The Waitlist Generation: Why Vancouver Parents Are Competing for Spots in Everything from Day Camp to Swim Lessons

“We need more of everything,” groans a fellow parent as we wait for the bus after dropping off our kindergarteners. “Daycare, swimming lessons, everything.”

We’ve just met. But we’re already comparing years’ worth of parenting frustrations like battle scars. Our struggles with finding childcare. Exasperation with instantly sold-out registration systems. Waitlists, waitlists, waitlists. Before we can get into the accelerating cost of summer camp, our bus arrives, we squeeze onboard and we go our separate ways.

“We Need More of Everything”: The Daily Reality for Vancouver Parents

One hour later, I collapse into a firm armchair in the bustling Mount Pleasant Community Centre lobby, next to Amy Duizer, a Kitsilano-based mother of three—ages eight, six and four.

For one supervised hour each week, our toddlers get to test out a new sport in the gymnasium. I’m grateful for this opportunity. Unable to find full-time $10-a-day childcare in my neighbourhood, I typically use this hour to cram in school work or paid work that’s been piling up. Plus, I had scored the last available spot for my budding sports fanatic.

But my luck comes with a side of guilt, knowing that a waitlist has sidelined a handful of other equally eager toddlers. For Duizer, it’s also bittersweet. She buses her son across town, she tells me, because her local community centre has cut many of the programs her children have loved.

When Waitlists Define Your Child’s Childhood

But that’s really just icing on the cake.

“There’s not enough schools. There’s not enough green space. There’s not enough childcare,” Duizer says of her neighbourhood, right off the Broadway Plan. “And it adds up for an extremely stressful situation in our neighbourhood. It’s constant conversation.”

Feeling starved for support is nothing new for Duizer and her partner. As entrepreneurs, they didn’t have access to parental leave benefits or accessible infant care options. When kindergarten registration came in 2021, they joined more than 300 incoming families on waitlists—an annual phenomenon largely driven by young families unable to afford single-family homes on the west side who are now congregating in and around the downtown core, East Vancouver and South Vancouver, where zoning rules have concentrated denser, more attainable housing.

Now, Duizer and her partner are wrestling with how, or whether, to balance $600 to $800 per week for summer childcare alongside mounting household costs and growing their businesses.

READ MORE: East Van’s Innovative Co-Working and Childminding Space

The True Cost of Raising Kids in Vancouver

A slew of independent schools and private businesses fill many gaps—childcare, swimming lessons, birthday party venues and beyond—but I know firsthand that those costs add up (especially when market-rate fees get forfeited when kids fall ill).

Guilt accumulates too, knowing that many families cannot access the same opportunities. Despite feeling constant pressure to give their children every experience that could help set them up for a successful future, Duizer says she and her partner have made conscious spending shifts: swapping childcare camps for colouring at home; skipping “big athletic clubs” for community-based rec programs; teaming with other families for one collective kids’ birthday party, to name a few.

Structural Ageism: How Policy Choices Squeeze Young Families

And yet, Paul Kershaw, policy professor at the UBC School of Population and Public Health and founder of the Generation Squeeze Knowledge Mobilization Lab, tells me over Zoom that the affordability struggles and social service shortages that millennial parents face are the result of societal failures, not individual choices. “And we need to address that societal failing together,” he says.

For more than a decade, Generation Squeeze has been pushing provincial and federal governments to acknowledge—and remedy—a range of policy choices that have secured healthy retirements for aging adults while squeezing younger generations out of “money, time and services.”

Today, he has a new way to describe the issue. “I think at the heart of the problem for families with young kids is structural ageism against younger people in this country,” he says. “Structural ageism that exists in our government budget, structural ageism that exists in our housing system, structural ageism that exists in our approach to the planet’s health.”

There will always be an age gap in government spending, Kershaw notes, due to the need for income support during retirement and increased medical costs that come with aging. “But as we’ve been adapting to a range of problems, we have reserved our dollars for adapting for the aging population at a rate that’s three or four times faster than what we’re doing for younger people,” he says.

READ MORE: What to Do With Toddlers in Vancouver

“People who’ve come before, my age and older, we’ve extracted so much of the good stuff, whether it’s the atmosphere’s ability to absorb carbon or a whole bunch of housing wealth from the housing system,” Kershaw adds. “So we leave little affordability for those who follow, as the tax dollars go for medical care and retirement security for an aging population. There’s little left over to invest in childcare or education. And we struggle to build parks and green spaces for people who no longer can afford homes with yards. I think it’s essential now that, if we want to restore affordability for younger people going forward, we have to recognize the political bargain in  this country.”

