$10-a-day: what provinces claim, and what the registries show

Quebec runs a subsidized network with a flat indexed rate. British Columbia reduces fees by a monthly dollar amount and reserves true $10 pricing for designated sites. New Brunswick publishes a fee grid. Ontario caps. That much is public policy, and our 2026 report sets it out province by province. In five of eight provinces, the answer to whether a given centre is in the program is: no, you cannot tell.

What each province says it charges

The chart is drawn so that unlike things look unlike. A dot is a single published rate. A bar is a published band, or a floor with no ceiling. Nova Scotia gets no marker at all, because it publishes no single provincial figure — inventing one to fill the row would be the exact error the chart exists to prevent. Ottawa counts eight provinces and territories delivering regulated care “for an average of $10 a day or less” across thirteen jurisdictions²⁵; counting published provincial rules across the eight provinces in this dataset, three qualify. Both are true, and they use different denominators.

Claimed vs. measured, province by province

The middle column is not a judgement about how well a province is doing. It reports one thing only: whether the province’s own published registry lets anyone identify the participating facilities, and if so, how many there are. The three provinces that publish such a field are each measuring a different program, so their percentages are not comparable with one another.

Source: MapleCub Canadian Childcare Dataset — Aug 2026 · computed 2026-08-10 · N = 20,516 · CSV · claimed column from the audited 2026 rules module (verified 2026-07-05) and, for New Brunswick, the province's own family information page; measured column computed 2026-08-10

The three provinces we can measure

Where the registry does record participation, it is never universal — and in British Columbia the number that is published measures the wrong thing. CCFRI authorization covers 96.5% of BC facilities, but CCFRI is a monthly reduction with out-of-pocket fees that stay well above $10 a day;^15,16 the designated $10-a-Day ChildCareBC sites are a much smaller, separately administered group that the open dataset does not identify at all.^23† So BC’s bar below is high and, for the $10 question, close to meaningless. That is itself the finding.

Quebec is the closest thing Canada has to a long-run answer, and it has run the reduced-contribution network since 1997: 73.9% of installations are in it,¹⁸ and the other quarter charge market rates offset later by a tax credit. That status is also dated: the $9.65/day contribution holds until December 31, 2026 and rises to $10.60/day on January 1, 2027 under the ministry’s own 2026-2027 budgetary rules.³ New Brunswick’s grid is three months old and already covers 67.7% of facilities.¹¹ Neither number is a failure; both are the ordinary shape of a voluntary program, which is exactly why the five provinces that publish nothing should publish something.

Why we can’t measure five provinces

Ontario, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba and Nova Scotia together license 10,093 programs — just under half of all the licensed child care in the country. None of their published files contains a per-facility field for the fee program. Not a sparse field, not a stale field: no field. Ontario’s open data runs to 18 columns and records the licensee, the service manager and the language of service, but not whether the centre is enrolled in CWELCC²¹ — the single fact that determines what a parent pays.¹³

What Ontario does publish, and why it does not close the gap. The province reports CWELCC participation in aggregate: 5,556 licensed sites (92%) and 328,610 licensed spaces (92%) for children aged 0 to 5 were enrolled as of March 31, 2025, out of 359,544 licensed 0-to-5 spaces in the province.²² That is a real number, published by the government, and an earlier version of this study said participation in Ontario was “not measurable from public data — by anyone,” which was too broad. The claim that survives is the one this study can defend: the aggregate is space-weighted and province-wide, so it tells a parent that most Ontario spaces are enrolled and nothing at all about the centre they are standing in front of. Four of the eight per cent are somewhere, and no published file says where.

• Manitoba — The Manitoba provider list carries nine columns (name, language, provider type, address, city, postal code, age groups, raw age groups, province) and no funding field. Every one of the 1,139 rows carries the same value.¹⁹
• Saskatchewan — The Saskatchewan provider list carries nine columns (name, provider type, address, city, postal code, phone, infant care, raw type, province) and no fee-program field. Every one of the 1,320 rows carries the same value.
• Alberta — Alberta's child-care open data carries 16 columns, including inspection and enforcement fields, but no affordability-grant field. Every one of the 2,912 rows carries the same value.^20†
• Ontario — Ontario's licensed child-care open data (March 2026 snapshot) carries 18 columns — licensee, program type, region, service manager, licence number and status, address, language — and no CWELCC enrolment field. Every one of the 4,374 rows carries the same value. The province does publish participation in aggregate — 92% of licensed 0-to-5 sites and 92% of spaces as of March 31, 2025 — so the gap is per-facility identification, not the existence of a figure.^21,22
• Nova Scotia — Nova Scotia's Child Care Directory carries 23 columns, including two inspection dates and licensed capacity, but no fee-program field. Every one of the 348 rows carries the same value.^24†

This belongs in the same family as the inspection and capacity gaps documented in the 2026 report: governments publish the existence of a facility while withholding the facts that would let anyone compare facilities. Three provinces have shown that the fix is one boolean column in a file they already publish. Until the other five add it, no parent, journalist or researcher can verify from public data how much of a multi-billion-dollar affordability program actually reaches the ground. This page leaves that gap visible rather than estimating across it.

