Laval Daycare Crash Was an Attack on the Best of Us

In Quebec, we sometimes take for granted the small miracle of affordable childcare and those who make it possible

The first sound I hear every morning is Wednesday’s voice.

Our baby, lying in her crib, singing the handful of words she knows in sequence.

“Cat, hello, thank you, gentle. Cat, hello, thank you, wow.”

Marie-Pier plucks her out of bed, plops Wednesday into the high chair and whips up breakfast. I turn on the coffee machine. We play for 45 minutes, brush her teeth, she brushes her stuffed rabbit’s teeth and then we’re off to daycare. Come 4:30, she’ll be waiting for us in her snowsuit, with a belly full of food and a heart full of love.

In Quebec, it’s easy to take this everyday miracle for granted. 

Access to affordable childcare is so embedded into our society that you almost forget it’s there. The system has significant flaws. Daycare workers’ wages are too low and burnout rates are high. Conditions at government-run daycares (called CPEs) are often far better than the subsidized for-profit daycares most of us send our kids to. And the waiting list to get a kid in a CPE can take years.

But the system — created by the Parti Québécois government in 1997 — has become the benchmark for childcare in Canada. Childcare that doesn’t force women to chose between motherhood and a career is, in essence, the foundation of what constitutes a feminist society. Two years ago, Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland hammered this point home as she outlined her government’s pledge to create $10 a day childcare across the country. 

“Just as Saskatchewan once showed Canada the way on health care and British Columbia showed Canada the way on pricing pollution, Quebec can show us the way on childcare,” Freeland said, ahead of the 2021 federal election.

When a bus driver in Laval crashed into Garderie Educative Ste-Rose Wednesday, it struck at the heart of Quebec society. 

The collision killed two children and sent six more to the hospital. Though the bus driver has been arrested and charged with two counts of first degree murder, police haven’t spoken publicly about what motivated him to commit such a horrendous act. I’m not interested in the man who did this. There are plenty of far better journalists who’ll dig into his past and try to figure out how someone without a criminal record and no history of mental distress could bring himself to maim and kill toddlers.

My thoughts are with the victims.

I can’t help but wonder how many children took their first steps in that daycare. Or how many developed from babies screaming each time they were dropped off to kids who can sing the same song 200 times and make macaroni art for their parents? What must it have sounded like in the daycare that morning, when a 40,000 pound machine came barreling into them, causing an explosion of broken glass, mortar and steel in a place that we hold sacred.

And what of the parents who had no idea they said their last goodbye that morning? 

The mothers who carried their children since they were smaller than a pea, wading through months of morning sickness and swollen feet just to work through the unimaginable pain of childbirth. All that work — assembling IKEA cribs, painting the nursery, learning to change diapers in the dark, developing the patience to rock that child to sleep for the fifth time in a single night, knowing their will probably be a sixth and seventh time — all of that love gone in an instant. 

But mostly I can’t stop thinking of the workers.

They spend their lives trying to create a loving environment for other people’s kids. Our baby’s caregiver, Anne-Marie, can’t quite pronounce Wednesday's Old English name so she simply calls her “Wed Ness”, which I’ve grown quite fond of. Anne-Marie is the first to alert us when a runny nose becomes a cold or when Wednesday seems unlike herself. For all intents and purposes, she’s another parent to our only child.

While we toil away at our desks every day, Anne-Marie is shoveling the walkway in a snowstorm, she’s wiping yogurt off children’s faces, singing to them, putting them down for a nap, wiping their bums and playing make believe with them. All of these little and big things that Anne-Marie does are what allows our daughter to grow and what gives us the peace of mind to be able to provide for her.

Like so many of her colleagues, Anne-Marie is a woman, an immigrant and a person of colour. 

They are the backbone of our childcare network— women in hijabs, women who fled political violence, women from neighbourhoods with broken basketball courts and a city bus that never comes on time. They are women who scrimped and saved their way through college to work for a government whose contempt for low wage workers is only outmatched by their disdain for immigrants and asylum seekers.

These women represent the best of us. And my heart breaks for them.

On the day of the deadly bus crash, Marie-Pier and I both went to pick up Wednesday from daycare. Neither of us could continue working that afternoon but the daycare workers didn’t miss a beat. The kids fingerpainted and ate quiche with apples for lunch. 

I could feel a lump in my throat when Anne-Marie rounded the corner, clutching Wednesday in her right arm. 

That night, while parents in Laval made arrangements for their children’s funerals, I craddled Wednesday and fed her from a bottle. Every few sips, she’d pause and offer me some, refusing to take the bottle back until she saw me take a swig.

Then she pointed to my face, smiled and said something that made me cry. 

“Papa.”

Wednesday then pointed to her diaper to diffuse the tension.

“Papa caca.”

I’ll never understand how anyone would destroy something so beautiful.