*Updated Jan 19, 2026*

In BC, there are two ways new child care spaces get built.

1. Without a provincial grant

Individual operators – whether non-profit, for-profit, or public – must pay for the planning, design, and construction/renovation costs of creating new child care spaces, generally through some combo of:

• Their own funds
• Private debt
• Other grants or gifts (e.g. charitable foundations or endowments)
• Public child care operating funding (which, depending on the funding model and circumstances, can be used to pay e.g. monthly mortgage payments)
• Parent fees.

This expansion pathway is essentially entirely unplanned (from a provincial government perspective).

It’s up to “the market” where to build new child care. Many of these new spaces will be for-profit spaces, which are associated with a range of issues, including higher parent fees.

2. With a provincial grant 

Eligible non-profits, local governments, Indigenous organizations, and provincially governed public bodies (school districts, health authorities, crown corporations, etc.) can individually or in partnership apply for a provincial capital grant ("New Spaces Fund"). Or, home-based child care providers can apply for a "Start Up Grant." The province adjudicates these proposals and selects recipients.

The processes surrounding these provincial grants add some centralizing influence to how child care expansion happens in BC, including:

• Through the design of provincial eligibility criteria and scoring/prioritization schemes.
• Through the involvement/eligibility of delegated provincial authorities (including school districts).

However, the fact that it is still up to individual applicants to voluntarily plan and execute proposals (e.g. school districts are not required to plan for child care expansion) means that even via this pathway child care expansion in BC is largely unplanned.

This decentralized approach also leads to a great deal of wasted time, energy, and money (including taxpayers money) for unsuccessful applicants, and it fails to take advantage of the economies of scale and consistent design standards that could be achieved if the province played more of a leadership role. 

Between April 2018 and Mar 2025, the number of child care spaces receiving core public operating funding (CCOF or $10aDay operating funding) changed as follows.^[1] 

The main takeaway of this table is that roughly half of new child care spaces in BC have been entirely unplanned (market-driven), with the other half being grant-supported but still largely/significantly unplanned (from a provincial perspective).

Many of the spaces created without a provincial capital grant will be for-profit spaces that are associated with a range of issues including higher fees, less stable care, and lower overall quality. And whether or not the operator is for-profit or non-profit, they may choose to “locate to a centre that is most financially viable and not necessarily where it serves the greatest need,” as documented in “Not done yet: $10-a-day child care requires addressing Canada’s child care deserts”.

The BC government’s largely decentralized approach to child care expansion has created/maintained highly unequal access.

As can be seen in this analysis, in some school districts, there are only enough publicly-funded child care spaces for about 1 in 10 children age 0 to Grade 7 – while in other districts there are spaces for closer to half of young children.

This is not how K-12 schools or hospitals are planned and funded 

In BC, every school district and board of education has a legal mandate to ensure access to education for every child in their district. 

And every health authority must maintain a regional health plan that complies with specific standards and specified services set by the Minister.  

While school districts and health authorities are in constant coordination and negotiation with their respective Ministries as it pertains to capital and operational funding – which impacts the quality of services and effective degree of access they can provide – and while shortages of e.g. teachers, educational assistants, doctors, nurses, etc. also impact the degree of access enjoyed in each community, the delegated mandate and planning framework/governance to provide and maintain universal access is clear even if not perfectly achieved. 

With child care, the Ministry of Education and Child Care does have a mandate to advance "...the government’s 10-year plan to provide universal, affordable, accessible, quality and inclusive child care to every family that wants or needs it” ^[3] but there is no clear planning framework or multi-year capital budget – like we see in K-12 or health care – to actually achieve the goal of universal child care.  

The solution 

BC needs to transition from its current unplanned, grant-based and market-driven approach to child care expansion, to a formally planned and supported expansion more similar to that used in K-12 education and health care.  

• BC needs to require and support every school district to provide universal before-and-after school care in existing elementary schools (taking advantage of existing space).
• BC needs to lead the actual planning and implementation of universal access for children 0 to Kindergarten, just as they do for public schools. This would include a proper multi-year capital plan/budget, as committed to in the BC NDP’s 2024 election platform. ^[4]
• As part of its plan, BC should take advantage of opportunities to build new centres using template (vs. customized) designs and prefabricated components on suitable sites. 

Because of the various accountability issues with for-profit child care, BC’s expansion should not inadvertently encourage the further expansion of for-profit child care centres, with direct capital funding reserved exclusively for public, nonprofit and Indigenous expansion. This aligns with the current Canada-wide child care agreements, which largely prioritize expansion in public, non-profit, and in some cases home-based settings. ^[5] 

For more information see the School-Age Care, Capital Expansion and Capital Planning sections in the 2022 Roadmap to $10aDay Child Care in BC. 

^[1] Table data sources and methods: (a) the total change in publicly-funded spaces is taken from the BC Government's Child Care Facilities and Spaces Over Time data file (accessed January 19, 2026); (b)  the total number of new spaces receiving a provincial capital grant – including via the Rapid Renovation Fund, New Spaces Fund, and Start Up grants – is taken from the "Accelerated Space Creation" tab available here: https://studentsuccess.gov.bc.ca/childcare , clicking on "Export Data to Excel" (accessed Jan 19, 2026) – with the April 2018 cumulative total of [new] operational spaces assumed to be zero (the data itself is reported in fiscal year, not month-to-month, hence the assumption), and the 2024/25 data assumed to correspond with FY end of March 2025; (c) the difference between these two numbers is then reported as the change in the number of publicly-funded child care spaces created without a provincial capital grant. 

^[2] A caution: some of the change in the number of spaces not associated with a provincial capital grant will be from existing facilities opting into provincial operating funding, so they won't be *new* spaces per se. However, there is no way to disaggregate truly new spaces from the cited data sources (supra note 1).

^[3] As stated in the BC Budget 2024 Service Plan for the Ministry of Education and Child Care (2024/25 – 2026/27) (p. 4).

^[4] See pg. 14 of the platform, which commits to: “initiating a long-term capital plan that will be built with input from families, providers, school districts, municipalities, sector experts and more.”

^[5] Eric Swanson, “Auspice prioritization under the Canada-Wide Early Learning and Child Care Agreements,” CCCABC, 2024.