Surrey among most expensive Canadian cities for child care 

Surrey is one of the most expensive cities in Canada for child care, highlighting how far B.C. has fallen behind other provinces in offering affordable child care. 

The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives released a report surveying child care costs in 35 major Canadian cities, with the top five cities being in B.C.

Families in Surrey are paying an average of $36 a day in infant fees and $31 for pre-school age fees — the most expensive city being Richmond at $52 and $42 a day for the age groups. 

The federal government launched the Canada-Wide Early Learning and Child Care program in 2021 with the intention of bringing child-care costs across the country to an average of $10-a-day by 2026.  

David Macdonald, senior economist with CCPA, has been doing this study for five years and said that currently “six of the 13 provinces and territories are at $10-a-day … That’s not all of the provinces and territories, which was the initial promise of the program. But big progress has really been made on this front over the last five years with the national program.” 

B.C. was once seen as a leader in this initiative, as the provincial government under John Horgan had pledged the same thing in 2018 and began taking steps to achieve this. 

But since then, the government has stalled considerably and has yet to implement a crucial component — B.C. does not have a fee cap on child-care costs. 

Even provinces like Ontario and Alberta, which have not achieved $10-a-day child-care across the province yet, have set fees at $22 and $15 a day, respectively. Parents in those two provinces are seeing much higher savings in child care costs compared to B.C. parents. 

“There seems to be actually a fairly well trodden path. Step one is you reduce the fees, which B.C. has done. Step two is you set the fees, which B.C. has not done, but the other big provinces have. And step three is you ratchet down those set fees towards $10 a day. B.C. is really stuck at step one of this process,” explained Macdonald.  

He added that B.C. is in a special situation as families do have access to $10-a-day child-care centres “if you happen to be lucky enough to get one of those spaces.” But these seats are not equally distributed across the province. 

Forty-five per cent of Vancouver’s pre-school age spaces cost $10 a day, but less than 10 per cent of these spaces in Surrey are at the same rate. 

“Vancouver has a lot more of these $10-a-day spaces. In part, this was due to the rapid expansion of the $10-day-spaces. This was about two years ago, and Vancouver scooped a lot of those spaces, and so as a result, Surrey just doesn’t have as many of them,” said Macdonald.  

Parents in Surrey are saving $440 a month for infant care and $375 a month for pre-school age care with the national program in place, but this is considerably less than other cities — families in Toronto are saving $1,806 and $1,052 on monthly fees in comparison. 

The report also notes that despite the program’s commitment to expand not-for-profit centres, there has actually been greater expansion in for-profit spaces. The program is application based, explained Macdonald, so seemingly more for-profits spaces have applied and received acceptances to open centres. 

“A lot of the non-profits are relatively small … There’s no incentive for them to go build another 10 centers. They don’t have the capacity to do it, and so this kind of wait for applications approach, this isn’t exclusive to B.C., but in many of the jurisdictions has just led to the the for-profits saying ‘We do want to expand, we want to make money here’ [and] they have a profit incentive to expand,” he said.

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. 

In June, the federal government announced an additional $5.4 billion over the next two years, bringing the total funding to $11 billion from 2026-28 — Macdonald said this increases the program by a third. 

He hopes the federal government uses this money in specific ways like buying new spaces, renovating buildings and providing better wages to workers. Early childhood educators, Macdonald said, are not being adequately paid or receiving unstable hours causing many to leave the profession.  

“You can’t get full-time shifts. The pay is bad. There’s no benefits, and so they’ll maybe stay in it for a little bit of time and realize they can’t make a career out of it, and they quit.”

Macdonald also hopes the federal government pushes B.C. to set a fee cap as it “would provide big savings for parents and move the province down that road towards $10 a day.”