Summary
Child care availability is improving in Toronto, thanks to the federal government’s launch of the Canada-Wide Early Learning and Child Care (CWELCC) program in 2021. This analysis looks at child care coverage between 2022 and 2025, by neighbourhood.
There has been some progress: Across Toronto, 3,943 spaces have been created since 2022. Average child care space coverage increased from 41.5 to 46.5 spaces per 100 children—a five percentage point increase, though more than half of the city’s children still lack access.
Adequate child care coverage nearly tripled, going from three per cent to nine per cent of neighbourhoods since 2022. Child care deserts decreased by half—dropping from 15 per cent of neighbourhoods in 2022 to eight per cent in 2025. But neighbourhoods with inadequate coverage only increased from 83 per cent in 2022 to 84 per cent in 2025.
Many high-need neighbourhoods have been rapidly adding new spaces, but inequalities persist: only 14 of 158 Toronto neighbourhoods have adequate coverage, nearly all in affluent downtown and mid-town areas. The 12 worst-performing neighbourhoods (child care deserts) are clustered in poorer areas of northwest and south Etobicoke and central/southern Scarborough.
Clearly, significant challenges remain. For starters, the only growth in child care space creation comes from home-based child care (it grew from six per cent to nine per cent over the past three years). The share of non-profit licensed child care spaces shrunk, from 56 per cent to 53 per cent.
Key obstacles to affordable child care expansion include recruitment and retention of qualified child care workers and insufficient capital infrastructure.
Federal funding has helped to bring down the cost of child care in Toronto, but provincial funding is needed to expand access—especially in the non-profit sector. Without it, the gap between affluent and low-income neighbourhoods will persist.
Introduction
The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in Canada illustrated just how essential child care is to economic infrastructure and national wellbeing, as parents lost access to this vital service.
Building on decades of activism and child care advocacy, this new environment prompted conditions that culminated in the federal government’s launch of the Canada-Wide Early Learning and Child Care (CWELCC) program in 2021 federal budget, a nationwide initiative designed to make child care accessible and affordable for all Canadian families.
To examine its progress, we carried out a deep dive into Toronto, the country’s largest city and economic hub, assessing the expansion of licensed child care spaces from 2022 to 2025. While the CWELCC has dramatically reduced financial barriers, space creation has emerged as the program’s central challenge.
An overview of space expansion
To assess how child care has expanded since the introduction of the CWELCC, we use the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives’ proprietary Child Care Licensing and Accessibility by Region (CLAR) database. This comprehensive database tracks all licensed child care spaces created across Canadian provinces, both in licensed family child care homes or centres, recording license types, facility ownership, locations and nearby children to explore how expansion varies across Toronto.
Across Toronto, a net total of 3,943 spaces was created from 2022 to 2025. Looking at coverage rates—the number of licensed spaces per 100 non-school age children1—our analysis shows a steady expansion of licensed child care spaces in Toronto.
The average coverage rates across Toronto neighbourhoods climbed from 41.5 spaces per 100 children in the fourth quarter of 2022 to 46.5 in the third quarter of 2025, representing a five percentage point increase. While this improvement moves Toronto in the right direction, licensed spaces still only serve less than half of the city’s non-school-age children.
This analysis shows there is still much to be done when it comes to service access and availability, but space expansion is also gaining momentum. Between the second quarter of 2024 and the third quarter of 2025, the coverage rate jumped by 3.6 percentage points, compared to a more modest 1.4 percentage point increase from 2022 to 2024.
Another way to assess how space expansion is unfolding is to look at the share of city neighbourhoods achieving certain coverage thresholds. Building on previous CCPA research that uses CWELCC thresholds and academic literature as reference, we classify child care coverage into three categories:
- Adequate coverage: Areas with coverage of 59 spaces or more per 100 children
- Inadequate coverage: Areas with coverage between 30 but below 59 spaces per 100 children
- Child care deserts: Areas with coverage below 30 per 100 children
This overview reveals important shifts in Toronto’s child care landscape.
