Abstract

Daycare enrollment is a hot topic between expected parents and new parents in Metro-Vancouver area, one well spread recommendation is to sign up on waitlist at all the daycares near you before the baby is even born and in hoping your expected toddler will have a spot before the end of your parental leave. As the daycare spots are real hot potatoes and experience severer shortage here. This study will consider childcare supply and demand in each municipality in the study area and present severity differences in evidence of childcare shortage in each community. Some visuals, such as graphs, plots, and maps, will enhance your experience and understanding of the topic. This study gathered data in daycare locations and total population of appropriate age group from census 2021. Data analysis and visuals are composed in programming language R.

Introduction

Canada became a low-fertility country after the “baby boomer” generation (mid-20th century), and experienced decline of birthrate since 2008. The low-fertility rate situation became more intensified after the global pandemic, COVID-19. “Canada’s fertility rate decreased from 1.47 children per woman in 2019 to a record low of 1.40 children per woman in 2020.” (Statistics Canada, 2021) The decreasing birthrate will result in decline on toddler population that needs childcare in general. One would assume there will be abandon vacancies in childcare facilities, however, that is not the case in Canada. The fact is, there are a general shortage of early childcare workers to operate existing childcare facilities, a report found 45% of childcare centres are experiencing hiring shortage in British Columbia (BC), Canada (DeRosa, 2023). The childcares are closing their programs and shorten center’s operational hours and even turn away children due to a lack of qualified staff in its operating facilities. Along with daycare shortages, in-home care for children is also removed due to financial stress that both parents need to work. As more and more women joined the labor force since 1990s. “The labor force participation rate for women aged 15 years and older and all education levels grew from 58.5% in 1990 (the beginning of the current data series) to 61.5% in 2022”(Statistics Canada, 2023). Despite the generous paid maternity and paternity leave benefit, one of the parents who took parental leave is forced to go back to work in a year or a year and half, depends on their career plan and their household financial situation. If the grandparents are not available to look after the children, that leaves limited childcare options for young toddlers. They either need to enroll in childcare, or their parents need to pay more to arrange other type of childcare, such as in-home nanny. Most parents will find out that daycare is in high demand when they start their search. Almost all daycare in Metro-Vancouver Area will ask you to sign up first on a wait list, before even offering you a tour at the care. The waiting period can be as long as 2 years. As supported in one article, the common wait time is around 18 months to 24 months (Beck, 2024). Some daycares even require you to pay a fee to just enroll on the waiting list, and fortunately those daycares who received provincial funding were prohibited to charge this fee starting 2024 (Pawson, 2023). Due to the high demand and long wait for a childcare spot, many Canadian parents, mostly moms, were forced to change their plans of going back to work. To combat this head scratching situation for most parents with young children, this report will be investigating on the location of daycare and answer research question on what is the spatial distribution of childcare facilities in the Metro-Vancouver area in BC, Canada, in 2021? This report will also study the current capacity of daycare in Merto-Vancouver area in British Columbia, Canada. And identify the multiplicity areas that are experiencing the most shortage of childcare facilities. By comparing the max capacity of daycare and local 0–4-year-old population from census 2021, we will answer research questions on which municipality experienced the most shortage of childcare facilities?

Data

Information was collected from two different sources for the supply and demand of childcare services in Metro-Vancouver Area. To know the market supply of childcare sports, we need to know the maximum capacity and physical location of daycare facilities, we gathered information from BC Childcare Map. The market demand is reflected in population data from Census 2021. We have downloaded both the population data for age groups 0 to 4 years old as the population will benefit from childcare services and census subdivisions boundary as study subject.

Childcare

The official website of the BC government hosts a map of all childcare locations (DataBC, 2024). Both the table and spatial file can be downloaded from BC Data Catalogue (Download). In this dataset, you can find information on address, program type, hours of operation and services it offered. In this report we are going to utilize its physical address as spatial element and performance spatial analysis. We are also going to look at the program type to determine the maximum capacity of each centre and compare to population data. Even thought the hours of operation, and service it offered are listed in the attribute list, but the actual information is rarely entered, therefore, we do not have sufficient information on those topics.

Population

Population information for this study area is available through Canadian Census 2021. This study is going to look at the total population in age range from 0 to 4 years old children in each municipality in Metro-Vancouver Area and compare it to daycare capacity records. However, census data is hard to access due to its abandoned information nature, a serious filtering to drive down to what information this study need will be performed. Like tidycensus for the USA, there is another Canadian version called “cancensus”. This study will adopt cancensus R package for analysis purpose. unlike tidycensus’s open access, cancensus require an API Key for access.

