MapleCub Canadian Childcare Dataset — August 2026 edition: 20,516 licensed child-care programmes across eight provinces

A count of 20,516 provincially licensed child-care programmes across eight Canadian provinces — British Columbia, Ontario, Quebec, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia — built from the eight provincial licensing registries, deduplicated, geocoded and published open under CC BY 4.0.

No federal body publishes a count of Canada's licensed child-care programmes. Child care is provincially administered; each province publishes its registry in a different format under a different licensing vocabulary, and several publish nothing beyond a name and an address. This dataset is built to be that national count, with its limits published beside it rather than after it.

Unit of observation: one licensed programme as the provincial registry records it — a point of access a parent can look up, not a licensed space. The two are not interchangeable, and provinces license family homes very differently (Saskatchewan licenses 870 individual homes; Quebec licenses none individually), so any per-capita rate here describes the shape of supply rather than how much care exists.

Contents: a province-level table (8 rows, 25 columns, in CSV and JSON); city snapshots for 30 cities; a claimed-versus-measured comparison of $10-a-day policy against what each provincial registry can actually demonstrate; a six-city pilot index of whether published licensed hours fit a work day; and the 20-page report as published.

Selected findings. 2,175 communities have at least one licensed programme, and 1,074 of them (49.4%) have exactly one — though where it can be measured, 51.8% of those one-option communities have another licensed programme within 10 km, so one option is not the same as no alternative. Only three of the eight provincial registries identify which programmes participate in the reduced-fee scheme at all, which means five provinces publish a $10-a-day claim their own public data cannot be used to verify. Licensed capacity (479,782 spaces) is a three-province figure — Quebec, Alberta and Nova Scotia — because the other five do not publish capacity as open data, and it must not be scaled to a national total.

Please read README.md before quoting any figure. It sets out the four ways these numbers are most often misread, including the fact that Google-match coverage is a statement about MapleCub's data collection and not about any province's sector, and that "geocoded" needs two numbers rather than one (99.8% carry a coordinate, but 54.1% of those are postal-district centroids).

Methodology and the full citation registry — 35 government sources, each with the date it was fetched — are published at https://www.maplecub.ca/research/methodology

Editions are quarterly and each keeps the date it was computed on, so an older citation stays honest. Corrections: hello@maplecub.ca