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EXCERPTS
Christine Léveillé walks home after work bearing all the hallmarks of the Quebec working mother. In one hand, she grips her briefcase and BlackBerry. In the other, the tiny hand of her three-year-old daughter, Kaily.
Then, just behind her, stands another key feature common to legions of Quebec working mothers: A reasonably-priced daycare.
"Having a good and affordable daycare makes a whole world of difference for a mom," said Ms. Léveillé, a dynamo who works as an accounts manager for a major telecom firm. "You can go to work with peace of mind."
No single factor drives a woman to drop the apron strings and doff a business suit. But economists say Quebec's publicly funded daycares played a definitive role.
After the program was introduced in 1997, Quebec working-age women began to surge into the job market. Where Québécoises once lagged behind their sisters in English Canada in seeking jobs, today they've moved ahead of the national average.
In 10 years, Quebec and Alberta, often viewed as being at the antipodes when it comes to social policy, traded places. Alberta's women used to have a higher-than-average presence in the workplace, while Quebec's women lagged behind. Now Albertan women are dropping back, and Quebec has surged ahead of the Canadian pack.
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"Economically, if you have a goal of levelling the playing field between men and women, this would be a pretty effective way to do it," said Kevin Milligan, an economist at the University of British Columbia. A study he co-authored found the proportion of working mothers shot up by 21 per cent in Quebec after the daycare system was introduced, more than twice the growth in the rest of Canada.
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Sandra Jenks, 41, has two children, ages 2 and 4, in the on-site daycare at the Merck Frosst Canada plant in Montreal, where Ms. Jenks works as a product manager.
The daycare costs $7 a day for each child. Ms. Jenks's friends in her native Vancouver pay $1,100 a month per child for the same type of high-quality care she gets. At that price, Ms. Jenks says, many friends either decide to forego a second child or forego their job.
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While Quebec's program doesn't come cheap -- it's costing the province $1.6-billion this year -- the new tax revenue it generates offsets about 40 per cent of its cost, according to Prof. Milligan's study, published by the C.D. Howe Institute.
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- reprinted from the Globe and Mail