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.
Introduction
The 2021 federal budget kicked off a new national plan, one part of which was to reduce child care fees to $10-a-day called the Canada-Wide Early Learning and Child Care (CWELCC) program. While this lowered fee was one of its more visible goals, the agreements included a major expansion in the number of licensed child care spaces. Once fees dropped, demand would skyrocket. For the national plan to be successful, the spaces would have to be there to accommodate that new demand. The agreements call for expansion to be primarily in the non-profit and public sectors.
By 2022, all the provinces had signed five-year agreements that end March 31, 2026. Each of the agreements set space creation targets by jurisdiction to be accomplished by the end date.
As of early 2026, all the provinces signed agreements to continue with the CWELCC program, although on different time frames. Ontario1Employment and Social Development Canada, Canada and Ontario agree to one-year extension of the Canada-wide early learning and child care agreement, December 4, 2025, https://www.canada.ca/en/employment-social-development/news/2025/12/canada-and-ontario-agree-to-one-year-extension-of-the-canada-wide-early-learning-and-child-care-agreement.html. and Alberta2Employment and Social Development Canada , Canada and Alberta agree to one-year extension of early learning and child care agreements, December 12, 2025, https://www.canada.ca/en/employment-social-development/news/2025/12/canada-and-alberta-agree-to-one-year-extension-of-early-learning-and-child-care-agreements.html. have only signed up for an additional year, ending March 31, 2027. All other provinces and territories have signed up for another five years. Future research will examine whether the provinces and territories have hit the $10-a-day promise. This analysis examines whether they’ve hit their space creation goals.
While we aren’t quite at the end point of the agreements, we can evaluate space creation as of the end of the third quarter of 2025 (September 2025). This gets us to within six months of the deadline and can provide insight into the success and failures of the first five years. In this analysis, we are leveraging the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives’ proprietary Childcare Licensing and Accessibility by Region (CLAR) database.
The database tracks all 1.4 million licensed child care spaces in the provinces and is the only database of its kind. Unfortunately, due to data constraints, a similar tracking system isn’t possible for the territories. It compiles provincial child care licensed databases, standardizes them and tracks them over time. This analysis follows the same methodology of our initial report from the CLAR database in the summer of 2025 which had data up to Q1 2025, with some minor revisions.3David Macdonald, Cash cow: Assessing child care space creation progress, Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, August 21, 2025. https://www.policyalternatives.ca/news-research/cash-cow-assessing-child-care-space-creation-progress/. For more detail, see the methodology section.
The CLAR database only includes spaces that have been licensed to centres or homes. We are excluding various provincial categories of spaces “under development” or “to come”. In addition, the database tracks licenses, not enrolment—and enrolment will almost always be at least slightly lower than licensed capacity. As such, this analysis represents a “best case” look at space creation.
We’re evaluating the provinces’ progress based on their original commitments and we’re also attempting to be consistent between them, even when the CWELCC agreements differ. Specifically:
- Alberta committed to 68,700 new spaces by March 2026 (42,500 non-profit spaces and 26,200 for-profit ones).4Employment and Social Development Canada, Toward $10-a-day: An Early Learning and Child Care Backgrounder, April 2025, https://www.canada.ca/en/employment-social-development/news/2025/03/toward-10-a-day-an-early-learning-and-child-care-backgrounder0.html#:~:text=%5B4%5D%20Total%20space%20creation%20commitment%20for%20AB%20is%2068%2C700%20spaces%3B%20however%20AB%C2%A0must%C2%A0create%20a%20minimum%20of%2042%2C500%20new%20not%2Dfor%2Dprofit%20spaces.%20In%20addition%20to%20the%2042%2C500%20not%2Dfor%2Dprofit%20spaces%2C%20AB%C2%A0may%20create%C2%A0up%20to%2026%2C200%20for%2Dprofit%20spaces%20between%20fiscal%20years%2021/22%20and%2025/26. However, this deadline was extended to March 31, 2027, with the one-year extension signed in 2025.5Employment and Social Development Canada , Canada and Alberta agree to one-year extension of early learning and child care agreements, December 12, 2025, https://www.canada.ca/en/employment-social-development/news/2025/12/canada-and-alberta-agree-to-one-year-extension-of-early-learning-and-child-care-agreements.html#:~:text=the%20goal%20of%2068%2C700%20new%20spaces%20by%20March%202027.%C2%A0. Ontario also extended its agreement by a single year, but its space creation timelines didn’t change. In this analysis, we’re holding all provinces to the original timeline ending March 31, 2026.
