Quebec’s family policy begins with up to 55 weeks of paid leave for parents when they have or adopt a child, as well as a yearly allowance of anywhere from $500 to about $1,900 (in American dollars) that families receive per kid under the age of 18. But the policy’s central piece is Quebec’s full-day, year-round child-care program for all children under 5, which the province annually subsidizes with roughly $2 billion in public funding. Quebec families cover part of the costs on a sliding scale, with the wealthiest families paying around $17 per day for their first child. In 2016, nearly 300,000 children were enrolled in the province’s system.

But just because the program is “universal” does not mean it is uniform. A plurality of the province’s young children attend centres de la petite enfance (CPE)—publicly subsidized, nonprofit child-care centers that collect small daily fees. Families apply through a centralized lottery system, with many kids granted preference to a given center if their siblings are already enrolled there or (in some cases) if their parents work in the same building. But funding limitations mean CPEs can’t serve everyone who wants their services. Families say it’s normal to spend several years on CPE waitlists before getting a slot.

So, in 2003, provincial leaders created a tax credit that reimburses families for up to 75 percent of tuition at private child-care centers and home-based care options. This new option helped ease Quebec’s child-care-undersupply problem for more families. It also helped the number of seats in unsubsidized private centers in Quebec skyrocket: Slots in these centers, many of them for-profit ones, grew by 3,000 percent between 2003 and 2016, reaching more than 55,000 seats. The total number of child-care seats in the province grew by a relatively modest 73 percent during the same period.

Cristian Cano, a restaurant manager who immigrated from Chile and has lived in Quebec for 21 years, is among the thousands of parents who ended up enrolling their kids in an unsubsidized private center because of the CPE space limitations. Cano and his wife resorted to a home-based child-care center run by a Haitian woman they knew. While happy with the outcome, Cano argued that the provincial government ought to allocate more funding to CPEs.

A visit to a CPE—one of the nonprofit, publicly subsidized centers—makes it clear why these centers are so popular with Quebec families. CPE Populaire St-Michel is located in a borough just northwest of downtown Montreal, where almost half of the residents are immigrants. Its 220 children are spread across three programs—the infants are in a nursery that employs one adult for every five children; older kids are grouped by age in noisy, cheerful classrooms connected by a purple hallway.