And I just found a list of "approved day care homes" which I would assume means registered, and they have the additional rule of only ONE under age 2 when you have 6.
Yes, An approved care home is one approved and monitored by an agency. They are also called registered.
And yes, I'm not surprised by the extra rules for approved/registered homes as we have extra rules for registered/approved carers too which affect the ages of the children although they number of children remain the same and always included the carer's own children.

In NS, if registered, we may not have more than 2 under 2 or 3 under 3 (inc our own). As you can imagine, finding care for those with twins when returning to work, is a nightmare! It requires they find a carer who not only has two vacancies, but also all other children in her care, inc her own, must have had their 2nd birthday and only one of the current client can be younger than their 3rd birthday.

My friend thinks the extra rules are just for registered homes (she's not registered).

Try searching for NB community Services and seeing if they have a free phone numbers. It's way easier to go straight to the horses mouth.

Also - and I dread telling you this and hope it's only NS that has this issue...although the NS day care regs set our max limits, in some communities, it's even lower. Local by-laws can affect businesses run from residential properties and so I do know in some areas, despite the provincial ruling being 6, the municipality further restricts that. The lowest I've ever heard of is 4. So a carer with three children under age 12 would only be allowed ONE day care child.