Since Governor Evers signed off on the new state budget, childcare advocates have voiced alarm at the lack of support for childcare in the budget. Though the state budget allocated over $360 million to help address the childcare crisis, the organization Wisconsin Early Childhood Action Needed (WECAN) says that “we were asking for the bare minimum, and somehow we got less.” Less than one-third of the allocated funds will go directly to keep childcare providers operating, and this funding will only last for one year. 

This is a topic we’ve been following on this program, so on today’s show, we learn about how one state made an investment in universal childcare and changed its entire economy. In 1997 in the Canadian province of Quebec, lawmakers created a universal childcare system, charging only $7/day for up to 10 hours of care plus homemade, locally sourced meals, and so much more. Journalist Isabeau Doucet writes about this program and the overwhelmingly positive results of the universal childcare system in a recent article in The Guardian. 

Quebec’s universal childcare system helped balance the state’s budget and changed the lives of many of the lower-income families who get access to it by helping families get to work and be able to pay for housing, food, etc. That meant that families weren’t relying on other social services. The number of women and single parents in the workforce skyrocketed, and the child poverty rate in Quebec is now 44% lower than all the other provinces. Doucet says that the system more than pays for itself and is now being rolled out across Canada. 

Doucet says that in the US childcare isn’t treated as a public good but as a private matter for families to figure out on their own, and there are wide swaths of childcare deserts and high prices everywhere. Republicans in Wisconsin say we can’t afford to fund childcare. And though it was once a priority of the GOP to have a balanced budget, Doucet worries there are other ideological reasons keeping Republicans from getting behind universal childcare, namely their ideology of keeping women in the home and out of the workforce. 

Isabeau Doucet is a journalist and documentary producer based in the Bay Area.

Featured image: photo of a childcare center by Gautam Arora via Unsplash. 

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