Most notably, the share of neighbourhoods with adequate coverage almost tripled, from three per cent in 2022 to seven per cent in 2025, while child care deserts declined by almost half—from 15 per cent to eight per cent. As neighbourhoods escaped the desert category, areas with inadequate coverage increased slightly, from 83 to 84 per cent, indicating children now have some access where previously they had very little.
Space expansion and ownership types
Emphasis on non-profit and publicly delivered child care programs lie at the heart of equitable child care access, so understanding space expansion requires examining who are the providers behind new spaces. For-profit providers cannot be counted on to target the areas that are currently underserved. This strategic focus became central to the federal government’s 2021 budget, which introduced the goal of expanding child care primarily through not-for-profit providers.
Currently, the policy faces a fundamental tension. While the CWELCC agreements commit to not-for-profit expansion, the city’s Early Years and Child Care Service Plan acknowledges these same operators encounter significant capital barriers that constrain their expansion ability.
Our estimates show that between 2022 and 2025, the share of licensed spaces under public and not-for-profit administration declined slightly, from 56 per cent to 53 per cent. The share of for-profit operators also declined slightly, from 39 to 38 per cent. Meanwhile, the share of home-based child care providers increased from six to nine per cent.
This pattern suggests that, despite policy intentions, the financial barriers facing not-for-profit operators may be limiting their ability to lead the expansion effort.
Progress amid persistent disparities: Targeted reductions of coverage inequalities
Balanced and equitable child care expansion requires increasing coverage city-wide, especially in areas needing greater public service support. Toronto’s Neighbourhood Improvement Areas (NIAs) are 31 city-designated areas identified as facing the most inequality in economic opportunities, social development, healthy lives, participation in decision-making, and physical space under the Toronto Strong Neighbourhoods Strategy 2020 (TSNS2020). Since NIAs are priority recipients of public and private community development funding, we examined how child care coverage has changed across NIAs and non-NIAs since CWELCC’s launch.
While child care coverage remains uneven across Toronto’s socioeconomic landscape, the gap between NIAs and other communities is narrowing, indicating that while child care coverage disparities persist, expansion efforts are improving in vulnerable communities.
The most notable improvement appears in child care deserts. In 2022, 29 per cent of children in NIAs lived in child care deserts, but only 13 per cent did in non-NIAs. Meaning there was a 16 percentage point difference between NIA and non-NIAs. By 2025, the share of children in deserts in NIAs dropped to 13 per cent and non-NIAs to 6 per cent, shrinking the gap to seven percentage points.
Throughout the same period, non-NIA neighbourhoods saw some progress in achieving adequate child care coverage. In 2022, only two per cent of these areas had adequate coverage near them. By 2025, this stood at 10 per cent. Unfortunately, no NIA neighbourhood had adequate access to child care in either 2022 or in 2025.
However, the broader pattern shows NIAs moving from severe shortage toward just inadequate coverage levels. In the inadequate coverage range, trends converged as neighbourhoods moved between categories: non-NIA areas with inadequate coverage decreased slightly, from 85 to 84 per cent, while the increase in NIAs went from 71 to 87 per cent, as more neighbourhoods escaped the desert category.
Overall, our analysis shows that, while coverage disparities persist, child care expansion is reducing the gaps affecting Toronto’s most vulnerable neighbourhoods. Expediting these trends is critical for the well-being of Toronto’s children.
Spatial distribution of child care spaces
In the following section, we analyze the geographic distribution of child care coverage across all of Toronto’s neighbourhoods.
The average coverage rate of each neighbourhood in the third quarter of 2025 is displayed in the map below. Coverage was greater in central Toronto and North York, and much scarcer in most areas of Etobicoke and Scarborough. Most neighbourhoods have inadequate coverage, with many hovering closely to either child care desert status (under 30 spaces per 100 children) or adequate status (59 or more spaces per 100 children).
Only 14 of 158 neighbourhoods had adequate coverage. All were in downtown and mid-town Toronto, where coverage rates were the highest in the city. Though not exclusively high income, this group contained many of the city’s most affluent neighbourhoods, including Casa Loma, Rosedale, and Yonge-St. Clair.