- Ontario’s CWELCC agreement gives them a start point of 2019 for space creation while all other provinces have 2021 as their start point. All spaces created between 2019 and 2021, the two years before Ontario even signed up for the federal plan, are included towards their space creation goal, well before CWELCC was even introduced. In this analysis, we’ve set the start point for Ontario as 2021, just like all the other provinces.
- Saskatchewan is claiming that a small-scale Junior Kindergarten program called the PreK program is new in 2024, adding over 5,000 “new” child care spaces in a single year.6See Figure 2 page 80 the bar titled “Early Learning Program Spaces,” from Provincial Auditor of Saskatchewan, 2025 Report—Volume 2, December 2025, https://auditor.sk.ca/publications/public-reports/2025-report-volume-2-1. In fact, that program has existed since 2007, the spaces aren’t new and the PreK space count has been identical since 2014-15. We aren’t including these as new child care spaces.
Where the provinces stand after five years
There are different ways of calculating new child care space creation over the past five years. Sometimes governments report the raw change in the space count, irrespective of whether those spaces are part of the CWELCC system. Sometimes new spaces are reported as only the new CWELCC spaces. In this section, we will report both, as shown in Figure 1. In either case, we’ll examine the net change in spaces: new spaces created due to facility opening or expansion, minus spaces lost due to facility closure or shrinking.
In either version of space creation, it doesn’t matter if those new spaces were directly created as a result of a government program—say, a capital grant—whether those spaces are enough to satisfy demand, whether they would have been created through natural expansion anyway. It also ignores whether those spaces are non-profit or for-profit.
With six months to go, as of September 30, 2025, provincial progress in hitting their CWELCC space creation targets is all over the map. Three provinces—Quebec, British Columbia and New Brunswick—hit their targets ahead of time, whether looking at net new CWELCC spaces or net new spaces generally.
Essentially all new spaces in British Columbia were CWELCC ones. However, almost all the expansion occurred in the for-profit sector, against the wording of the CWELCC agreement, raising long-term costs, reducing quality and stability while locking in lower workers’ wages.
Quebec slightly exceeded its target, if we look at CWELCC spaces created, but if we look only at new spaces of any type, it slightly missed its target. Quebec signed an “asymmetric” agreement with Ottawa but still committed to create more of its “reduce fee” spaces at just under $10 a day, which we’re calling CWELCC spaces. The province has seen a net reduction in non-CWELCC spaces since 2021.
New Brunswick hit its CWELCC space creation target. If we look at all net new spaces, not just CWELCC ones, it created 400 more spaces than it promised. Unfortunately, almost all space creation was in for-profit spaces, which is counter to its agreement and raises program costs while reducing quality.
Ontario is close to its target, as shown in Figure 1, if we include all spaces, not just CWELCC ones. However, Ontario has a uniquely large expansion in spaces that aren’t in the CWELCC program and charges much higher fees as a result. If we look at all new spaces, it’s possible that with additional licensing before March 31, 2026, Ontario could close the current 13,000 space gap. Unlike many other provinces, Ontario also committed to create another 9,300 spaces next year (2026-27), so it might fall further behind on that goal.
Ontario centres aren’t forced to be part of the CWELCC system. For instance, one can open a centre and charge whatever they want. Of course, the fee charged would have to be much more than the regulated price of $22 a day, and that centre wouldn’t receive government support. There is an obvious incentive for new centres to join the CWELCC system in order to offer much lower fees. However, upon joining, new centres must disclose their finances to the province and limit their profits. A profit-driven centre might not wish to do so. In addition, a centre cannot join the CWELCC system if it is not within the geographic boundaries and auspice quotas of the SSMs’ Directed Growth Plans.
Alberta will almost certainly miss its original target of 68,700 new spaces by March 31, 2026. Figure 1 shows it is falling short by almost 26,000 new spaces. The one-year extension that the province signed in 2025 grants it another year to create those new spaces; hopefully it will meet that revised timeline. As a sub-goal, the province also committed to create 42,500 non-profit spaces as part of that larger 68,700 figure. Unfortunately, the province has only added an abysmal 3,600 new non-profit spaces since 2022—nowhere near the 42,500 it agreed to.
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. Like Quebec, P.E.I. has seen a net reduction in non-CWELCC spaces and, therefore, created slightly more CWELCC spaces.
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. These provinces expanded spaces in their non-profit sector.
