From Paradise to Paradox: Examining Family Policy in Quebec’s Welfare State

Quebec is distinct within the Canadian federation for its unique welfare state, particularly concerning family policy. From the mid-1990s to the early 2000s, provincial governments implemented significant reforms aimed at better supporting families. These reforms included modifying social tax expenditures, such as tax credits, establishing a network of subsidized child care services including Centres de la petite enfance (CPE), and introducing a more generous parental insurance system compared to the rest of Canada. Consequently, Quebec has emerged as a model for child care nationwide. Scholars have described Quebec as a “paradise” for families, with research emphasizing the pivotal role of universal child care. However, family policies continue to evolve, and the child care network remains unfinished, resulting in a system that can be difficult to navigate, and can lead to high costs and low-quality care for many families. Furthermore, while scholars have explored family policy in Quebec, the existing literature remains incomplete. For instance, researchers have analyzed budgetary data to assess spending on family policies over time, noting slight increases. Others have conducted document analyses to explain policy expansion and retrenchment in child care. However, existing studies often fail to explain the interactions between policy instruments and their implications for the overall policy framework, leaving a critical gap in our understanding of the Quebec model of family policy. To fill this gap, this paper provides a comprehensive analysis of family policy in Quebec by contextualizing policy changes from 1998 to 2024 and examining the discourse of elected officials on the issue throughout this period. It argues that understanding these changes and their context within parliamentary discourse is crucial for a thorough comprehension of family policy during this time. To achieve this, the article analyzes parliamentary discourse in Quebec’s National Assembly from 1997 to 2024 using a novel structured dataset, Agora+, and text-as-data methods. The article begins by tracing the evolution of family policies in Quebec, examining the role of social tax expenditures in the family model and how fiscal policy interacts with available services. It presents statistics illustrating the gap between the supply of quality subsidized child care and growing demand, as well as discussing the increasing generosity and uptake rates of parental insurance. This leads to the central question: how have these policy changes been framed and debated by elected officials and stakeholders during this period? To address this, the article employs textual analysis of parliamentary and commission debates from 1997 to 2024 to extend existing empirical research. It first analyzes issue salience using dictionary methods to determine the frequency of child care discussions in the legislature. Next, Latent Dirichlet Allocation is applied to a subset of the corpus, including commission debates on proposed legislative changes to child care policies, to identify dominant themes. These themes are then compared with party manifestos to assess their alignment with the policies presented therein. Finally, the article contextualizes the drivers behind these themes, relating them to policy changes and discussing their implications for the generosity and universality of Quebec’s welfare state.