Provincial government obscures child care space-creation numbers

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

15 October, 2025

British Columbia’s child care program is failing to deliver for parents. In a new report, Child Care Funding Update: British Columbia—Years Two and Three, Cardus finds that the proportion of BC child care facilities with a waiting list reached 82 percent in 2023-24, up from 77 percent in 2021-22.

“Instead of solving problems in BC, the Canada-Wide Early Learning and Child Care Agreement is creating them,” says Peter Jon Mitchell, Family Program Director at Cardus. “Despite a federal allocation of more than $3.2 billion over five years, BC parents are facing more frustration and waiting lists.”

Cardus also finds that the BC government met just 60 percent of its 2022-23 child care space creation target. Then the province moved the goal posts in 2023-24 by counting spaces created by for-profit providers towards its targets, even though the province denies space-creation funding to these providers.

“BC’s government should be clearer about how it spends public money,” says Mitchell. “By counting all new spaces, not just the ones created specifically with federal funding, the BC government obscures attempts to assess the effectiveness of its spending.”

Meanwhile, the Cardus report also finds that BC cannot spend its federal funding quickly enough. After carrying over much of previous years’ federal allocation, BC had an estimated $1.1 billion on-hand for 2023-24. Even so, it still could only spend less than $770 million of that amount in that year.

“Like every other province that has accepted federal funding for child care, BC has ended up with a bloated, bureaucratic system that fails to meet families’ needs,” says Mitchell. “Direct funding to parents would avoid this mess and help families afford the care that best works for them.”

Child Care Funding Update: British Columbia—Years Two and Three is freely available at Cardus.ca.

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MEDIA INQUIRIES
Daniel Proussalidis
Cardus – Director of Media & Public Relations
media@cardus.ca
613-241-4500 x508

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Cardus is a non-partisan think tank dedicated to clarifying and strengthening, through research and dialogue, the ways in which society’s institutions can work together for the common good.