MapleCub Data Lab · Study · 2026

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

1,074 of the 2,175 communities with any licensed child care at all have exactly one licensed programme — 49.4%, just under half. Not a percentage: the places, by name, linked to the programme that serves them.

  • Computed 2026-08-10
  • 1,031 communities published
  • 43 registry artefacts itemised
  • CC BY 4.0

1,074

one-option communities

49.4%

of the 2,175 communities with licensed care

72.2%

Saskatchewan, the starkest province

8

provincial registries covered

Data CSVMethodologyThe eight lists

That number is the fourth finding in The State of Licensed Child Care in Canada, 2026, and it is the one people ask us to break down most often. So here it is broken down. In these places there is no comparing, no waitlist hedging, no choosing between a centre and a home: one licence serves the community, or the family drives.

Every community with licensed child care in the eight provinces, one square each
Every community with licensed child care in the eight provinces MapleCub tracks: 435 squares, one per five communities. 215 are red — they stand for the 1,074 communities with exactly one licensed programme.

1,074 communities with exactly one licensed programme|1,101 with two or more. One square = one community on a wide screen; one square = five communities on a phone.

Source: MapleCub Canadian Childcare Dataset — Aug 2026 · computed 2026-08-10 · N = 2,175 · CSV · community = normalized city name (lower-cased, trimmed, non-empty) within a province

The spread between provinces is wider than the national average suggests. Saskatchewan sits at 72.2% of its communities and British Columbia at 28.4%, and most of that gap is a licensing-law difference rather than a supply difference: provinces that license family child-care homes one at a time record several licences in a village where an agency-based province records none.

We publish 1,031 of the 1,074 communities. The other 43 are registry artefacts — a trailing comma after a city name, a transposed spelling, a city and province typed into the same field — each listed on its province page with the evidence that disqualified it. None of them is rewritten.

The share, province by province

Read this chart as a measure of how concentrated each province’s licensed sector is, not as a ranking of how well each province serves families. Quebec and Ontario carry the largest absolute counts (297 and 271 communities) because they simply have the most communities; Saskatchewan tops the share because so much of its licensed capacity sits in five cities.

Share of communities with exactly one licensed programme, by province, 2026
Share of communities with exactly one licensed child-care programme, by province, 2026Saskatchewan72.2%Saskatchewan — 72.2%127 of 176 communitiesNova Scotia58.1%Nova Scotia — 58.1%68 of 117 communitiesQuebec54.3%Quebec — 54.3%297 of 547 communitiesOntario48.8%Ontario — 48.8%271 of 555 communitiesAlberta45.2%Alberta — 45.2%108 of 239 communitiesNew Brunswick44%New Brunswick — 44%73 of 166 communitiesManitoba43.1%Manitoba — 43.1%69 of 160 communitiesBritish Columbia28.4%British Columbia — 28.4%61 of 215 communities0%20%40%60%80%100%Share of that province's communities with exactly one licensed programme

Source: MapleCub Canadian Childcare Dataset — Aug 2026 · computed 2026-08-10 · N = 20,516 · CSV · denominator: communities in that province with any licensed care

The eight named lists

One-option communities by province, 2026
One-option communities by province, 2026, with links to each named list
ProvinceCommunitiesOne-optionSharePublished
Quebec54729754.3%297
Ontario55527148.8%243 (−28)
Saskatchewan17612772.2%124 (−3)
Alberta23910845.2%106 (−2)
New Brunswick1667344%69 (−4)
Manitoba1606943.1%66 (−3)
Nova Scotia1176858.1%68
British Columbia2156128.4%58 (−3)

Source: MapleCub Canadian Childcare Dataset — Aug 2026 · computed 2026-08-10 · N = 1,031 · CSV · "Published" excludes 43 registry artefacts, itemised on each province page

How to read the lists

A community means a normalized registry city name — lower-cased and trimmed — within one province, which is the same definition the flagship report uses. That has two consequences worth knowing before quoting a number. A hamlet whose only programme is licensed under a neighbouring town’s name will not appear on its own; and a settlement inside a larger municipality can appear under its own name if the registry writes it that way.

A programme count is also not a space count. Only Quebec, Alberta and Nova Scotia publish licensed capacity as open data, so “one licensed programme” means one door a parent can knock on, not a known number of seats behind it. And 55 rows across Saskatchewan and Manitoba carry no city value at all; they sit outside every count here, which makes these totals a floor.

Everything on this page is free to reuse with attribution. If you are writing about a specific region and want the cut behind it — a county, a riding, a health authority — email hello@maplecub.ca and a person will send it.

Jump to a province: British Columbia · Ontario · Quebec · Alberta · Saskatchewan · Manitoba · New Brunswick · Nova Scotia

Cite as: MapleCub, “Canada’s one-option child-care communities,” 2026-08-10, https://www.maplecub.ca/research/one-option-communities. Released under CC BY 4.0. More open data: MapleCub Data Lab.