New childcare spaces coming to the city

What happened: Rarely is there a quiet day at city council, and, as usual, Tuesday’s meeting was packed with reports on consequential issues. This week’s meeting focused on new childcare spaces and the city’s failed planning for the recent by-election.

More childcare, eventually: Council approved non-profit operators for 488 new childcare spaces, across 12 locations, that are planned to open with financial and facility support from the city. Vancouver currently has a deficit of about 7,200 childcare spaces for kids aged 0-5.  

• However, it will be 2-5 years before those facilities will be open for programming. Four of the new facilities are located Downtown, three near Oakridge, and one each in Cambie Village, Marpole, the River District, Joyce-Collingwood, and Mount Pleasant.

Additionally, the city created just under 400 new childcare spaces that have or will open between 2024 and 2026, according to Mayor Ken Sim, including the new facility at Eric Hamber Secondary. 

• Overall, there are about 3,000 childcare spaces in various stages of planning and development in Vancouver, about 70 per cent of which get support from the city.

Council priority: While childcare is primarily a provincial responsibility, the city has been acquiring a number of new childcare facilities as part of building development approvals, where developers construct and hand over the rights to these spaces to the city. 

As part of issuing rezoning or development permits the city gets to negotiate a community amenity contribution from the developer as part of the project, and childcare facilities have recently become a prominent amenity that the city is getting from these projects.   

• About 75 per cent of city-owned spaces are part of the province’s $10-per-day childcare program, according to staff. 

The politics: Councillor Lucy Maloney brought up that, in the 2022 election campaign, ABC had promised to create 5,000 new childcare spaces by 2026, and compared it to ABC’s unmet campaign promise to hire 100 mental health nurses. Maloney’s comment drew a rebuke from Councillor Sarah Kirby-Yung on a point of procedure about casting aspersions on other council members. 

“We usually don’t have political rhetoric… this would be a first if we’re going to start doing this in this chamber,” Kirby-Yung said.  

What it means: While Maloney’s comment was politically pointed, it was grounded in fact, and spoke to the unhelpful practice of many political parties, including ABC, to overpromise during an election campaign and, once in office, explain the shortfall by pointing to the very real practical complexities of most public projects.  

However, while they haven’t met their lofty election promises, the ABC majority clearly has focused city resources on creating more childcare spaces in the city and is shrinking that deficit. But like so many facets of city-building, those efforts are going to take longer than one term to bear fruit.

By-election post-mortem

Bye election: Another significant item on council’s docket on Tuesday was a report on the 2025 by-election, most of which focused on the city’s failed planning efforts that resulted in multi-hour lines at many voting places. 

“I think everyone on council realizes that it was unacceptable that people had to wait for several hours to vote in the by-election,” ABC Councillor Peter Meiszner said, saying many people had other responsibilities that day and couldn’t wait that long. 

In 2025, staff recommended (and city council approved) a 50 per cent reduction in polling places and a 62 per cent reduction in staff, compared to the 2017 by-election. Meiszner was the only councillor who expressed serious concern about the reduction in staffing when it was recommended by staff in January, according to CBC.

• On Tuesday, councillors heard that the biggest bottlenecks in vote processing were during registration, when voters got their ballots from an election worker, rather than at the electronic vote tabulators being used to process ballots. 

Staff also said they weren’t able to enforce rules around voters not visibly promoting candidates or parties (through wearing buttons for example) because they were short-staffed. That was an issue at some polling places, according to Meiszner and staff.

Looking ahead: Council asked staff to consider a number of election improvements, including an expansion of the number of advanced voting days and improving vote-by-mail access, amongst other things, and report back before the next election in 2026.

• Council also moved to ask the province for a legislated requirement for employers to give employees time off to vote in Vancouver’s municipal elections – something that is currently required for federal and provincial elections, but not local ones. 

“We need to ensure that it’s much easier to vote and people can exercise their democratic rights... Voters deserve to know these mistakes won’t be repeated in 2026,” Meiszner said.  

Big swing: ABC Coun. Mike Klassen even tried to start a conversation with the province about Elections BC managing elections for Vancouver and other larger municipalities. However, that idea was largely shut down by other councillors, with Green Coun. Fry pointing out that local governments know their regions the best, and that this sort of idea shouldn’t be unilaterally brought to the province without input from other municipalities.

Voter suppression? TEAM For a Liveable Vancouver, whose candidates finished third and fifth in the by-election, released a statement on Monday accusing the city of “widespread voter suppression,” through their decision to reduced polling places and election staff. 

TEAM’s statement included a report estimated that about 33,800 people didn’t vote because of the long lines on the day of the 2025 by-election. If should be noted that the  report was authored by Thomas Kroeker, who is a TEAM party member (as of July 2024), as well as an academic assistant at UBC’s School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture. Kroeker’s estimate was based on the increased turnout at three of the least busy polling places between 2017 and 2025 and applied city-wide.       

• When COPE Coun. Sean Orr brought up Kroeker’s estimate, staff said they don’t have any data on how many people left without voting due to long waits.