Banff Takes First Step Toward Major Childcare Expansion

Kathryn Hanke's family has been on Banff's daycare waitlist for 21 months, since the day her son was born. On Tuesday, she stood before council and asked it to stop studying the problem and start spending on it.

By the end of the council meeting, it had. After about an hour of discussion of Banff's childcare shortage, councillors voted unanimously to spend $56,000 to advance the design of an expansion to the Banff Child Care Centre, run by the Day Care Society of Banff. It was the concrete first step that parents and the society had been pleading for, and it went further than the town's own staff had advised. Councillors also told staff to bring the expansion forward as a formal funding request in the 2027 budget, and to look at whether the town should run childcare itself in a school space offered by the local division.

The decisions marked a shift from planning to spending on an issue that has shadowed Banff politics for more than a year, with more than 100 local families on a waitlist and no permanent new spaces yet built.

"We keep hearing from the community that this is at an all-time crisis desperation level," Mayor Corrie DiManno said.

The affordability trap

The problem in Banff is no longer only that there aren't enough childcare spaces. It's whether families can afford the ones that exist. Jessica LaBonte, the town's community development coordinator, walked council through a provincial funding change that has sharpened that second problem.

Under Alberta's affordability grant, a full-time childcare spot costs a family $326.25 a month. But in June, the province told operators that newly created programs would no longer be eligible for that grant, and the Day Care Society of Banff's new site, Elements Child Care, had not yet received its licence when the change landed.

The result, LaBonte said, is that a family at Elements now pays $1,350 a month for full-time care, roughly $1,024 more than families pay at the society's two established centres for the same service from the same non-profit. Of 30 waitlisted families the society had contacted, she said, nine accepted spaces at Elements, about 30 percent. The main reason the rest declined was cost.

"This is important to note, as it shows that creating physical childcare spaces is only one part of the solution," LaBonte said. "For those spaces to meet the needs of Banff families, they also need to be financially accessible."

The grant's future is uncertain, too, since the funding deal behind it expires in March 2027. In the meantime, LaBonte pointed to a faster option: Canadian Rockies Public Schools has offered a room at Banff Elementary School for 16 to 20 children, possibly as soon as September, that the town could run itself.

"Behind every waitlist number is a family"

Hanke had put a face to the numbers earlier in the meeting, during the public input portion. She described watching friends with younger children receive subsidized spots ahead of her, then finally being offered a place at Elements, only to face a bill more than four times what other families pay.

"My partner and I have been working alternating shifts, therefore spending little time and meals together as a family, just to ensure our son has care while we contribute to Banff's economy," she said. She urged council to "signal its commitment by immediately approving the funding for the design stage," and to "prove that building a life in Banff is a priority."

Her appeal echoed a written submission from the Day Care Society of Banff, which operates three sites holding 142 children at capacity against a waitlist of more than 210, including 108 families living in Banff. The society had asked council to fund the design work and publicly commit to a permanent solution, arguing that Elements, a temporary site whose lease ends in January 2029, "buys Banff time" but cannot build its future.

Councillors connect the crises

When debate opened, councillors did not treat the choice as close.

Councillor Kaylee Ram, who in 2023 became the first Banff elected official to take parental leave, and who joined Tuesday's meeting remotely with her own infant, put forward the motion to add the expansion to the town's 2027 budget as a project it would actually build. She rejected the idea that the temporary site was enough.

"Temporary is temporary," Ram said. She described families "told to bring their (daycare) application to the hospital as part of the hospital bag checklist," juggling shifts, cobbling together part-time nannies, and in some cases taking their babies to work. Relying on a temporary, third-party site, she said, "is not a long-term solution." Backing the expansion, she added, would show "that the town of Banff is coming to the table."

Councillor David Fullerton pressed council to stop treating two of Banff's defining pressures as unrelated.

"I think we need to stop talking about our housing crisis and our childcare crisis as separate silos. They're tied together," Fullerton said, noting that adding hundreds of new housing units could deepen the childcare shortfall if the town does not plan for both. He called the short-term measures "valuable, but they're band-aid fixes," and warned against waiting on the province: "Anybody who's lived in this province for more than a year can attest to the fact that provincial or federal grants, for that matter, come, go, change very frequently."

DiManno used the discussion to update council on her own lobbying. She said Alberta's education minister had responded that the funding change would stand as "status quo," with no exception, and that she had written back urging one, citing Banff's roughly $938,000 median home price, near-zero rental vacancy and the province's own acknowledgment that the town's housing market is atypical. She said she had requested a meeting at the Alberta Municipalities convention in September.

What council decided

Over a series of unanimous votes, council reopened its 2026 to 2028 operating budget and allocated $56,000 from the budget stabilization reserve to sole-source LOLA Architecture, the firm the daycare society had already engaged, to carry the expansion design to the development-permit application stage. Administration acknowledged that sole-sourcing is an unusual step, but said finishing the work already underway made sense before any larger project goes to public tender.

Council also told staff to bring the expansion into 2027 budget planning, and to look at whether the town should run childcare itself, using the school room, at a break-even rate that wouldn't undercut Elements.

"I repeat, the Town of Banff, we are not asking the daycare society to also take this on," DiManno said, stressing that any new program would be the town's job to run, not the Society's.

None of Tuesday's motions committed the town to building the roughly $3.8-million expansion, which staff have said would likely need to be paid for with borrowed money if outside grants do not come through. But together they turned an item council could have simply noted and set aside into a project with money attached and a place in the next budget, the difference, in the daycare society's words, between a project that is parked and one that is moving.

For families still counting months on the waitlist, the timeline remains long. Even supporters noted it will take years before an expanded centre opens its doors. As Fullerton put it, "The longer we wait, the further behind we get."