5 Assessing child care needs and forecasting demand MOVING FROM PRIVATE

5 Assessing child care needs and forecasting demand Childcare Resource and Research Unit March 2022 About the series One aspect of Canadian child care provision is that the MOVING supply of child care services is too limited to meet demand, unevenly distributed and inequitable in terms FROM PRIVATE of location. [...] These are: the City of Toronto’s approach to assessing demand, which includes ability to pay/affordability in the calculation; the City of Vancouver’s demand forecasting calculation tool considering the impact of urban development on demand for child care; and British Columbia’s collaboration with the Union of British Columbia Municipalities (UBCM) to develop needs assessments with the aim of crea. [...] ASSESSING CHILD CARE NEEDS AND FORECASTING DEMAND 6 The economic modelling then examined two scenarios: • The first scenario looked at children below compulsory school age (0 – 5 years) and examined the influence of price of care, eligibility for a fee subsidy, potential earnings of the main care giving parent, age of the youngest child in the family, number of children in the family, immigrant st. [...] The data sets used for estimation were the Survey of Young Canadians and a City of Toronto dataset (Cleveland et al., 2016).2 City of Vancouver The use of a specific tool for child care demand forecasting has been used in Vancouver for some time and fits in the context of the City of Vancouver’s activities on child care and specific characteristics. [...] To facilitate service operation, the City also facilitated the creation of the Vancouver Society of Childcare Centres, a new non-profit child care organization to manage the new spaces created in the downtown core (see a case study of VSOCC in this series’ non-profit child care paper).