Saskatchewan and Manitoba will fall furthest behind in space creation compared to other provinces, despite having among the highest need for new spaces. Their space creation goals over five years were ambitious, but they have fallen short.
As shown in Figure 2, the provinces agreed to create over 284,000 new spaces, primarily in the non-profit and public sector, by March 31, 2026. With six months to go, as of September 30, 2025, they had created only 194,000 new spaces—most of them for-profit and a portion of them not even in the CWELCC system. In aggregate across the country, the provinces are falling short. With only six months left of the first five-year agreements, we’re 90,000 spaces short of where we should be in terms of promised space creation.
Not all the new spaces are low fee
Net new space figures presented by governments often ignore whether those new spaces are CWELCC spaces. Figure 3 breaks apart the net new spaces created into those that are a part of the CWELCC system and those that are not. Both for-profit and non-profit centre spaces are included in this section.
CWELCC centres receive government support and charge lower fees as a result, whereas non-CWELCC centres don’t receive government support (or receive less) and will generally charge market rates. Depending on the province, centres aren’t forced to be part of the CWELCC system. Being part of the system means offering much lower fees, but it comes with strings attached. Specifically, centres can’t increase profits by raising fees and their profits are often limited by signing up.
As already suggested in Figure 1, Ontario has the largest proportion of newly created child care spaces that are outside of the CWELCC system. Of the spaces created between the fourth quarter of 2022 and third quarter of 2025, only 67 per cent were CWELCC spaces charging a reduced fee. The other 33 per cent of spaces were created outside of the system, charging market rates. While Ontario is close to hitting its CWELCC space creation targets, in raw terms, a third of those new spaces aren’t in the CWELCC system.
A portion of Manitoba’s new spaces are also outside of its $10-a-day program. While the province is set to substantially miss its space creation goals as examined above, 16 per cent of those new centre spaces aren’t in the CWELCC system.
New Brunswick outperformed its CWELCC space creation target six months before its deadline. However, 10 per cent of those newly created spaces are outside the CWELCC system, likely charging well more than its set fees of $21 a day for infants and $18 for older children.
The remainder of the provinces created almost all new spaces within the CWELCC system, with less than five per cent of new spaces outside of the system and likely charging much higher fees.
Quebec and P.E.I. created more than 100 per cent of their net new spaces as part of CWELCC, or, in the case of Quebec, its “reduced fee” program. This is possible as there has been a net reduction in non-CWELCC spaces in both provinces as the net count of new CWELCC spaces has expanded. Quebec, in particular, has been moving centres into its “reduced fee” system.
For-profits have owned the expansion
The federal government’s stated preference in the CWELCC agreements was to expand child care spaces primarily 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.
Unfortunately, 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.
Net growth in licensed home-based spaces has been most significant in Ontario, Quebec, and Saskatchewan. However, much of this growth may reflect existing unlicensed home providers moving into the licensed sector to lower their fees. While this transition significantly reduces fees for parents, it reclassifies the spaces in those homes rather than creating new physical capacity.
Nova Scotia, Manitoba and Saskatchewan were the only provinces that provided no operating funding to new for-profit centres. Their centre-based expansion was almost entirely in the non-profit sector as a result.
Other provinces, like Alberta, British Columbia and New Brunswick, did allow operational funding to go to new for-profit centres, allowing them to expand rapidly. The result will be a more costly system and likely more pressure on governments from the for-profit providers to increase their financial support to sustain profits.
The other likely result of more for-profit spaces will be lower quality care. Non-profit child care consistently outperforms for-profit care across key indicators.7Gordon Cleveland and Michael Krashinsky, “The Nonprofit Advantage: Producing quality in thick and thin child care markets,” Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, 28, no. 3 (2009): 440–460, https://doi.org/10.1002/pam.20440; Martha Friendly, et al., Risky Business: Child Care Ownership in Canada Past, Present and Future, Childcare Resource and Research Unit, 2021; Gordon Cleveland et al., An Economic Perspective on the Current and Future Role of Nonprofit Provision of Early Learning and Child Care Services in Canada, University of Toronto, 2007; Elizabeth Dhuey, “Will the Increased Investment in Early Childhood Education and Care in Canada Pay Off? It Depends!” Canadian Public Policy, 50, no. S1, April 2024. Non-profit centres are overrepresented at higher levels of quality.8Cleveland and Krashinsky, 2004; Drouin et al., 2004, cited in Friendly et al., Risky Business. These quality differences are closely tied to hiring better trained staff, paying them more and investing in their professional development.9Friendly et al., 2021; Cleveland and Krashinsky, 2009; Cleveland et al., 2007. Expanding primarily in for-profit centres will do the opposite.
