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

Opinion

Politics

When will the province lock in standards and target communities it knows are most vulnerable?

Rabia Mir Today The Tyee

Rabia Mir is a PhD candidate at UBC, where her dissertation examines BC’s childcare rollout. She is a parent and has worked in the childcare sector in BC.

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 f…