Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani visited a day care center in East Flatbush Thursday to promote his vision for universal child care.

“After housing, child care is the No. 1 cost in so many New Yorkers’ lives,” Mamdani said. “And we see that in the average estimate of $22,500 a year, being the cost of childcare for a single child across these five boroughs.”

While Mamdani did not offer many specifics on his plan, he said he is drawing inspiration from Quebec’s subsidized child care system.

“Universal child care is something that we've seen in other cities. In Montreal, for example. Rather in Quebec, we saw the implementation of universal child care also led to a 10-1 economic return,” he said.

Quebec launched its subsidized child care program in 1997, a model considered successful by many.

To understand how it’s working now, News 12 spoke with Pascale Sarrasin, a mother in Montreal who recently enrolled her 17-month-old son, Esteban, in a subsidized daycare outside the city.

“It’s quite a relief,” she said.

Sarrasin pays roughly 200 Canadian dollars per month for full-time day care. “And mine is wonderful. It helps us out quite a bit,” she added.

When the program first started, subsidized care cost $5 CAD per day. Today, the fee is about $9.35 CAD per day.

“It is really cheap for the service you get if you get into a good day care, because it's hit or miss,” Sarrasin said.

But getting a spot was not easy. She put her name on a waiting list as soon as she found out she was pregnant. " I was like, number 430, you know, it's demoralizing,” she said.

Once her year-long maternity leave was almost over, she actively started calling every day care around, “because even though your name is on the waiting list, you call every single daycare you have around because not all day cares actually go through the list and use it,” she said.

When a spot finally opened, Sarrasin says, “you don't feel like you have an option. It's like whatever is available, you take it. Because if not, someone else will fill in the spot for sure. So it's a lot of pressure.”

Research has found Quebec’s subsidized child care helped get more mothers back to work and boosted the province’s GDP.

“It is a good system, but sometimes it'll take a year and a half, two years before you find a spot in the subsidized daycare. And that's where the issue is for me,” Sarrasin said.

To fund his child care plan, Mamdani said he intends to raise taxes on the top one percent and increase the state’s top corporate tax rate, though he remains open to other funding strategies.

“The most important thing, which is not how we fund it, but that we fund,” he said.

Mamdani said the plan’s specifics will be developed in the coming months. On a timeline, he said, “I view the time that I will be the mayor as the time that we have to implement the policies that we ran on.”