Juno News - Canada’s birth rate is collapsing as young people are giving up on family life

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.

00:00:00.000 in the book you talk about canada's plummeting birth rate like our birth rate is scary low

00:00:05.360 we are not it's not even that we're not going to grow as a society it's that like was given up

00:00:09.840 and that particularly millennials aren't having children or choosing not to i i understand like

00:00:15.680 the set of circumstances around us are pretty grim when you think about the economy the idea that

00:00:21.360 you know typically you would go buy a house and then you would start a family but in canada that's

00:00:24.640 just like not a thing that most people can reasonably do. I think our birth rate is like

00:00:30.240 as low as South Korea now. And I think probably part of it has to do with the housing market.

00:00:36.400 Part of it is obviously like a deeper spiritual question that people just don't see the reason to

00:00:42.640 do the thing that we've always done as a species to survive. So I'm wondering like, why do you

00:00:48.880 think the birth rate has just fallen off a cliff since basically since COVID? And is there anything

00:00:53.040 that we can do to stop it. I'm inclined more towards saying that it's economic. And I would

00:00:58.580 just point you towards sort of the differences between Ontario and say Quebec. So the easiest

00:01:06.300 places to afford in Canada, it's still very unaffordable, but Alberta and Quebec, it's still

00:01:11.540 marginally possible for a young person with a reasonable salary to afford a home of some kind.

00:01:17.180 And I've just noticed, you know, either traveling to Quebec or living in Alberta,

00:01:21.620 as soon as I get there, the first thing I notice is that people, younger people seem more mature.

00:01:26.780 They seem more grown up and they act like grown ups as compared to, you know, say the young people

00:01:31.700 in Toronto or Vancouver. And I think it's just because they're allowed to buy into being grown

00:01:36.300 ups and they want to be grown ups. And that's why we're seeing, we've been seeing this for quite

00:01:40.020 some time, this very weird trend in which the average young person is more conservative than

00:01:45.080 the average old person. I don't think I can't, I couldn't find a single other country where that's

00:01:49.400 the case or has been the case in recent decades. There's been plenty of times where young people

00:01:54.900 have sort of veered towards conservative ideas or conservative parties. Brian Mulroney got a

00:01:59.400 plurality of the youth vote in 1984. But the idea that the average Canadian 25-year-old is more

00:02:05.400 conservative than the average Canadian 75-year-old, that's like cats laying with dogs. Something has

00:02:10.280 obviously gone very wrong for that to be occurring. And I think it's just Canadians, young Canadians 1.00

00:02:17.900 want the ability to just sort of settle down, raise a family and do these these normal things.

00:02:23.240 So, yeah, you could you could you could do what my my grandma said, which is, oh, you know,

00:02:28.540 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.

00:02:34.180 OK, sure. But I would be inclined to say that if a lot of our economic problems went away

00:02:41.680 and we went back to the housing affordability of the 1990s,

00:02:46.260 the income of the 1990s, the per capita growth of the 1990s,

00:02:49.560 I think people would very happily start having kids.

Juno News - April 22, 2025

Canada’s birth rate is collapsing as young people are giving up on family life

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