Madelyn Bardell doesn’t think working parents should be expected to provide childcare during their work hours. She compares the idea to expecting the same parents to build the road they travel on their daily commute. In an editorial-style paper entitled The Mirage of $10-a-Day Childcare: Affordability Without Access, Bardell outlines how the expansion of Quebec’s $10 per-day childcare plan into a federally-mandated universal childcare program remains, for many families, an illusion.

The third-year Victoria College student is pursuing both a Major in Economics and a Major in Ethics, Society and Law. It’s a pairing of programs that will give the Belleville native, who is considering law school as a next step, a healthy background in policy creation, as well as the research methodologies for testing and evidencing the efficacy of social programs that result from policy decisions. She has already started applying the critical lenses she is learning about to the world around her.

“I have a young niece and a niece and nephew, so I was just interested in the space,” Bardell explained. “I’d been seeing the $10‑a‑day headlines in the papers, but then I was hearing more anecdotally about problems with long waitlists. And when I started to look into that, there was just a lot of research available, so it seemed like a good space to get to know more about!” [Read more…]