Census Subdivision

Canadian census is conducted by dissemination areas, and they further summarized by census tracts, census subdivision, census agglomeration, census metropolitan area, provinces/territories, and Canada. This study analysis data based on census subdivision. As Metro- Vancouver is a big area to analysis, this region contains 21 municipalities, one electoral area, and one treaty First Nation. It would be too board for study purpose, therefore, the census subdivision polygons will allow further refine study area for each part of Metro-Vancouver municipalities. In this study, we are also planning to summarize the count of daycare facilities by municipalities.

Methodology

Figure 1 provides a visual flowchart of the methodological approach proposed to address the research question. This consists of 3 main stages described as follows:

Data preparation includes acquiring data and cleaning it up into analysis ready forms. Further data wrangling is also needed to get the data ready in a form to serve the purpose of creating a side-by-side bar plot, and distribution map with ggplot2 package. A more comprehensive spatial analysis of kernel density is later performed on the intersected data.

Figure 1, Methodology flow chart.
Figure 1, Methodology flow chart.

In this study, data preparation and spatial analysis are all conducted in R studio software. Assortment of packages were utilized in this analysis, such as dplyr, tidyr, tidyverse for data preparation. A package called cencensus helped in easy of process of accessing census data. Ggplot2, and plotly enhanced graphic elements in this article. And spatial analysis required some sf, sp related packages. A point layer of daycare facilities and a polygon of census subdivision were used for input data.

library(sf)
library(sfdep)
library(spdep)
library(tidyr)
library(cancensus)
library(dplyr)
library(tidyverse)
library(ggplot2)
library(plotly)
library(spatstat)

Population

In census data, population from age 0 to 4 years old is a provided variable that roughly matches the age range who need daycare service for this study. Evidence shows the children attending daycare are ranging from 6 months to pre-school age(5 years old).

#read in census for Metro-Vancouver by census subdivision, age 0-4
census_data <- get_census(dataset = 'CA21', regions =list(CMA='59933'),vectors = c("    
v_CA21_11","v_CA21_14"),level = "CSD",use_cache = FALSE,geo_format = "sf",quiet = TRUE)
#rename attribute name for easy access.
census_data['pop04']=census_data['v_CA21_14: 0 to 4 years']
#only label city with big population of 0-4
census_big<-census_data%>%filter(pop04>5000)
#plot out Metro-Van by
ggplot()+geom_sf(data=census_data,aes(fill=pop04, name="0-4"))+geom_sf_label(data=census_big,aes(label=name))+
labs(title = "0-4 Years Old Population(2021)",fill="0-4 Years Old")
Figure 2, Population of 0-4 years old in Metro-Vancouver Area, 2021.

Figure 2, Population of 0-4 years old in Metro-Vancouver Area, 2021.

Daycare

A point layer of daycare facilities and a polygon of census subdivision were used for input data. The script was able to asset to identify which municipality of each daycare located in with an intersection tool in R. The daycare point layer identifies which type of facility it was licensed under. As per regulation, each type of license has its maximum capacity. Therefore, we can summarize daycare capacity in each municipality and compare that with population data for 0-4 years old children in the same study area.

#reading in daycare, converting csv to sf
daycaredata<-read.csv('~/PennState/Geog588/Term Project/childcare_locations.csv')
daycarepoint<-st_as_sf(daycaredata,coords = c("LONGITUDE","LATITUDE"),crs=4326)

Daycare Capicity

According to BC early childcare regulations, there are two types of daycare facilities, family care and group care. Family care is typically located at a residential location in a family setting with fewer children and minimum of one childcare staff. Group care is more like a formal childcare facility at a commercial location or housed in a local school. Each family daycare can host maximum of seven kids, and each group daycare can enroll 12 children under 36 months, and another 25 children from 30 month to school age (Ministry of Education and Child Care, 2024). There are 6 months overlapping between two age groups, and regulation on that is unavailable to locate. Therefore, the maximum capacity of group daycare is only an estimate. From the rough sum of two identified age groups, the maximum capacity for group daycare is 37 children. Since most daycare is full and the majority of daycare have a waitlist, this study assumes that all daycare facilities are at their maximum capacity for enroll before school age children. Daycare maximum capacity was treated as daycare enrollments in Metro-Vancouver Area.

