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Not surprisingly, costs have exploded. The program’s annual costs went from nearly $300 million in 1997-1998, to $2.6 billion in 2014-2015, a 767 per cent leap. This far exceeds the increase in the number of places provided, which did not even triple. Even with inflation taken into account, the cost per child has more than doubled.

These costs might have been justified if the system mainly benefited disadvantaged children, but that has not been the case. A majority of places in the Centres de la petite enfance (childcare centres) have gone to well-off families, while single-parent mothers see their children languish on waiting lists for years.

Other assumed benefits of this type of system have failed to materialize. For example, in comparing the academic performance of children under the age of five in Quebec and the rest of Canada, professor Pierre Lefebvre at the Université du Québec à Montréal found that the childcare system did not improve children’s cognitive development scores.

It is true that Quebec has caught up significantly in terms of women in the workforce. However, the female labour participation rate increased across the country between 1996 to 2014, even in provinces without $7-a-day childcare. Some provinces did even better at this than Quebec, notably the Maritime provinces. In other words, the link is not as clear as some people claim.

Moreover, exactly the same result could be achieved by giving the money directly to mothers, so that they can put their children in private childcare centres. What enables these women to enter the workforce is not the actual subsidized childcare centres, but rather the subsidy itself, which reduces the cost of childcare services.