What we do instead. Where a province publishes the field, MapleCub carries it on the listing. Where it does not, the listing says nothing about the fee program rather than guessing, and the province page tells parents what to ask.

Source: MapleCub Canadian Childcare Dataset — Aug 2026 · computed 2026-08-10 · N = 20,516 · CSV · column counts read from each province's published file as ingested on 2026-08-10

A footnote from provider websites

One more angle, offered as colour and nothing else. Of the 3,762 provider websites MapleCub has read so far, only 90 mention a $10-ish daily price anywhere on the site. In Quebec the count is 0 of 614, which mostly tells you that Quebec’s rate is $9.65 and gets written “9,65 $” when it is written at all.¹

This is not a participation rate and must not be quoted as one. The denominator is the set of sites our harvester has reached, not the sector; the match is a crude text pattern; and a provider who simply never publishes prices is indistinguishable from one that is not in the program. What it measures is website copy, and nothing beyond it.

Source: MapleCub Canadian Childcare Dataset — Aug 2026 · computed 2026-08-10 · N = 3,762 · CSV · harvested provider websites as of 2026-08-10; this denominator grows daily

Methodology

The claimed column

Taken verbatim from the fee rows in the State of Licensed Child Care in Canada 2026 report, which draws seven provinces from MapleCub’s audited 2026 rules module (verified 2026-07-05 against official provincial sources) and New Brunswick from the province’s own family information page.¹¹ Quebec’s $9.65 daily contribution was re-confirmed against the indexed 2026 rate on 2026-08-10.¹ No fee rule is re-derived on this page.

The measured column

Computed on 2026-08-10 from MapleCub’s registry-derived dataset, visible listings only, with the same denominators as the 2026-08-10 report edition. Each figure was computed three times with different SQL shapes — a grouped filter aggregate, a CTE joined to a separately computed denominator, and a complement anti-match with the opposite null handling — and all three agreed. The underlying field is a single per-listing flag whose meaning is province-specific:

• Quebec — Listed as subsidized (subventionné) — the network where the reduced contribution applies. Répertoire des installations, SUBV column: 'CR' (contribution réduite) vs anything else. A published per-facility fact, not an inference.
• Manitoba — Not distinguishable from public registry data. The Manitoba provider list carries nine columns (name, language, provider type, address, city, postal code, age groups, raw age groups, province) and no funding field. Every one of the 1,139 rows carries the same value.
• Saskatchewan — Not distinguishable from public registry data. The Saskatchewan provider list carries nine columns (name, provider type, address, city, postal code, phone, infant care, raw type, province) and no fee-program field. Every one of the 1,320 rows carries the same value.
• Alberta — Not distinguishable from public registry data. Alberta's child-care open data carries 16 columns, including inspection and enforcement fields, but no affordability-grant field. Every one of the 2,912 rows carries the same value.
• New Brunswick — Designated under the provincial Parent Fee Grid. New Brunswick's Childcare Finder publishes designation per facility; ingested on 2026-08-09 and stored as its own flag value (306 facilities are not designated).
• Ontario — Not distinguishable from public registry data. Ontario's licensed child-care open data (March 2026 snapshot) carries 18 columns — licensee, program type, region, service manager, licence number and status, address, language — and no CWELCC enrolment field. Every one of the 4,374 rows carries the same value. The province does publish participation in aggregate — 92% of licensed 0-to-5 sites and 92% of spaces as of March 31, 2025 — so the gap is per-facility identification, not the existence of a figure.
• British Columbia — Authorized for the Child Care Fee Reduction Initiative (CCFRI) — a fee reduction, not a $10 rate. BC Child Care Map open data, IS_CCFRI_AUTH_IND field. It records CCFRI authorization only. BC's separately designated $10-a-Day ChildCareBC sites are not identified in this dataset, so this page cannot count them.
• Nova Scotia — Not distinguishable from public registry data. Nova Scotia's Child Care Directory carries 23 columns, including two inspection dates and licensed capacity, but no fee-program field. Every one of the 348 rows carries the same value.

What this page does not claim

Registry participation is not enrolment: a designated or subsidized facility can be full, closed to new families, or charging for extras the program does not cover. A listing-level flag is not a per-child fee: what any one family pays depends on the child’s age, the hours, the province’s income tests where they apply, and the operator’s own rate before reductions. The three measurable provinces measure three different programs and their shares must not be ranked against each other. Nothing here rates providers, and the absence of a flag in five provinces is a statement about their published data, not about those providers. For what a specific family would pay, use the cost guides and subsidy calculators, which model the rules directly.

The eight rows behind this page are free to download and reuse with attribution (CC BY 4.0):

Cite as: MapleCub, “$10-a-day: what provinces claim, and what the registries show,” 2026-08-10, https://www.maplecub.ca/research/ten-a-day-reality. Media enquiries: hello@maplecub.ca. More open data: MapleCub Data Lab.