Introducing Vandaycare.ca: A Daycare Map for Vancouver Parents

As part of parental leave, one of my goals is to figure out daycare for my baby girl before I return to work.

However, it is notoriously challenging to find daycare in Vancouver because of the limited spots available. I was told that parents have to join a waitlist as soon as they know they are pregnant, since it can take years before they get accepted.

On the website https://www.westcoast.org/choosing-child-care/search they publish a pretty useful PDF weekly, listing the daycares that are currently available or accepting new applications: https://www.wstcoast.org/application/files/2417/7646/6400/Vacancy_List_Updated_-_April_2026_-.pdf. However, this is an aggregation of manual inputs. It is 14 pages long, with a mix of daycares across all ages in various locations.

It is incredibly tedious to parse through this PDF week over week, look up where they are, etc.

So I built something.

I wrote a script that automatically downloads the PDF, finds out more information about each daycare including its geo location, and renders it on a map.

I also wanted to filter for daycares that accept babies under 1 year old. So I added a birthday input, and the map view automatically filters out the irrelevant daycares.

The remaining daycares matching my baby girl’s age are rendered nicely on the map. I can then easily see where they are, check their info, and decide if I’d like to give them a call.

I hope this will be useful for other parents in Vancouver as well. I’ve open sourced the script at https://github.com/yzhong52/Vancouver-Daycare and hosted the website at vandaycare.ca.

If you’d like to contribute or have feedback, you can reach out to me on LinkedIn, GitHub, X, and Medium.