B.C. NDP Leader David Eby is vowing to secure a new federal child care funding deal by Dec. 1 if re-elected, after confirming his family benefits from $10-a-day child care services.
Eby was asked by reporters during a campaign stop over the weekend about his family’s child care arrangements and confirmed his youngest child has a subsidized daycare spot.
The disclosure drew criticism from the B.C. Conservative Party, which said Eby’s family benefits from a highly competitive child care system that many families can’t access, leaving them to pay much higher fees.
Conservative candidate Margareta Dovgal released a statement on Oct. 12 arguing it is unfair for a high-income family like Eby’s to occupy a “plum” subsidized spot while roughly 90 percent of B.C. families remain on long waitlists or pay some of the highest market rates in the country.
She noted Eby earns more than $227,000 as premier and, when combined with his wife’s income as a practicing physician, their household earnings likely surpass half a million dollars per year.
“Nobody begrudges David Eby and his wife for their success,” said Dovgal, who is running in Vancouver-Yaletown. “The Conservative Party of BC wants more British Columbians to succeed. What families will not accept is a Premier who promised them $10-a-day child care, failed to deliver it, and then took one of the scarce spots for himself while a single mom working two jobs sits on a waitlist.”
Eby issued an official statement on the BC NDP’s social media channels after his campaign stop, pledging to work with Ottawa “to reach a newly negotiated childcare funding agreement.”
“My family has benefited from a wonderful local childcare centre and I will keep fighting so that every family benefits from quality childcare across our province,” he said in the statement.
Eby said the child care centre one of his older children attended was designated as a $10-a-day site “a couple of years ago,” and his youngest now attends the same facility. The program assigns subsidies based on the facility itself, rather than household income testing.
“When that occurred, we chose as a family to make a donation to that excellent facility,” he said. “We felt that we did not need that discount and we wanted to make sure that the childcare centre could provide other supports for families in the community.”
Eby said his family will make a “similar donation” to the child care centre now that his youngest goes there.
BC Child Care
The $10-a-day ChildCareBC program caps full-time child care costs at a maximum of $10 per day—or roughly $200 per month per child—during regular business hours, according to the province.
A government ChildCareBC webpage says the program provides direct operating funding to selected licensed child care facilities instead of giving cash directly to parents. Participating centres lower their fees to the $10-a-day cap in exchange for government support.
The province paused the enrolment of new facilities into the program in February as part of Budget 2026.
Then-Finance Minister Brenda Bailey announced a three-year freeze on new provider enrolments, although existing spaces continue to operate under the fee cap. The government framed it as a bid to stabilize the existing system and address feedback from child care operators.
Budget 2026 also committed $330 million over three years—$90 million in 2026-2027, $110 million in 2027-2028, and $130 million in 2028-2029—to maintain current spaces and support operators and educators during this period.
British Columbia currently has some of the highest median child care fees in Canada, lagging behind provinces that have rolled out universal or widespread fee caps.
Major B.C. cities are the priciest among 35 studied urban centres across the country, according to a 2026 report by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.
“When it comes to cities in British Columbia, parents now pay the highest fees in the country for infant spaces,” the report said, noting that the fees would be even higher without the Canada-Wide Early Learning and Child Care (CWELCC) system, a national initiative started in 2021 to lower licensed child care costs for families with children younger than age six.
The federal CWELCC system is integrated directly into the province’s existing ChildCareBC framework.
“Their savings are much smaller than elsewhere in Canada, with parents of infants in B.C. cities saving $300 to $500 a month,” the report added.
Unlike several other provinces that instituted broad provincial fee maximums under federal agreements, B.C. has no universal cap for non-participating licensed providers.
Median infant fees in B.C. cities range from $28 a day in Kelowna up to $52 a day in Richmond, the report found.
By comparison, median daily infant fees sit at around $23 in Halifax, $22 in major Ontario cities, and $15 in Alberta.
Six provinces and territories have already locked in or capped fees at $10 a day universally, and Quebec maintains a fee structure near $9.65 a day.
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