#calculate daycare capacities 
#family *7, group*37(12 +25=37)
group<-daycaredata%>%filter(SERVICE_TYPE_CD=="Licensed Group")
group$Capicity<-12+25
family<-daycaredata%>%filter(SERVICE_TYPE_CD=="Licensed Family")
family$Capicity<-7
combined<-rbind(group,family)
combined_point<-st_as_sf(combined,coords = c("LONGITUDE","LATITUDE"),crs=4326)

Population VS Capicity

By comparing the total population of 0 to 4 years old children and daycare facility capacity in each municipality/ census subdivision, we can see a general shortage of daycare though out Metro Vancouver Area. According to figure 2, the severity of daycare spot shortage is extreme in Vancouver, Surrey, Langley, and Burnaby (ordered from top to bottom on plot), which are all the major population hubs in Metro Vancouver area. Some of census subdivision does not even have a registered childcare service. Imagine young children from those areas either have no option of daycare, or they need to travel very far to tend daycare. With only two exceptions, West Vancouver and North Vancouver have higher daycare capacity than its 0-4 years old population. The general trend is the severity of daycare spot shortage increases as community size increases.

#daycare cap with municipality
output<-st_intersection(combined_point,census_data)

#prepare data tables for plot
#select a few columns for plot
daycareclean<-output[c('Capicity','name')]%>%group_by(name)%>%summarise(sum(Capicity))
#label daycare records before table join
daycareclean$Children='Daycare'
#select a few columns for plot
censusclean<-census_data[c('name','v_CA21_14: 0 to 4 years')]
#label Census records before table join
censusclean$Children='Census'

#rename columns and assign tables to a variable  
x<-daycareclean%>% rename(Community=name, Pop='sum(Capicity)')
y<-censusclean%>% rename(Community=name,Pop=`v_CA21_14: 0 to 4 years`)
#merge two tables for plotting
forplot<-rbind(x,y)
#remove (xxx) on y-axis label
forplot$Community=gsub("\\s*\\([^\\)]+\\)","",as.character(forplot$Community))
#remove NULLs and zeros
forplot%>%na.omit()%>%filter(Pop>0)%>%
#plot by ggplot (bars side-by-side)
ggplot(aes(Community,Pop,fill=Children, na.rm=TRUE))+
  geom_bar(width= 0.4,position = "dodge",stat = "identity")+
  coord_flip()+
  labs(title = "Daycare Capicity VS Population(2021)",x="Municipality",y="Population")+
  scale_fill_discrete(labels=c("Age Group Population (0 to 4)","Daycare Maximum Capicity"))
Figure 3, Side-by-side bar graph shows market supply and demon on childcare facilities.

Figure 3, Side-by-side bar graph shows market supply and demon on childcare facilities.

Daycare Distribution

Childcare centres are generally well spread throughout locally from figure 4. With some clear clusters due to population are unevenly distributed across Metro-Vancouver based its landforms. Part of the study area is designated for farmland; they have very sparse population distribution. In the north part of North Vancouver, it also consists of lots of mountains that are reserved as parks. That forced the population to settle closer to the north bank of the inlet. In some parts of Metro Vancouver, the land consists of a lot of farmlands, looking at the hole right in the southern center of the map and exposed areas in east part of Metro-Vancouver.

ggplot()+geom_sf(data=census_data,fill='grey')+geom_sf(data=output,aes(colour=SERVICE_TYPE_CD)) +
  ggtitle("Daycare (2024) Distribution on Census Subdividsion 2021") +
  labs(caption = "Data source: Statis Canada") +
  theme_void() +
  theme(plot.title = element_text(hjust = 0.5),
        legend.position = "right")+labs(colour="Daycare Type")
Figure 4, Daycare locations in Metro-Vancouver Area in 2024.

Figure 4, Daycare locations in Metro-Vancouver Area in 2024.

Heat Map

The heat map shows intensity of daycare capacity in Metro-Vancouver Area. We can see five very clearly highlighted clusters in North Vancouver, Vancouver, Burnaby, Richmond, and Coquitlam. However, city of surrey, one of the cities shown in figure 1 as the most severity of daycare shortage, has not shown a clear cluster of daycares on the heat map.

#st_crs(output)
#st_crs(census_data)
# Define the target CRS (UTM Zone 10N)
target_crs <- "+proj=utm +zone=10 +datum=WGS84"

Daycare_proj<-st_transform(output,crs=target_crs)
census_proj<-st_transform(census_data, crs=target_crs)
liOwin<-as.owin(sf::st_as_sf(census_proj))
#class(liOwin)

coords<-st_coordinates(Daycare_proj)
p_daycare<-ppp(coords[,1],coords[,2], window=liOwin)
#plot(p_daycare)
kde<-density.ppp(p_daycare, sigma=2000, kernel ="gaussian")
par(mar=c(1,1,1,1))
plot(kde,main='Density of Daycare in Metro Vancouver')
Figure 5, Heat map of daycare centres in Metro-Vancouver Area.

