MapleCub Data Lab · One-option communities · 2026

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

In Ontario, 271 of 555 communities with licensed child care — 48.8% — hold exactly one licensed programme. Every one of them is named and linked below.

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

271

one-option communities in Ontario

48.8%

of the province’s 555 communities with licensed care

49.4%

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

Data CSVAll Ontario dataMethodologyThe list

Ontario carries the second-largest absolute count of one-option communities in Canada: 271 of its 555 communities with licensed care, 48.8% — a shade under half. The province’s supply is usually described through Toronto and the 905, but the tail behind those numbers is long and very thin. Attawapiskat, Fort Albany, Moose Factory, Bearskin Lake and Muskrat Dam each hold exactly one licence, and in the far north the nearest alternative is a flight rather than a drive.

Ontario is also the province whose registry city field needed the most cleaning. 28 of the 271 rows turned out to be spelling or punctuation variants of cities that already hold other licensed programmes — a trailing comma after Ottawa, a transposed Guelph — and they are dropped and counted at the foot of this page rather than quietly corrected. The canonical spellings behind them range from Toronto’s 856 programmes down to two-programme towns such as Campbellford.

Ontario’s communities with licensed care, one square each
Ontario: 555 squares, one per community with licensed child care. 271 are red — those hold exactly one licensed programme. 284 are grey — those hold two or more.

271 with exactly one licensed programme|284 with two or more. One square = one community.

Source: MapleCub Canadian Childcare Dataset — Aug 2026 · computed 2026-08-10 · N = 271 · CSV · Ontario; community = normalized city name (lower-cased, trimmed, non-empty)

Every Ontario 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 = 243 · CSV · Ontario communities published; 28 records under review (below)

28 records under review — why the published list is shorter than 271

The provincial registry writes the city field by hand. These 28 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.

  • Belleville - Hasting — Belleville plus a truncated county name; Belleville holds 22 listings.
  • Bradford West Gwilli — Truncated 'Bradford West Gwillimbury', which appears separately with 2 listings.
  • Campbelford — Misspelling of Campbellford, which holds 2 listings.
  • Carelton Place — Transposition of Carleton Place, which holds 4 listings.
  • City Of Greater Sudbury — Administrative wrapper; Sudbury holds 34 listings and Greater Sudbury 2.
  • City Of Pickering — Administrative wrapper; Pickering holds 40 listings.
  • Clarmont — Misspelling of Claremont; the other Claremont program is filed under 'City Of Pickering'.
  • Etobcoke — Misspelling of Etobicoke, which holds 18 listings.
  • Georgetown, Halton Hills — Georgetown with its municipality appended; Georgetown holds 10 listings.
  • Grimbsy — Transposition of Grimsby, which holds 14 listings.
  • Guelph On Ca — City, province and country code in the city field; Guelph holds 44 listings.
  • Guleph — Transposition of Guelph, which holds 44 listings.
  • Hamliton — Transposition of Hamilton, which holds 106 listings.
  • London, — Trailing comma; /daycare/london serves 102 listings.
  • London Ontario — City and province in the city field; London holds 101 listings.
  • Markahm — Transposition of Markham, which holds 87 listings.
  • Mississagua — Transposition of Mississauga, which holds 187 listings.
  • Misssissuaga — Another Mississauga misspelling; 'Mississuaga' alone carries 3 more listings.
  • New Market — Spaced variant of Newmarket; /daycare/newmarket serves 39 listings.
  • Newmarket` — Stray backtick; /daycare/newmarket serves 39 listings, this row among them.
  • Newmarket Ontario — City and province in the city field; Newmarket holds 38 listings.
  • Ottawa, — Trailing comma; /daycare/ottawa serves 224 listings.
  • Port Hope Ontario — City and province in the city field; Port Hope holds 5 listings.
  • Sarnia Lambton — Service-region label rather than a community; Sarnia holds 18 listings.
  • St.Catharines — Missing space; /daycare/st-catharines serves 41 listings.
  • St. George — Punctuation variant; /daycare/st-george serves 3 Ontario listings.
  • Toronto Ontario — City and province in the city field; Toronto holds 856 listings.
  • Woodbidge — Misspelling of Woodbridge, which holds 33 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

Ontario’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.

Ontario child-care dataThe State of Child Care 2026Child care in Ontario

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

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