MapleCub Data Lab · One-option communities · 2026

British Columbia's one-option communities: where child care means one door

In British Columbia, 61 of 215 communities with licensed child care — 28.4% — hold exactly one licensed programme. Every one of them is named and linked below.

  • Computed 2026-08-10
  • 58 named and linked
  • National figure 49.4%
  • CC BY 4.0

61

one-option communities in British Columbia

28.4%

of the province’s 215 communities with licensed care

49.4%

national figure, for comparison (1,074 of 2,175)

Data CSVAll British Columbia dataMethodologyThe list

British Columbia has the smallest share of one-option communities in the country, and the reason is a licensing rule rather than a policy win. 61 of its 215 communities with licensed care (28.4%) hold exactly one licensed programme — the lowest proportion of the eight provinces MapleCub tracks — because BC licenses family child cares one home at a time, so a village served by three home providers appears in the registry as three licences rather than one.

Where the count still lands at one, it lands hard. Alert Bay, Klemtu, Fort Ware and Atlin are reached by ferry, float plane or a long gravel road, and the single licence named below is the whole licensed sector. There is no second centre to phone, and the next licence is not in the next neighbourhood.

British Columbia’s communities with licensed care, one square each
British Columbia: 215 squares, one per community with licensed child care. 61 are red — those hold exactly one licensed programme. 154 are grey — those hold two or more.

61 with exactly one licensed programme|154 with two or more. One square = one community.

Source: MapleCub Canadian Childcare Dataset — Aug 2026 · computed 2026-08-10 · N = 61 · CSV · British Columbia; community = normalized city name (lower-cased, trimmed, non-empty)

Every British Columbia community with one licensed programme

Each name links to that community’s page on MapleCub, where the single licensed programme is listed with whatever the province publishes about it — provider type, age groups, hours, subsidy status. The names are printed exactly as the provincial registry writes them.

Source: MapleCub Canadian Childcare Dataset — Aug 2026 · computed 2026-08-10 · N = 58 · CSV · British Columbia communities published; 3 records under review (below)

3 records under review — why the published list is shorter than 61

The provincial registry writes the city field by hand. These 3 rows grouped as their own community but are not one: each is either a spelling, spacing or punctuation variant of a place that already holds other licensed programmes, or a string that is not a community name at all. They are dropped from the list above and counted here. Nothing is rewritten — a registry string is never silently corrected, so the next edition can tell whether the province fixed it.

  • Bunaby — Misspelling of Burnaby (315 listings); the listing's V3J postal code is a Burnaby FSA.
  • Darcy — Apostrophe variant of D'Arcy, which holds 3 BC listings; the two spellings resolve to separate city pages, so /daycare/darcy would show only this one.
  • Fort St James — Punctuation variant of Fort St. James; /daycare/fort-st-james serves 3 BC listings.

What one option actually means

In a community on this list there is no comparing. No second waitlist to hedge with, no choice between a centre and a home, no switching after a bad month. One licence serves the whole place, and if it is full, or closes, or does not take infants, the answer is a drive. Nationally 1,074 of 2,175 communities with any licensed care at all — 49.4% — are in that position.

Two limits are worth stating plainly. A community here means a normalized registry city name, not a municipal boundary: a small place whose only programme is licensed under a neighbouring town’s name will not appear, and a settlement inside a larger municipality may appear under its own name. And a programme count is not a space count — five of the eight provinces publish no licensed capacity in open data, so “one programme” describes how many doors a parent can knock on, not how many children fit behind them.

This page is a snapshot of 2026-08-10. Licences open and close weekly, and a community that gains a second programme drops off the next edition without ceremony.

Keep reading

British Columbia’s full statistical picture — provider mix, published capacity, what families pay — sits on the province data page. The one-option count is one of five findings in the national report.

British Columbia child-care dataThe State of Child Care 2026Child care in British Columbia

Other provinces: Ontario · Quebec · Alberta · Saskatchewan · Manitoba · New Brunswick · Nova Scotia

Cite as: MapleCub, “British Columbia’s one-option communities,” 2026-08-10, https://www.maplecub.ca/research/one-option-communities/british-columbia. Released under CC BY 4.0. Journalists: we will pull a custom cut on request — hello@maplecub.ca.