BC Keeps Asking Child Care Operators What’s Wrong. It Has the Data to Act

Last month, B.C.’s Minister of Education and Child Care, Lisa Beare, convened a virtual townhall to seek the views of operators and professionals in the child-care sector. She heard comments urging better pay, higher quality standards and more transparency in funding decisions. Nothing new here. These are the same three issues the ministry has been receiving formal feedback on since at least 2022. The ministry has launched an interactive survey, running through July 9, to collect more of it.

But B.C.’s child-care system is not failing for lack of information. It has been collecting mounds of data for nearly a decade. What the province has not done — under the Ministry of Children and Family Development and now under the Ministry of Education and Child Care — is design policy that responds to what the information shows.

Consider what Beare already knows or can easily find out.

The Early Development Instrument or EDI is a population-level measure of kindergarten children's developmental readiness across five domains: physical health, social competence, emotional maturity, language and cognition, and communication. It has been administered in B.C. since 2004 and is used by the Human Early Learning Partnership at the University of British Columbia to map developmental vulnerability across neighbourhoods, school districts and the province.

This is not a screening tool for individual children. It was designed to diagnose communities. And little has changed, according to EDI data.

A neighbourhood is deemed highly vulnerable when a large share of its kindergarten children are flagged by their teachers as struggling in core areas of early development — for example, with communication, fine motor skills, emotional regulation or readiness to engage with classroom learning.

The EDI does not measure poverty or literacy directly. It measures whether children, by the time they reach kindergarten, are arriving ready to thrive and it makes visible at the neighbourhood level the conditions that shape that readiness.

Over close to two decades, the findings have been remarkably persistent.

Nine neighborhoods show up again and again as among the most vulnerable. They include South Fort George–The Bowl in Prince George, Fort St. James, Gold Trail West, Downtown Williams Lake, Strathcona in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, Prince Rupert and Chilliwack Cultural Centre.

In Prince Rupert, 49 per cent of kindergarten children, on average, have been flagged as struggling in at least one of those core areas of early development across every cycle of EDI data collection.

In Chilliwack Cultural Centre, the figure is 45 per cent. These are not statistical artefacts. They are children — successive cohorts of entirely different children — arriving at kindergarten in the same neighbourhoods with the same patterns of developmental risk, year after year, for close to two decades.

This is not a B.C. anomaly. A national study published in 2022, drawing on EDI data from across Canada, found that over 60 per cent of Canadian neighborhoods showed the same pattern of developmental vulnerability between 2006 and 2016. The neighbourhoods at the top of the vulnerability ranking stayed at the top. The ones in the middle stayed in the middle. Almost none moved significantly.

Where children grow up shapes their developmental trajectories in ways the population-level data make visible and stable across time. The conditions of place — housing, income, community infrastructure, the density of family supports, the quality of early learning environments — produce these patterns. The same conditions reproduce them.

The ministry has had access to this analysis for years. So has the federal government, which named affordable child care a central instrument of Canada's poverty reduction strategy.

The Canada Early Learning and Child Care Act, which received Royal Assent in 2024, established guiding principles of affordability, high quality, flexibility and inclusion. But no indicators were introduced to monitor and evaluate quality, flexibility, or inclusion. The main accountability marker became the number of $10-a-day spaces. The federal architecture itself made the gap between what gets measured and what matters inevitable. British Columbia has done little to push against it.

Lots of reporting, slow responses

What the province does measure is operators. The ministry requires child-care providers to submit monthly reporting on revenue, expenses, hours worked by Early Childhood Educators, and enrolment. It collects detailed annual human resources data and audited financial statements. It has been collecting this information from operators participating in the funding framework for years. I know this because I worked at a child-care site for several years and was responsible for parts of that reporting. The reporting requirements are not light. The use of what is reported is harder to see.

The ministry knows, in real time, when an operator is running a deficit. Requests for funding modification, however, can take months. There is a working assumption embedded in the design that child-care operators can absorb financial loss indefinitely, while the data describing that loss sits in a provincial database.

Meanwhile, no comparable system measures quality. Licensing regulations set a floor that any reasonable parent would consider minimal. No curriculum framework is required. No pedagogical standards are enforced. The funding architecture is preoccupied with which bucket of money flows to which provider; it is largely silent on what happens to children inside the rooms that money pays for.

The ministry is also not always consistent in what it tells whom. Operators are told one thing about a funding decision or a policy interpretation. A parent inquiring about the same matter may be told something different. An MLA inquiring on behalf of a constituent may be told something different again. There is no public mechanism by which these inconsistencies become visible, because there is no public accountability framework that would require them to be.

This is the architecture inside which Beare convened her townhall. Operators raised the same issues that have been raised for years. None of these issues require more consultation to understand. They require design choices the province has so far declined to make.

Getting real about improving child care

What would taking the evidence seriously look like?

It would mean treating the EDI data as a planning instrument rather than a passive map. The nine neighborhoods identified in the analysis have been signalling for two decades that the conditions producing developmental vulnerability are concentrated, geographic and stable. A serious policy response would direct disproportionate resources — not only child-care spaces, but quality early learning programs, integrated family supports, workforce investment and the housing and income measures that shape neighborhoods — toward the places where the data shows they are needed.

As well, it would require quality and inclusion to be measured, not just affordability. It would require operator reporting to feed into design rather than disappear into a database.

Quebec, whose subsidized child-care system is often invoked as a cautionary tale because of long waitlists and uneven access, at least set a quality standard in the form of its public Centres de la petite enfance. B.C. has set none.

The international jurisdictions Canada is often compared to — Norway, New Zealand — built curriculum and quality frameworks into the foundations of their early learning systems. B.C. has expanded a child-care program and called it an early childhood education system. They are not the same thing.

The Early Development Instrument was designed to make these questions answerable. The province has the answers. The communities it has been diagnosing for nearly 20 years are still waiting for the system to respond in kind.