Cash cow: Assessing child care space creation progress

Summary

Since 2021, the federal government has been funding a rollout of a Canada-wide $10-a-day child care program. One of the more public goals is to reduce child care fees to $10 a day by April 2026. However, a less public goal is a major expansion of spaces.

To track trends, the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA) has created a proprietary database named the Childcare Licensing and Accessibility by Region (CLAR) database. It individually tracks all 1.32 million licensed child care space in any province. It also calculates the accessibility of child care for all 53,861 city blocks in any province (Dissemination Area). From the CLAR database, we track changes from the fourth quarter of 2022 to the first quarter of 2025. Among the key findings:

Growth in child care spaces, but mixed levels of progress

By April 2025, the provinces promised to create 210,604 new full-time spaces with federal money, but they are short 57,030 spaces.

• New Brunswick has created 47 per cent more spaces than it committed to and it has already surpassed its space creation goal for 2025-26.
• British Columbia has created more than 25,000 new spaces, exceeding its April 2025 goal of just over 20,000 new spaces. The province is well positioned to hit its goal of just over 30,000 new spaces for 2025-26 and 40,000 new spaces by the end of 2027-28.
• Ontario and P.E.I. are close to meeting their April 2025 targets and are well on their way to hitting their final 2025-26 space creation goals.
• Most of the other provinces are lagging in terms of space creation. Manitoba and Saskatchewan have only created a fraction of the promised spaces. While there has been space creation in both provinces, they are nowhere near the scale so far to meet the target.

Who will hit the federal target of 5.9 full-time spaces for every 10 children?

Whether raw space creation goals are hit or not isn’t the real battle, it’s whether parents can find a space. To evaluate that, we need to look at how many spaces there are per 10 children. If they hit their raw space creation targets, and this is a big if, this would be the result:

• Quebec and P.E.I. are already at or above the federal target of 5.9 spaces per 10 children.
• Saskatchewan, Newfoundland and Labrador and Nova Scotia would get to roughly 5.9 spaces per 10 children. Unfortunately, none of these provinces is on pace.
• Manitoba and British Columbia will be slightly below 5.9 spaces per 10 children if they create their promised spaces. Unfortunately, Manitoba is nowhere near where it should be in 2025.
• Alberta, Ontario and New Brunswick might hit their raw space creation targets. But even if they did create what they promised, their coverage rates would be below 5.9 spaces per 10 children.

For-profit providers are taking advantage of this publicly funded program

An important stipulation of the child care agreements is that the spaces created should be primarily non-profit or government run. The costs of the child care system in most provinces and territories are now being paid almost entirely from the public purse. For-profit providers are cashing in:

• Since 2022, 57 per cent of all the net new licensed child care spaces for non-school age children have been for-profit spaces—larger for-profit chains make up a quarter of the growth.
• Only 30 per cent were public or non-profit, and the remainder were new homes.
• This hasn’t been a Canada-wide public expansion of child care—it has been an overwhelmingly for-profit expansion.

Child care deserts remain

The federal goal is 5.9 spaces per 10 children. But many children live on a city block with fewer than three spaces per 10 children nearby (net of the overlapping needs of other children), which constitutes a child care desert.

• British Columbia cut its rate from 38 per cent of children in a child care desert in 2022 to 16 per cent in April 2025, a drop of almost a quarter.
• Alberta, Saskatchewan, Newfoundland and Labrador and Ontario reduced the proportion of their children living in child care deserts by roughly 15 percentage points.
• Saskatchewan still has the largest proportion of its child population living in child care deserts, at 51 per cent, but the situation has improved from where it started in 2022, at 70 per cent.
• P.E.I., Quebec, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick have managed to increase the proportion of their children living at or above the federal target by roughly 10 percentage points.
• Child care deserts are clearly related to population density, being lowest in big cities and highest in rural areas. However, rural areas of Quebec have fewer deserts than major western cities like Calgary or Winnipeg.
• Child care deserts are not consistently related to parental income. In some provinces, the richest city blocks do have the best access, but in others the poorest blocks win out.

Child care accessibility in 45 Canadian cities

• Kitchener, Oshawa and Fort McMurray have three quarters of their children living in child care deserts, with little licensed child care nearby, adjusting for the needs of other blocks of children.
• While half of the children in Calgary live in child care deserts, there is a surprising minority of 17 per cent of children who enjoy the federal target of 5.9 nearby spaces per 10 kids. This illustrates how unequal the distribution of child care deserts can be.
• At the other end of the spectrum, many Quebec cities and Charlottetown have almost no children living in child care deserts and almost all blocks meet federal targets of at least 5.9 spaces per 10 children.
• Some cities—like Vaughan, Coquitlam, Burnaby and Oakville—buck their provincial trend and have almost none of their children living in child care deserts, although most of the children have inadequate coverage, with between three and 5.89 licensed spaces per 10 kids.

Next challenge

As very high market fees become a thing of the past, policy-makers now need to shift their focus to the next challenge: rapid space creation—and keep those spaces in public, non-profit hands.

What’s needed now is strong public planning. The non-profit or public providers who will expand must be identified by government and they must be provided with the tools to expand. Otherwise, we will end up with a larger private system expanded in places where it’s convenient for providers, not to where children live.