71 new child care spots coming to Surrey 

Surrey council has approved proposals for two new child-care sites in Surrey – meaning 71 new seats.  

The first centre would be located at 15407–91A Ave. and would allow a child-care centre for up to 25 children within an existing single family dwelling. The second facility, approved for up to 46 children, would be two-storeys and located at 12036–84 Ave. This is currently a vacant lot. 

Over the past few years, B.C. families have been voicing concerns that there are not enough daycare spots, nor are they affordable. In 2021, the federal government planned to have an average of $10-a-day child care programs across the country by 2026 — a promise that came several years after the B.C. government began testing these types of programs. 

While B.C. may have once led affordable child care, a 2025 report by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives found that B.C. was falling behind other provinces.

Surrey sat second on the list of major Canadian cities with the highest median fees for infants at $39-a-day. Surrey families also saw the lowest return in savings, said the report. 

The report found that six provinces — Nunavut, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Quebec, Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland and Labrador — had already met the federal goal of at or below $10-a-day for all spaces. 

The $10-a-day day care programs only make up for around 10 per cent of all child-care spaces in B.C. Surrey families may also specifically struggle to find these affordable programs — Surrey has just over 800 $10-a-day child care spaces, while Vancouver has a little over 4,000. 

Many families have also criticized that actually enrolling your child into a $10-a-day program is complete luck. If a family is lucky enough to enrol their child full-time in one of the $10-a-day sites, they’d be paying about $200 a month, a significantly lower price than the over $1,000 most families have to spend for monthly child care. 

The 2025 report also found that average child-care costs were lower in provinces that had imposed fee caps, which B.C. still has not done.  

Around 150,000 child-care spaces have cut fees in half to an average of $20-a-day through the Child Care Fee Reduction Initiative and families with a household income of $111,000 or less are eligible for a government subsidy which can bring fees down to zero; but this is a patchwork model rather than a universal one.  

The province’s goal was to have 20,000 spaces by spring 2026 — but according to all the listed $10-a-day centres on the province’s website, the total still sits at around 17,500. Earlier this year, the province paused new enrolment to the program.