Good morning.
Wendy Cox in Vancouver today.
Parents who manage to get their kids into one of the heavily-subsidized, $10-a-day daycare spots that formed the core of the B.C. NDP’s election strategy in 2017 and 2020 can rightly feel like they’ve won the lottery.
As of this past March, some 15,000 kids had one of those spots, and the provincial government’s aim is to have 20,000 such spaces by spring 2026. But according to Statistics Canada figures, there were 142,300 kids aged 0-5 in some form of out-of-home child care in 2023. Some 59 per cent of parents said they had a hard time finding any kind of spot for their child, never mind one of the $10-a-day spots, the same Statscan release found.
Daycare providers know this well.
Fatima Abaszadeh, who operates a private-sector, for-profit daycare as her business, told reporter Xiao Xu that she gets calls daily from parents looking for a space. The owner and manager at Cozy Childcare in Kitsilano said she has to tell them she’s fully booked until September, 2026.
She’s been looking for eight years for a suitable location to expand her daycare, one that meets the rigid city requirements for such a business and with appropriate outdoor space. But she said that, even if she could find such a facility, she couldn’t afford it without substantial government support.
Jason Li, another private daycare operator, said he’d been looking for a similar amount of time for a suitable facility where he and his wife could open their second location. But meeting the demands of The City of Vancouver and Vancouver Coastal Health – requirements that were sometimes in conflict – has been expensive and exhausting.
Neither operator can hope for much help from the provincial government. The governing NDP has shifted its resources to funding non-profit and publicly-run child care centres, which puts the privately-run facilities at a deliberate disadvantage.
A 2021 internal document from the Ministry of Education and Child Care, released by the BC United Party under freedom of information legislation, indicated that only public organizations, Indigenous governments and non-profits would be eligible for provincial child-care space creation funding.
“As the government moves towards a universal, public-funded, flat fee model of child-care delivery, it may be cost prohibitive for for-profit providers to remain in the sector, making the creation of these spaces unviable in the medium-term,” the document says.
And yet, the same document notes that for-profit, private child-care providers make up the majority in the B.C. sector, and even without government help, are creating more spaces at a faster rate than publicly funded daycares.
Data provided by the ministry last month show that, from 2019/20 to 2023/24, the number of private group child-care spaces increased by about 15,000 to 72,182. Publicly-funded group child-care spaces saw a smaller increase of around 10,400, climbing to 61,874.
Paul Kershaw, a public policy professor at UBC and the founder of Generation Squeeze, noted that, despite the focus the B.C. government has placed on its $10-a-day plan, B.C. has reallocated much of the new money it promised, preferring to replace it with funds from the federal government.
“When provinces do little more than ride federal coattails, the wages of child-care professionals are collateral damage,” he wrote in an opinion piece in The Globe.
“Incomes for early educators often rival those of parking lot attendants or people who clean cages at the zoo. Low wages make it challenging to attract or retain enough professionals to scale up the $10-a-day system.”
The debate over whether child care should be entirely publicly funded is an important one. But squeezing out qualified private operators in favour of a public system that is slow to ramp up won’t benefit parents desperate to find a good-quality spot at a reasonable fee.
This is the weekly Western Canada newsletter written by B.C. Editor Wendy Cox and Alberta Bureau Chief Mark Iype. If you’re reading this on the web, or it was forwarded to you from someone else, you can sign up for it and all Globe newsletters here.