Summary
At the five-year deadline of the provinces’ agreement to make good on their promises of affordable and accessible child care, there is a lot more progress to be made.
By March 31, 2026, the provinces are supposed to achieve the following federal goals under the nationally funded program, the Canada-Wide Early Learning and Child Care (CWELCC) program, which is meant to bring child care fees down to $10-a-day and create more of those affordable spaces near families with children. That child care space expansion is supposed to happen in the non-profit or public sector—not the for-profit sector.
As part of the program, spaces have been created but progress has been uneven.
More spaces are being created, but more than half are in for-profit centres
The federal government’s stated preference in the CWELCC agreements was to expand child care spaces in the non-profit or public sector to keep costs down, quality up and to ensure that the public money now funding the system didn’t evaporate as corporate profit. With a few exceptions, the new spaces created have been overwhelmingly in the for-profit sector, contrary to the explicit goals of the agreements. Of the new spaces created since 2022, 57 per cent were in for-profit centres. There was some non-profit expansion, which made up 27 per cent of the new spaces over the past year. Home-based child care is also playing a role, making up 16 per cent of the new spaces.
The provinces, in aggregate, have fallen behind in space creation promises
The provinces agreed to create over 284,000 new spaces, primarily in the non-profit and public sector, by March 31, 2026. But six months before that deadline, they had created only 194,000 new spaces—most of them for-profit and a portion of them not even in the CWELCC system, which is particularly true in Ontario.
The number of child care deserts is going down, but not at the rate promised
Regardless of whether new space targets are achieved, the most important outcome for parents is finding a space near where they live. The federal government is targeting 5.9 licensed child care spaces for every 10 non-school aged children.
As of the third quarter of 2025, only two provinces achieved that interim federal goal—P.E.I. and Quebec. British Columbia and New Brunswick are on their way to having five spaces per 10 children but aren’t there yet. The rest are not on track to reach this target.
Several provinces are unlikely to make good on their promises by deadline
Three provinces—Quebec, British Columbia and New Brunswick—hit their space creation targets ahead of time.
Ontario is close to its target, if we include all spaces, but growth has been concentrated in the for-profit sector, which charges much higher fees.
Alberta will almost certainly miss its original target of 68,700 new spaces by March 31, 2026. And the province has only added an abysmal 3,600 non-profit spaces, despite promising 42,500.
It looks like P.E.I. will also miss its agreed-upon target, although, given the high coverage rate in that province, the need is lower.
The remaining four provinces will almost certainly miss their space creation goals, by a large margin. They include Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Newfoundland and Labrador, and Nova Scotia.
In the aggregate, the provinces are falling short. With only six months left of the first five-year agreements, as of September 30, 2025, we were 90,000 spaces short of where we should be in terms of promised space creation.
Gap between politics and reality
Of the biggest provinces, only Quebec is above the federal target of having 5.9 spaces per 10 children. The other large provinces of Ontario, British Columbia and Alberta are well below that target, after four-and-a-half years. Ontario and British Columbia are doing well towards their CWELCC space creation targets, but even if they reach them, parents will continue to experience long wait lists and frustration in trying to find a spot.
This inadequate coverage will continue to put political pressure on the program. There will be a substantial communications gap in March 2026 as government press releases celebrate met targets while parents on the ground see a much different reality.
While public money is now the primary funding source for licensed child care, the expansion of spaces has been overwhelmingly in for-profit centres, counter to the CWELCC agreements. If expansion continues along this path, it will lock in a child care system that is more expensive than it needs to be, with lower quality.
As we move into the second half decade of a national child care plan and a second set of agreements, the federal government and the provinces must redouble their efforts to expand the number of licensed spaces. The push is now on to meet the new demand for child care with the high quality, low fee, non-profit spaces that parents deserve.