The selection of children on the basis of ethnic or religious criteria for admission to subsidized daycare centers in greater Montreal is not legal, confirms the Minister of Families, Suzanne Roy.
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“It’s not legal, so, it’s clear, we adopted a law regarding educational childcare services across the board which clearly specifies that we can’t do that,” she said in an interview with LCN.
An article published in The Press, Tuesday, reveals that 36 state-subsidized daycare centers in greater Montreal select the children they welcome according to criteria such as religious or ethnic affiliation.
The Minister of Families confirms that the government was aware of the existence of different admission policies in subsidized daycares in the province.
“Place 0-5 was a CPE cooperative that we took over at the end of 2022, beginning of 2023, precisely to ensure that we could set up a one-stop shop, therefore to ensure parents the greatest transparency, and we found that there were more than 2000 admission policies,” says Mme Roy.
The latter maintains that the selection of children according to different criteria from one establishment to another will no longer occur with the application of a regulation already adopted by the Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ).
“We made a regulation to bring it down to a single admission policy which will have prioritizations such as provided for in the Educational Childcare Act.”
These criteria for prioritizing children, which must be applied by all subsidized daycares, will be, for example, the date on which the parents will need the service or whether brothers or sisters are already attending the daycare service.
Despite the entry into force of the regulation, unsubsidized daycare centers will still be able to impose selection criteria for children.