Figure 5, Heat map of daycare centres in Metro-Vancouver Area.

Results

After a series of statistical and spatial analysis, this study identified the following conclusion and answers to the research questions listed in the beginning of this report. First of all, most of census subdivisions in Metro-Vancouver area are experiencing sever shortage in childcare offerings except two cities in northwest of the study area. With the highest population, Surrey, and Vancouver both lack more than 50% of childcare spots compared to its 0-4 age group population needed. Some smaller communities even show the absence of childcare facilities in their communities. In most municipalities, parents with young children are affected by the sever shortage of daycare facilities, they either need to delay going back to work or permanently provide home care until their kid reaches school age. Even during elementary school, most parents need to seek after school care due to early school dismissal than typical end of day at work. Overall, bringing a young child to a family can critically influence their parents’ opportunities to bring in household financial gain. Secondly, the distribution of childcare facilities is generally well spread across the study area, after considering farmland, park reserves, and other population thin areas. Compared to other daycare hot spots, Surrey daycares are more evenly distributed throughout its neighborhoods. Considering it is also the city that lacks most daycare spots, I think it is the best location to build more daycare. Based on the heat map, there is a slight deep in the center of the oranges in surrey, it is the best spot for a new daycare facility.

Reflection

Considering this study, consists of the process of data collection, statistical, and spatial analysis, there are a few limitations for this study. In data perspective, this study made a few assumptions about daycare capacity. First, daycare location data is updated regularly, so we cannot be certain all childcare locations are registered officially and included in the data. Second, there are daycares that only accept children aged 2.5 years old and up, but in this report, we assumed all of them accept children starting 6 months old. Third, when studying BC daycare regulation, the two age groups in group daycare has an age overlap of 6 months, we did not find a finer statements on maximum capacity rules on that. For census data, the age group we accessed from databases is from 0 to 4 years old, it is not a 100% match of daycare age children. Depending on the birthday month, some kids go to school right after 4 years old or some go to school after 5 years old. And obviously, kids from 0 to 6 months that were included in the census date should not considered for daycare analysis. This study, we only compared the supply and demand of daycares on population, but there are much more to consider in real life. The government has been putting lots of effort into making daycare affordable and available to most families, however, there are more emerging issues against it. One of the most crucial issues, from building more childcare facilities to reach market demand, is resources, for example staff resources. It is not just simply building more daycare facilities, but it is the shortage of childcare staff. It happens as the province announced and roll out the $10-a-day daycare program, which has increased need for childcare staff that already experience low wages and burnout at work (DeRosa, 2023). Beside staff, located of daycare are another concern, as population increases in general, most school are running out of space itself. Students are taking classes in portables. That resulted in a space issue with daycares who originally shared space with the school yards. Some daycares are forced to move and relocate (MacLellan, 2024). Overall, there are further research and analysis to fill the knowledge gap on this topic by resolving above limitations and considering more above listed variables to elevate this research.

References

Beck, (2024). What to Expect from a Daycare Wait List, https://www.lifetales.com/blog/what-to-expect-from-a-daycare-wait-listGovernment of Canada, Statistics Canada. (2021, December 1). Changes in fertility intentions in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/45-28-0001/2021001/article/00041-eng.htm

DeRosa, K. (2023, January 12). Some B.C. daycares limiting hours, turning away kids because of staff shortages. Vancouver Sun. https://vancouversun.com/news/bc-daycares-limiting-hours-turning-away-kids-because-staff-shortages#:~:text=The%20report%20found%2045%20per,a%20lack%20of%20qualified%20staff

Government of Canada, Statistics Canada. (2023, November 15). Women in the labour market: Increased potential, pay, and participation. Statistics Canada. https://www.statcan.gc.ca/o1/en/plus/4823-women-labour-market-increased-potential-pay-and-participation

MacLellan, J. (2022, December 14), Daycare centres forced out of New Westminster schools. New Westminster Record. https://www.newwestrecord.ca/local-news/daycare-centres-forced-out-of-new-westminster-schools-6246556

Ministry of Education and Child Care. (2024, January 18). Understand the different types of child care in B.C. - Province of British Columbia. https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/family-social-supports/caring-for-young-children/how-to-access-child-care/licensed-unlicensed-child-care

Pawson, C. (2023, December 7). B.C. to prohibit daycare waitlist fees. CBC. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/waitlist-fees-daycares-british-columbia-prohibted-april-2024-1.7052189