Terry Archibald has been operating her public daycare in the Cote des Neiges area for the past 23 years, a labor of love that brings her in contact with families that make up the diversity of the community around her.
Over the past few years, her business has been taking what can be described as a financial beating because of the pandemic, as an increasing number of parents have been off the job while others work from home.
In the face of the downturn, Archibald is always on the look-out for new clients to keep the doors of Terry Toddlers open.
So it was a windfall for the business when a few months ago, nine mothers showed up at her doors to apply for spaces at the daycare.
“These women were all refugee applicants with work permits and they needed a daycare for their kids. So, I immediately started the process, filling out the forms to be submitted to the Quebec government,” Archibald recounted to the CONTACT recently.
She says like everything else to do with her job, completing the forms is a time-consuming task that demands her utmost attention to detail.
“It took hours out my day to get them all done, but it was important for my business and the women who desperately needed a place to care for their children. ”
That’s why it was such a shock, when she received an email from the government rejecting all the applications on the basis that as refugee applicants and asylum seekers, the women’s children did not have access to the subsidized daycare that Terry offers.
“To me it doesn’t make sense: the government gave the women work permits and the women are ready to find jobs to help their families but have no access to the subsidized daycare services that should be available to all Quebec workers,” says Archibald. “Many of these women are from Haiti and countries across Africa, they are eager to work but the government is making it difficult for them to get into the workforce because of this obstacle.”
The obstacle here is a faulty interpretation of Quebec’s Educational Childcare Act stipulates that anyone who is in Quebec and holds a work permit should be able to access subsidized daycare.
But in 2018, the Liberal government in an effort to douse the outcry against the increasing number of immigrants many from Africa, Haiti and Latin America, coming from the USA through the Roxham Road border to claim refugee status here, adjusted the application of the law to exclude these asylum seekers.
Refugee rights advocates and owners of public daycares who stand to benefit from accommodating these children expected the Coalition Avenir Québec to revoke the practice after it took office.
However, when the Legault government, noted for its anti-immigrant sentiments, refused to budge, a parent who was affected by the government ad-hoc policy brought the matter before the Superior Court of Quebec and won a judgement on behalf of the aggrieved parents.
Sylvania Wallace secretary general of ADMIN, an organization representing owners of public daycares and CPEs, was one of the biggest cheerleaders when Superior Court Judge Marc St. Pierre handed down his ruling this past May, ordering the government to provide the reduced contributions to all children including asylum seekers.
She says although the government didn’t comply immediately to the ruling, her hope was that it wouldn’t appeal.
Those hopes were dashed, a week before the adjournment of the National Assembly for the summer when the Family Minister Mathieu Lacombe announced that his government was appealing the ruling.
The issue was then lost as the government dragged the province into the fall elections that swept the CAQ back to office with its overwhelming majority.
Wallace told the CONTACT, the government’s deliberate disregard on this issue is having its most dire impact on communities with large immigrant populations as well as on single women, who depend on the daycare subventions to make it economically viable to go to work and support their families.
