’t do this by half measures … there’s a lot of goodwill, but not a lot of campaign contributions coming.”
If Quebec can teach the US anything, it’s that a mass mobilization of people demanding paid family leave, universal childcare and high-quality early education can work. Lawmakers need a crash course in the broken market math of childcare and how to turn it around: public investment pays off when parents can work, put food on the table for their kids and pay taxes and when today’s toddlers become tomorrow’s taxpayers.
“I’m convinced that the more women we have in politics, the more we’ll move towards public policies that promote gender equality and the fight against poverty,” said Marois. After all, it was feminist lawmakers like herself, and Chrystia Freeland, the former Canadian finance minister, who successfully reframed childcare as essential economic infrastructure and made such policies a reality in Quebec and now Canada.
Quebec also shows that to get the quality that will reap long-term rewards for children, investment must be sustained over decades and into a public system and its educators rather than a for-profit market. Even in Quebec, this is still a work in progress.
In March, the union representing the largest number of early childhood education centers – nearly 13,000 workers – voted to go on strike. It’s the only province that has unionized educators, but like elsewhere, there’s a shortage, and high turnover, due to low pay and grueling working conditions.
On a freezing Tuesday in early April, snow blanketed the picket line of Les Trottinettes educators in Verdun as cars zipped by honking.
The following Saturday morning, hundreds of parents with strollers and children took to the streets of Montreal, in solidarity with their beloved educators. Families marched through the streets with bobbing placards that read: “The diaper is full,” “Kisses don’t pay the rent,” and “We’re forming tomorrow’s adults, so consider us today.”
A spokesperson from Quebec’s ministry of families said the province had invested C$5.9bn into the early learning and care network since October 2021.
Trudel, who runs Les Trottinettes, worries that his cherished network of CPEs is on the brink due to the high staff turnover and low pay. “We found out the other day that our food produce delivery guy makes more than our educators,” he said.
But the cultural shift in Quebec means that parents and the public consider universal childcare to be a core part of the social contract and their Quebecois identity.
In early June, after 13 days on strike this year, the unionized educators agreed in principle to a renewed collective bargaining agreement with the Quebec government.
Looking at the childcare crisis south of the border, Trudel is struck that all the US research that once inspired Quebec hasn’t led to similar change there. “When we have ample data documenting best practices to help children to thrive and have better life outcomes,” he said, “when there’s such clear evidence and we don’t act, it’s an ideological decision.”