Policy Wins and the Long Road Ahead

Over the years, Generation Squeeze’s research and advocacy have borne fruit. The lab’s research on childcare led to a call for capping costs at $10 a day, which childcare advocacy organizations grew into a national movement and policy win.

In 2024, both the federal and B.C. budgets acknowledged the need to reinvest in younger generations with targeted programs, like increasing interest-free student loans, accelerating affordable housing construction, expanding $10-a-day childcare and increasing B.C.’s monthly family benefit payments. And, while campaigning for re-election at the end of the year, Premier David Eby promised $500 million over two years to create before- and after-school programs onsite at every school in the province, which childcare advocates argue is key to advancing gender equity in the workforce and boosting economic productivity while safeguarding children’s rights.

But it will take years of concerted effort to raise the standard of living for younger generations, Kershaw says. As such, Generation Squeeze has no shortage of policy solutions. Some of these proposals include advocating for improvements to parental leave, lightening the tax burden for younger people by lowering income taxes while increasing wealth and property taxes, and reforming zoning rules and tax policy to prioritize housing affordability over using homes as investment vehicles.

READ MORE: 5 Ways We Can Seriously Fix Vancouver’s Real Estate Problem

Reducing payments to already affluent retirees with incomes over $100,000 per year, according to the lab’s federal budget analysis, could generate $36 billion over five years, which could be used to eliminate senior poverty altogether while reducing the deficit and significantly increasing investments in affordable housing, childcare and postsecondary education.

“We’re asking people who are financially secure to say, ‘I’d be willing to receive less if that money is repurposed to help poor seniors and/or my kids and grandchildren,’” Kershaw explains, emphasizing the importance of “inviting” the financially secure to become active participants in creating the solution. “Polling shows three quarters of Canadians agree with this idea. People feel good when they actually give something to help others.”

Why $10-a-Day Childcare Still Isn’t Reaching Most B.C. Families

Increased public investment isn’t the answer to every problem parents face, but it’s crucial to completing the rollout of $10-a-day childcare provincially, says Sharon Gregson, spokesperson for the Coalition for Child Care Advocates of B.C. Gregson began advocating for a subsidized childcare system in the late ’80s. Over the decades that followed, she played an integral role in developing and popularizing an action plan that politicians ultimately leveraged to implement the provincial childcare strategy that later rolled out across the country.

Now, eight years into the province’s universal childcare rollout, just 26 percent of B.C. children have access to licenced childcare, and only 10 percent of those spaces are officially $10-a-day.

“The childcare funding from the province was flatlined last year, flatlined this year, and it’s flatlined for the next two years to come” after the B.C. NDP unveiled its 2025 budget, says Gregson. “The only increase we’re seeing is a little bit of a bump through federal funding—nowhere near enough to actually make systemic changes that are necessary to move families off waiting lists, to implement the wage grid [establishing competitive pay rates] for early childhood educators, to move more programs to $10-a-day.”

Nor do these latest budget projections include Eby’s promise for $500 million to build more childcare spaces and expand before- and after-school care programs in all schools. Gregson calls the omissions “disappointing,” as child care advocates have long pushed for rapidly expanding the $10-a-day program by including high-quality school-based care that’s available to students ages five to twelve before and after school, as well as all day throughout seasonal school breaks.

“The need for advocacy and continued momentum, to put pressure on the provincial government, is so evident now more than ever,” Gregson says. “We constantly need new parents to bring their energy and their momentum, that this is an issue that they care about and will vote about, to make sure politicians are listening.”

From Advocacy to Action: What Parents Can Do

Back at the Mount Pleasant Community Centre, Duizer and I spend our final child-free minutes daydreaming about a wistful idea: a future where summer camp is built right into our children’s existing elementary schools. No more scrambling to find, or struggling to afford, week-long camps before they all sell out.

“It’d be lovely for the children to have community,” Duizer says, noting the added labour of trying to book activities the kids will enjoy while also coordinating camp schedules with classmates to provide social continuity over the summer months. “And you’d feel great as a parent.”

If only, I sigh, as class comes to an end and we rush off to collect our ecstatic toddlers. But, as we feed our little ones snacks, I can’t help but remember the decades of work that Kershaw, Gregson and many other tireless advocates have invested in pushing for systemic change, the policy wins their efforts have secured for young people and families across the country and the advice they gave me over Zoom: Sign the petitions. Call and email elected officials and tell them what you need. Then don’t miss a chance to vote.

Lamenting our struggles with similarly squeezed parents certainly feels cathartic, but directing our voices at those in power is the key to large-scale change—change that all our children and future generations could, one day, thank us for.