Hitting targets doesn’t mean there’s a space nearby
Regardless of whether new space targets are achieved, the most important outcome for parents is finding a space nearby where they live. The federal government included text in most, but not all, of the agreements specifying a target of 5.9 licensed child care spaces for every 10 non-school aged children. While this target is low for the long term,10European Union goals through the Barcelona targets specify a 45 per cent coverage rate for children under the age of three and a 96 per cent coverage for children aged three to school age. Weighted with Canadian child populations, it would equate to a 67 per cent coverage rate for non-school age children, somewhat higher than the 59 per cent rate in the CWELCC agreements. See Official Journal of the European Union “Targets on Early Childhood Education and Care,” Volume 65, December 20, 2022, https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?from=EN&uri=OJ%3AC%3A2022%3A484%3AFULL#:~:text=TARGETS%20ON%20EARLY%20CHILDHOOD%20EDUCATION%20AND%20CARE. given how far behind most provinces and territories are from having even that coverage rate, it makes for a plausible interim goal.
As of the third quarter of 2025, only two provinces achieved that interim federal goal— P.E.I. and Quebec, as illustrated in Figure 5. 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 the federal target. So even if they hit their space creation goals, and many of them won’t, it won’t matter much for parents because they’ll still have a very difficult time finding licensed child care.
Of the biggest provinces, only Quebec is above the federal target of spaces compared to its child population. The other large provinces of Ontario, British Columbia and Alberta are well below the federal 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.
The CLAR database allows us to go much further and calculate the child care access for each of the 54,000 city blocks in Canada. In other words, it isn’t good enough just to have more spaces, those spaces should be located nearby where children live. In urban areas, ‘nearby’ is defined as within 5 km and in rural areas it’s within 10 km.
As implied by the general coverage rates, Manitoba has the highest proportion of its children with no nearby child care spaces. Half of Manitoban children (46 per cent) in the third quarter of 2025 lived on a block that is a child care desert. That is where there are less than three licensed spaces per 10 children. In fact, only four per cent of the children in Manitoba live on a block that meets the federal standard of child-to-space availability.
Saskatchewan is similar, with 42 per cent of its children living in a child care desert—although this second Prairie province has slightly more children that live in areas at or above the federal target. Unfortunately, both of these worst performers will miss their space creation targets as well; spaces that are desperately needed to better serve families with young children.
A third of the children in Nova Scotia and Ontario live in child care deserts. A quarter of children in Nova Scotia live on blocks at or above the federal target. Ontario has relatively few of its children with adequate coverage at or above the federal target (six per cent).
Just over 31 per cent of children in Alberta and Newfoundland and Labrador live in a child care desert. However, Alberta fares slightly better at the top end, with 19 per cent of its children at or above the federal target, whereas Newfoundland and Labrador has only managed eight per cent with adequate coverage.
Many of these worst performers, excluding Ontario, have larger portions of their populations living outside major centres. However, living in smaller towns and rural areas is hardly a recipe for poor provision of child care. P.E.I. is very rural yet has very few children living in deserts. Quebec has vast northern rural areas, yet the rural areas of La Belle Province have better child care coverage than the big cities in the Prairies.
As for British Columbia, its average coverage rate isn’t particularly good but it has managed to keep most of its children out of child care deserts (14 per cent living in child care deserts), doing slightly better than P.E.I. in this regard. Most children in B.C. do have some child care nearby, although few children live on a block that hits the federal target of 5.9 spaces per 10 children.
New Brunswick has the most extremes. On the one hand, 21 per cent of its children live in child care deserts while another 34 per cent live on blocks with plentiful child care options. There are large differences between the coverage in its centres of Saint John, Moncton and Fredericton compared to its smaller towns and more rural areas, where child care is much harder to find.
Only seven per cent of Quebec children live in child care deserts and two thirds already live on a block that meets or exceeds the federal target.
Despite missed target, new spaces are eliminating deserts
While major new federal programs are challenging to implement and many provinces will miss their space creation targets, progress is being made. This is particularly true in the reduction of children living in child care deserts since 2022.
Alberta, British Columbia and Saskatchewan have been particularly successful at reducing the proportion of their children with almost no licensed child care nearby. Since 2022, all three have effectively moved a quarter of their child populations from a situation where they had almost no access to child care to a situation where there is some.
