Canada’s birth rate is collapsing as young people are giving up on family life
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Summary
In this episode of the podcast, I sit down with the author of the new book The Decline of Canada s Birth Rate and discuss why millennials are choosing not to have children, why they ve ve veered towards the right, and what we can do about it.
Transcript
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in the book you talk about canada's plummeting birth rate like our birth rate is scary low
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we are not it's not even that we're not going to grow as a society it's that like was given up
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and that particularly millennials aren't having children or choosing not to i i understand like
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the set of circumstances around us are pretty grim when you think about the economy the idea that
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you know typically you would go buy a house and then you would start a family but in canada that's
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just like not a thing that most people can reasonably do. I think our birth rate is like
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as low as South Korea now. And I think probably part of it has to do with the housing market.
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Part of it is obviously like a deeper spiritual question that people just don't see the reason to
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do the thing that we've always done as a species to survive. So I'm wondering like, why do you
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think the birth rate has just fallen off a cliff since basically since COVID? And is there anything
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that we can do to stop it. I'm inclined more towards saying that it's economic. And I would
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just point you towards sort of the differences between Ontario and say Quebec. So the easiest
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places to afford in Canada, it's still very unaffordable, but Alberta and Quebec, it's still
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marginally possible for a young person with a reasonable salary to afford a home of some kind.
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And I've just noticed, you know, either traveling to Quebec or living in Alberta,
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as soon as I get there, the first thing I notice is that people, younger people seem more mature.
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They seem more grown up and they act like grown ups as compared to, you know, say the young people
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in Toronto or Vancouver. And I think it's just because they're allowed to buy into being grown
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ups and they want to be grown ups. And that's why we're seeing, we've been seeing this for quite
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some time, this very weird trend in which the average young person is more conservative than
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the average old person. I don't think I can't, I couldn't find a single other country where that's
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the case or has been the case in recent decades. There's been plenty of times where young people
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have sort of veered towards conservative ideas or conservative parties. Brian Mulroney got a
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plurality of the youth vote in 1984. But the idea that the average Canadian 25-year-old is more
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conservative than the average Canadian 75-year-old, that's like cats laying with dogs. Something has
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obviously gone very wrong for that to be occurring. And I think it's just Canadians, young Canadians
1.00
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want the ability to just sort of settle down, raise a family and do these these normal things.
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So, yeah, you could you could you could do what my my grandma said, which is, oh, you know,
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just live in 300 square feet and, you know, just have a baby and, you know, just put in a basket on top of the dryer.
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OK, sure. But I would be inclined to say that if a lot of our economic problems went away
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and we went back to the housing affordability of the 1990s,
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the income of the 1990s, the per capita growth of the 1990s,
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I think people would very happily start having kids.