MapleCub Data Lab · One-option communities · 2026

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

In New Brunswick, 73 of 166 communities with licensed child care — 44% — hold exactly one licensed programme. Every one of them is named and linked below.

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

73

one-option communities in New Brunswick

44%

of the province’s 166 communities with licensed care

49.4%

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

Data CSVAll New Brunswick dataMethodologyThe list

New Brunswick entered this dataset on 2026-08-09, and its one-option map arrived with it: 73 of 166 communities (44%) hold exactly one licensed facility. The province licenses small family homes individually, so a settlement served by two home providers does not appear here at all — which makes the 69 places below the ones where a single licence really is the whole answer, from Wilsons Beach on Campobello Island to Tobique First Nation.

4 rows are excluded as registry labels rather than communities, two of them “DSL” local-service-district entries whose named villages already appear in the registry with programmes of their own. Because New Brunswick is new here, treat this list as a first pass: it has not yet been through a second quarterly refresh.

New Brunswick’s communities with licensed care, one square each
New Brunswick: 166 squares, one per community with licensed child care. 73 are red — those hold exactly one licensed programme. 93 are grey — those hold two or more.

73 with exactly one licensed programme|93 with two or more. One square = one community.

Source: MapleCub Canadian Childcare Dataset — Aug 2026 · computed 2026-08-10 · N = 73 · CSV · New Brunswick; community = normalized city name (lower-cased, trimmed, non-empty)

Every New Brunswick 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 = 69 · CSV · New Brunswick communities published; 4 records under review (below)

4 records under review — why the published list is shorter than 73

The provincial registry writes the city field by hand. These 4 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.

  • Dsl De Drummond — Local-service-district abbreviation; the village of Drummond holds 2 listings.
  • Dsl De Grand-Sault/Falls — Local-service-district abbreviation; Grand-Sault/Grand Falls holds 9 listings.
  • Harvey Station — Same E6K village as 'Harvey York Co'; 2 programs between the two labels.
  • Harvey York Co — Same E6K village as 'Harvey Station'; 2 programs between the two labels.

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

New Brunswick’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.

New Brunswick child-care dataThe State of Child Care 2026Child care in New Brunswick

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

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