British Columbia has been uniquely successful at boosting children into the federal target range. Since 2022, it has managed to move 17 per cent of children into a situation where their block has at least 5.9 spaces per 10 children.
Unfortunately, Manitoba had very poor child care coverage in 2022 and that only improved marginally by the third quarter of 2025. There have been relatively few new spaces created over the past five years. This province was one where expansion was needed the most and, unfortunately, it’s where there’s been the least.
Saskatchewan, like Manitoba, had poor child care access in 2022. But Saskatchewan added relatively more spaces since 2022. It was also doing worse than Manitoba in terms of coverage in 2022. The net result was that it moved a quarter of its children out of the child care desert category, mostly into the inadequate child care category—a small step forward.
At the other end of the spectrum, P.E.I., New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Quebec all moved 10 per cent or more of their children into the best category, with 5.9 spaces per 10 children. Except for Nova Scotia, these provinces already had low prevalence of child care deserts, making it more difficult to reduce those further. Nova Scotia, the province of extremes, has a third of its children in child care deserts.
Conclusion: the availability of child care after five years of CWELCC
Progress towards a national system of accessible child care has been uneven. The provinces started in very different places. Some had good coverage rates at the starting line, and some started far behind. All provinces have built new spaces since then, but some have been more successful at expansion than others and some have been more successful at creating new spaces in the CWELCC system. As a result, there has been a clear improvement in the accessibility of child care over the past five years.
For most parents though, finding a child care space will remain a frustrating experience with the licensed centres. While public money is now the primary funding source for licensed child care, the expansion of spaces has been overwhelmingly in for-profit centres. This runs counter to the CWELCC agreements that the provinces entered into. 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 high quality, low fee, non-profit spaces that parents deserve.
Methodology
The data in this report relies on the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives’ proprietary Child Care Licensing and Accessibility by Region (CLAR) database. This database tracks every licensed child care space in the provinces and does so semi-annually. Those licensed spaces can be in either licensed homes or centres. It also calculates coverage rates down the city block level, called Dissemination Areas (DA) by Statistics Canada. We are presently tracking 1.4 million licensed spaces and calculating coverage rates in 54,000 Dissemination Areas (DA).
A more detailed version of methodology is available in the August 2025 version of this report, which examined data to the first quarter of 2025.11David Macdonald, Cash cow: Assessing child care space creation progress, Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, August 21, 2025, https://www.policyalternatives.ca/news-research/cash-cow-assessing-child-care-space-creation-progress/#methodology. This section only highlights changes and improvements from that original methodology. Broadly the original methodology is still what’s being used with the following minor revisions.
Our CLAR database tracks the opening and closing of centres and homes, as well as their expansion and contraction of licensed spaces. In order to determine the mix of CWELCC vs. non-CWELCC spaces, we need to examine the net change across all these trends over the database timeframe of Q4 2022 and Q3 2025. In some provinces, it wasn’t clear if centres were part of CWELCC in 2022, but then they closed before the status could be ascertained. In those cases, we assume that those spaces were in CWELCC.
The data has now been updated to the end of Q3 2025 and will be updated again for Q1 2026 to capture the entire CWELCC period. The Statistics Canada projections of child populations were updated to the June 1, 2025 sub-provincial child populations estimates, so child counts by Dissemination Areas are updated accordingly, as are Dissemination Areas coverage rates.
In terms of changes to the original methodology, to calculate coverage rates, a two-stage floating catchment area approach continues to be used. However, stronger urban vs. rural travel distance preferences were implemented, ensuring children in urban DAs will only ever travel 5 km to a child care centre, no matter if the centre is located in a rural or urban DA with children living in a rural area, expanding their travel to 10km.
The database now has much improved data on Quebec homes, successfully locating almost all of them, instead of placing them synthetically, as was the case in the last update.
In the previous report, only some provinces had reliable identification of child care centres located on public school grounds. Now the CLAR database has the information in all provinces, although that doesn’t affect the analysis in this report.
Table 1 provides an updated overview of the data that’s available by provinces from the CLAR database.
The data sources have changed only marginally since the summer August 2025 report in Quebec and Alberta. The updated URLs are available in Table 2.
Acknowledgments
The author would like to thank Elizabeth Adamson, Lynell Anderson, Morna Ballantyne, Jane Beach, Martha Friendly and Eric Swanson for their thoughtful comments on an earlier draft of this analysis.
