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Two Quebec staples

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Steamés and $7 a day daycare.

I was sitting on a terrace yesterday enjoying lunch of hot-dogs and fries with my daughter (because, apparently, Listeria doesn’t scare me one bit). Along came a 50-something woman, asking if she could share our table. “But of course!”

The conversation quickly turned to childcare. (For some reason, she believed a woman having a weekday lunch with her 3-year-old could be some sort of a resource.) This woman’s daughter is looking for a daycare for six-month-old twins, but keeps encountering waiting lists up to 4 years long.

I suggest: “Why not enroll them in private daycare and pay $30 a day only to get it all back on her income tax?”

She comes back with: “Oh, well she and her spouse make too much annually to qualify to get any money back.”

Yes, of course. When it comes to daycare, it’s deplorable to think that a family making 6 figures should have to pay more than $1,820 a year per child. Thank goodness even those families receive $100 a month per child under 6 in childcare benefits. How ever would they make ends meet?

And there you have it. Another example of how enviable our childcare system is in Quebec.

Dumping your kids in daycare is good for your social status?

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I don’t get it. Gordon Brown is promising a free daycare spot for every 2-year-old in what is billed as a scheme that “will play a central role in his drive for ‘upward social mobility’, which he intends to put at the heart of government policy.”

Huh? The only way that could work is by costing so much folks who are already upwards, social-mobility-wise, end up paying so much more in taxes to pay for this thing that they are dragged down to the level of, well, folks who are lower, social-mobility-wise.

Oh, wait. I think that’s the plan:

At present, three and four-year-olds receive up to 15 hours of free child care a week. The new plan to extend this to two-year-olds will take several years to introduce and could cost more than £1 billion a year, according to government sources. They admit that the scheme would need “significant additional resources”.

Ministers have already announced a smaller scheme aimed at the parents of 20,000 two-year-olds from the lowest-income families. The new policy, for which pilot projects will be announced imminently, could eventually include up to 600,000 children a year.

No decay of the human family here

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Quebec is only meeting the increased demand for daycare by half. We have the coveted $7 a day daycare system in place here in this province, and, apparently, we can’t get enough of it. Essentially, we’ve created a monster that can never be quenched. Daycare here is the norm. It’s so normal, that everything else is abnormal. Attempting to illustrate:

Mary to Doris: I’m sending my son to the Big Daycare down the road. Where are you sending your daughter?

Doris to Mary: Oh, I’ll be staying home with her. (or My mother will be watching her 5 days a week.)

Mary to Doris (gasping for breath): What? Aren’t you terrified that she won’t be socialized?

Yes, that’s right. Many in Quebec believe that, if you don’t send your child to daycare, they will be that weird kid who sits in the corner and talks to himself. A fallacious stigma once reserved only for homeschooled children has now attached itself to those kids who spend their early formative years with (brace yourselves) family.

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