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Your B.C. Government

Child Care

Your B.C. Government is providing child-care subsidies for low income families and investing in new child-care spaces so that all parents have more options for affordable, quality child-care.

What your B.C. Government is doing for Child Care:

  • B.C. will spend $300 million this year on child care – an increase of $8 million over last year and an increase of 42 per cent since 2001.
  • Those funds help to build child-care spaces and help to lower the cost of child care in B.C. by providing operating funds to licensed child care providers and subsidizing the cost of child care for low- and middle-income families.
  • Today we provide $64 million per year in operating funding to support new and existing licensed child-care spaces.
  • That funding supports approximately 90,000 licensed child care spaces throughout the province – double the number of spaces receiving funding in 2001.
  • Your B.C. Government has also provided over $35 million in capital funding to child care operators since 2001 – with nearly $7 million invested in First Nations communities – to build more than 6,500 new spaces, including more than 3,000 spaces in the last two years alone.

Protecting the Most Vulnerable:

  • The B.C. Government is focusing on protecting the most vulnerable families by adding another $25 million over the next three years to the Child Care Subsidy program, which assists low- and middle-income families with the cost of child care.
  • $150 million will be spent this year on the subsidy program, which supports an average of nearly 27,000 children each month and almost 50,000 individual children over the course of the year.
  • In 2005, we increased the subsidy income threshold from $21,000 to $38,000 for families with children under six and also increased the subsidy rates for children under six by an average of 15 per cent.
  • As a result of the increases, nearly 6,500 additional children are now eligible to receive the subsidy, while another 6,000 children have seen an increase in the amount they receive.
  • The Supported Child Development program provides B.C. children with special needs the opportunity to participate in a child care setting.
  • Funding for the Supported Child Development program increased from $37.7 million to more than $57 million in 2005, increasing the number of children served to an estimated 9,000 today – an increase of 35 per cent.

For more information:
Ministry of Children and Family Development