1500 day-care places needed on Laval island

The 18,000 new places have been added to the 2,000 announced earlier, with the date advanced to 2010 from the previous 2012 target.

“As soon as the requests from day care operators came in, they were evaluated,” Kim Ledoux, spokesperson for Minister Courchesne, told Courrier Laval at the beginning of the week.

Mr. Boucher explains that it’s difficult for the Ministry of Family and Senior Citizens to estimate the demand for day care places, in the absence of a centralized mechanism to coordinate needs prevalent in the various regions of Quebec.

Presently, Laval is the only region with a centralized tool, a website that allows parents to put their children’s names on a waiting list for day care places in a specific district.

“There is a project underway for a waiting list and coordinating mechanisms are expected to be set up in certain Quebec regions in the autumn,” states Kim Ledoux, without specifying either location or numbers for these regional services to be placed at the disposal of parents seeking day care places for their children.

“Laval is an urban region with private day care centres. The Ministry could set up agreements with these private centres to create more places at $7,” says Mr. Boucher.

Family Minister Michelle Courchesne is on record with previous promises to work with public day care centres, family day care services, and private day care institutions towards resolving the problem of scarce places for children.

At press time, Courrier Laval was unable to establish how many places the Laval region would be allocated in the new plan which is expected to create 20,000 new places across the province two years ahead of schedule, in 2010.