Reconciling Work and Family
Tracey Madigan, CBC News Online | March 24
With notes from Loreen Pindera

With his party's family policies, PQ leader Bernard Landry is promising “the biggest change in Quebec society since the Quiet Revolution.”

The Liberals and ADQ call the plans unrealistic, and are offering their own ways to make family life easier for Quebecers.

Two major family-friendly planks getting a lot of attention in this election are:

• beefing up Quebec's $5-a-day program of subsidized day care; and
  
• Introducing a four-day work week for parents with young children.

Popular $5-a-day child-care program

It's difficult to find a parent paying $25 per week for day care who is willing to criticize the PQ platform of making regulated, quality child care affordable and accessible for every family who needs it.

The naysayers are the 40,000 or so families who can't find the subsidized places.

But, as the PQ government has raced to create more spaces—doling out hundreds of millions of dollars to do it—the number of children on waiting lists continues to decline.

Premier Bernard Landry is now promising to meet the target of 200,000 spaces by 2005, a year earlier than planned.

"We know very well we are the most advanced place in North America to help families to raise children," he says.

And the PQ has earned the right to boast about child care, says Jane Jenson, the head of family research for the Canadian Policy Research Network. She has compared Quebec's strategy to childcare policy in the rest of Canada and abroad.

"It was a brave step and it was a complicated reform. They did it at a time when most other countries were moving towards programs that allowed more and more informal child care, particularly in the early years," Jenson says.

"They said, 'No, we don't want to go in that direction. We want to have a quality system and allow access to it.'"

Jenson says the opposition parties initially underestimated the popularity of the PQ's child-care reform. It was popular despite the waiting lists and a billion-dollar price tag.

She remembers the Liberals' strategic error in the electoral campaign of 1998.

"If you think back to that election, you'll remember the Liberals said they were going to eliminate the program and the objections that came from all quarters—including Liberal quarters—were so great that they backed off within a day and a half," Jenson recalls.

Now, the Liberals are promising to keep the $5-a-day program, but to expand opportunities for private day-care centres. Basically, they are promising the PQ system, but with a more market-based approach.

The Action Démocratique du Québec is taking another tack. The party says it will maintain $5-a-day care, but instead of subsidizing day-care centres, they'll turn that subsidy over to parents in the form of vouchers.

Under the ADQ plan, even parents who stay home would be entitled to cash in.

Jenson says that is a radical change, one that would undermine the funding base of non-profit parent-run centres, which are the backbone of the network.

"Day care in Quebec is highly subsidized. I think it's a good program but it's a very expensive program," she says. "It costs over $1 billion now, and if they were going to start distributing some of that subsidy to stay-at-home parents, then we're talking about a huge increase in spending."

In this campaign, Landry is aiming to improve the program. He wants to make more $5-a-day spaces available, to keep day-care centres open longer, and now he's offering free day-care during the March school break.

Landry says he's a grandfather who understands the needs of families.

ADQ: different view of what is needed

During the first week of the election campaign, the ADQ unveiled its plans to improve the province's public day-care system.

Dumont calls the Parti Québécois' $5-a-day program a "Soviet-style" service and he says waiting lists are the hallmark of a socialist system.

The ADQ wants to introduce $30-a-day vouchers, which parents could use for public or private care, or even home care for their children.

"Because of the organization of their work schedule, because of their personal values, parents may not require the unique model of services provided by the PQ," Dumont says. "And that's exactly why we think the choice should be given back to the parents through a voucher."

But Dumont says the ADQ would also inject an additional $300 million per year into the public day-care system. And when you add that to the extra money needed for their voucher system, the total price tag for the ADQ's child care plank would weigh in at more than $2 billion.

The other major issue attempting to reconcile work and family is the four-day work week.

Related Stories:

VIDEO: Lots of voters sat up and paid attention when the Parti Québécois promised a four-day work week for parents of young children. But is that a practical solution for families - or a pipe dream? Lyle Stewart has this reality check.
March 21 [Runs 4:50]

AUDIO: Reality Check: Reduced Work Week. The issue of a reduced work week has surfaced as perhaps the most contentious so far in this election campaign. Mary Dean Lee is a professor of organizational behaviour at McGill University. She is studying how organizations adapt to reduced workload arrangements. CBC Radio reporter Loreen Pindera began by asking her if the option of a reduced work week has been legislated anywhere else.
March 15 [Runs 4:12]