82 VANMAG.COM MAY 2017
“I can’t help but
feel displaced.”
Writer Aaron Scott
Hildebrandt and
daughter Maeve
are adjusting to
life in the Comox
Valley after a
fruitless search
for affordable
child care forced
the family out of
Vancouver.
hen we found out
we were expecting, we assumed we’d raise our daughter
exactly where we were—in our 450-square-foot
apartment in the West End. Our place had an incredible
view of English Bay and, thanks to an ancient lease
that refused to die between tenants, reasonable rent.
It was tiny, but it was our home. Yes, we’d have to upgrade
to a larger place at some point, but leaving Vancouver
was never an option. Parenthood is full of so many
unknowns; the least we could do was not throw a move
into the mix.
But there were many other reasons we wanted to raise
our family in Vancouver. The city has educational and
vocational possibilities that are hard to find elsewhere.
There are excellent services to assist both new and
expecting parents. (When my wife struggled with severe
antepartum depression, the city produced support
groups and people willing to help.)
And then there’s the lifestyle. During the six years we
lived in Vancouver, I never stopped adoring it. I loved
the people, the long walks on the seawall, the Sunday
afternoons on the beach. I even loved the tension that
seems to run under the surface of the city, this force
driving people to punch above their professional weight.
My daughter adored Vancouver, too. Even before she
turned one, she was an incredibly social animal, begging
to be taken on the bus so she could wave and smile at
all the people. She’s almost three now and still asks on
occasion if we can take her on a bus.
Staying in Vancouver would mean we could keep our
jobs and careers and friends. It was the obvious choice,
until it wasn’t.
A lot of people were shocked last summer when a City
of Vancouver staff report found that more than half of
Vancouver’s families were thinking of leaving the city
in the next two years. Not us—we read the news from
our new home on Vancouver Island, early casualties of
a brutal conundrum that is a fact of life for families in
Vancouver: it’s nearly impossible to find child care.
And if you do manage to find it, you almost certainly
can’t afford it.
The Catch-22 of Child Care
To survive in the city, most families need to consistently
pull in two incomes, making child care an imperative.
Daycares in the city cater to this, offering lunch
programs, early drop-offs and late pickups. Some offer
evening care or weekend care, or can prepare supper to
bring home with you. If you have to pull graveyard shifts,
there are even places that will watch your kid overnight.
But many families don’t even get that far, because
there aren’t nearly enough daycare spots in the city for all
the children who need them. Wait-lists can be thousands
of names long, and it can take several years to land a spot
anywhere. A 2014 report by the Childcare Resource and
Research Unit found there were 363,800 children across
the province in need of some form of care, and only
106,719 licensed child care spots.
That means the majority of families looking for child
care won’t find it. It simply doesn’t exist. They’re left to
survive on a single income, find an alternative form of
care—or leave. And leaving is a popular choice.
According to Statistics Canada, the city’s population
is growing by about 5,000 people each year, but it’s
mostly an influx of the young, single and childless. If you
comb through census data, you’ll find that every year
the city grows by only about 16 new families, while the
Vancouver School Board reports that school enrolment is
shrinking by roughly 600 students each year.
Janine Reid and her husband abandoned the city
for Ottawa last year, in part due to the lack of child care
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