The 12 neighbourhoods classified as child care deserts were clustered in northwest and south Etobicoke, as well as in central and southern Scarborough. Most of these neighbourhoods had average after-tax incomes far below the average for all of Toronto. Three of them were NIAs: Kingsview Village, Weston, and Kennedy Park.
In the next map, we can see the percentage point increase in the average coverage rate in each neighbourhood from the fourth quarter of 2022 to the third quarter of 2025. In the city core, where coverage rates were already much higher, improvement was average at best. Several neighbourhoods in North York are now approaching adequate coverage status due to rising coverage rates.
Many high-need neighbourhoods in Scarborough, Etobicoke, and North York performed strongly in adding coverage. Among those with the highest growth rates were Morningside, Highland Creek, Hillcrest Village and both East and West Malvern.
Two areas of concern stood out due to low levels of improvement.
The first is in central and southern Scarborough, while the second borders the city limits in northern and western Etobicoke. Coverage rates are still among the lowest in the city in these areas, which contain most of the city’s remaining child care deserts. While the coverage rate across all of Toronto rose by five percentage points, the increase in these areas of concern ranged from only 1.7 to 3.1 percentage points.
Information on coverage rates and improvement, non-profit and public provider participation and neighbourhood average income for all of Toronto’s neighbourhoods is available in the table below.
Overview and challenges
Looking at trends in child care spaces in Toronto shows that, while progress in space creation has been improving over the past three years, the average coverage across all city neighbourhoods is still below adequate levels. The most encouraging trend: space expansion in the most needed areas, resulting in a dramatic reduction of child care deserts in vulnerable neighborhoods from 29 per cent to 13 per cent. Yet with less than half of Toronto’s children served by licensed spaces, the city remains far from its universal access goals.
As we move from an environment where child care services were cost prohibitive for many families to a near-universal access policy, space creation has proven to be a challenge. Key obstacles include recruitment and retention of qualified child care workers and insufficient capital infrastructure, both of which limit the adequate expansion of child care coverage across the system.
These barriers are particularly limiting for a not-for-profit expansion, curbing their ability to open more spaces and meet the current demand.
As financial barriers crumble, lack of physical infrastructure and staffing constraints emerge as the new gatekeepers to child care access. Toronto’s experience offers key lessons for child care policy expansion, highlighting the need for a comprehensive strategy addressing workforce development, capital investment, and target-investment to address local community needs.
Child care in Toronto is now much more affordable. Now it also must be available to all.
Appendix: Methodology
This analysis employs the Two-Step Floating Catchment Area (2SFCA) method, originally developed by Luo and Wang to measure health care accessibility in Chicago. Unlike traditional accessibility metrics that rely on provider-to-population ratios within fixed boundaries, 2SFCA captures the reality that families often cross administrative boundaries to access care. The method is a two-step process that incorporates both supply and demand within overlapping service areas. In Step 1, a supply-to-demand ratio is calculated for each child care facility by dividing the number of non-school age spaces by the number of non-school age children in all Dissemination Areas (DAs) within a defined catchment radius. In Step 2, an accessibility score is calculated for each DA by summing the ratios of all facilities within the catchment area, producing a coverage rate adjusted for overlapping demand.
The analysis tracks almost 42,000 child care facilities across Canada and over 55,000 DAs with children, using DAs as the lowest feasible census geography since they contain child population figures. Urban areas use a 5 km catchment radius while rural areas use 10 km, distances calibrated against the distance within which 90 per cent of children aged four and under live from public elementary schools. DAs exceeding 200 km2 are excluded due to concerns about centroid representativeness in sparse populations, leaving 53,861 DAs with valid coverage rates.
For the Toronto analysis, we aggregated FSA postal code to match the boundaries of all city neighbourhoods. While people frequently cross their neighbourhood’s boundaries in a densely populated city like Toronto, understanding availability of child care spaces by neighbourhood is important for local development, since many city policies are implemented at the neighbourhood level, such as the Toronto Strong Neighbourhoods Strategy (TSNS). Toronto’s neighbourhoods are also urban divisions that reflect how families experience and access local services, and a source of identity and attachment for local communities and residents.
For more details on the Two-Step Floating Catchment Area see: Cash Cow—Two step floating catchment area to determine child care access (p. 47).
