00:00:00.000The CBC attempted to find out why Canadians are having fewer kids, and they failed miserably.
00:00:06.560It's Fake News Friday, I'm Candice Malcolm, and this is The Candice Malcolm Show.
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00:00:40.760Okay, so if you saw the interview that I did with Erin Woodrick on Tuesday, we talked about immigration and everything that's wrong with Canada in terms of our broken immigration system.
00:00:50.420The very end of the interview, we got into what I think is one of the most important and pressing issues of our time, which is the real reason why we talk about why we have an immigration system, because Canada has a below-replacement birth rate, fertility rate, and that fertility rate is dropping at an alarming rate.
00:01:08.880I think it's the biggest issue facing our country.
00:01:11.680Even Elon Musk recently said that he believes that it is the biggest issue facing our civilization.
00:01:49.700He's made similar comments over and over.
00:01:51.940You know, we hear a lot from the climate alarmists that the world is overpopulated and that climate change is going to be this, like, civilization-destroying event.
00:01:59.880Elon Musk sees it the complete opposite, that we're not replacing our populations.
00:02:05.420So he's raising the alarm bell in a very public way.
00:02:08.300Demographers and researchers and sort of conservative writers and thinkers have been talking about this issue for a very, very long time.
00:02:15.880And so I was very pleased to see that the CBC covered it.
00:02:19.640The CBC had a documentary or a segment on one of their news shows that ended up on YouTube.
00:02:25.580It was called The Cost of Having Kids, Why Fewer People Are Planning to Have Kids, and a program called About That with Andrew Chang, which aired on February 28th.
00:02:33.760And given my conversation with Erin Lee Woodrick, I thought, hey, this is great.
00:02:37.180The CBC is finally covering this issue.
00:02:49.280And basically, the CBC managed to get every aspect of this issue wrong.
00:02:53.920Not only that, they produced a very cheap, very lazy, very sort of low-quality, low-budget attempt to answer this question.
00:03:02.720So I'm going to play you parts of this documentary or part of this segment today.
00:03:06.000And just point out all the very many ways that the CBC gets it wrong.
00:03:11.400Look, we're talking about an organization that gets $1.4 billion from the taxpayers every year.
00:03:16.400And this is the best that they can come up with.
00:03:18.400This shoddy piece of journalism that doesn't even scrape the surface when it comes to what I believe is the most important issue facing Canadians and facing the future of our country.
00:03:29.700I want to play this segment it's with, again, a journalist named Andrew Chang, where he explores supposedly the main reasons why people in Canada are not having kids.
00:04:01.900First, right off the bat, we have some TikTokers.
00:04:04.600So rather than going and interviewing Canadians to find out why Canadian young women aren't just choosing to have kids, they just pull these TikTok videos.
00:04:11.420And we'll see there's a trend throughout this clip that these are not even Canadian people, right?
00:04:19.760Those are both Americans, those two women that we saw both there, both American TikTokers, young ladies talking about whether or not they want to have kids.
00:05:50.240Because there's going to be a difference.
00:05:51.140So I think this is pretty shoddy journalism to present this as just like a huge monumental title shift in the past 20 years when, you know, the studies that I've looked at don't show this.
00:06:04.540So the Gallup poll from 2003, rather than following up with another Gallup poll, they follow up with a Pew Research poll, which is inexplicable.
00:06:12.580When you look up the data in the updated Gallup poll from 2023, it actually shows the opposite of what the CBC is trying to present here.
00:06:21.680So I pull up this article from Gallup, and it says that Americans' preference for larger families, the highest since 1971.
00:06:29.280Again, this is a follow-up to that 2001 study, the same study.
00:06:44.900Even more, 45% of U.S. adults say that three or more children is the ideal family size.
00:06:51.280Just 2% of Americans, 2%, think the ideal family includes no children at all.
00:06:57.360And it notes that Black families, religious families, and younger adults favor larger families.
00:07:03.000That is what the Gallup report from 2023, the latest result, shows.
00:07:07.240So rather than showing apples to apples the Gallup poll versus the Gallup poll, the CBC went and showed a Pew Research poll that had a different criteria that wasn't the same as what they were showing that somehow found a totally different conclusion.
00:07:19.340Rather than 2% of adults saying they don't want any kids, the CBC is presenting it that 49% of American adults don't want kids, which is, from the research that I looked at, just completely not true.
00:07:31.060So CBC not starting out very good with this segment, let's resume.
00:07:36.260Pretty good shift over just a couple of decades.
00:07:38.920And in Canada, it's not all that different.
00:07:42.360When young adults here were asked in a survey a couple of years ago how many kids they planned on having, 34% said none.
00:07:51.880But a similar question in 2001, only around 7% of Canadians in the same age group said the same thing.
00:08:00.300So when you see the numbers side by side, these are not, again, he said the same age group, but it's not the same age group because one of them was asking the Canadians age 15 to 49.
00:08:12.120And that's where you get 75% saying that they don't want kids, sorry, 65% saying they don't want kids.
00:08:16.460In 2001, the study was asking adults, Canadian adults, between 20 and 34.
00:08:23.080If you're asking a 15-year-old, do you want kids, you're going to get a different answer than if you ask a 30-year-old.
00:08:28.440And so, again, CBC is doing like this weird kind of cherry-picking of data to try to make the problem seem like the real issue here is that people just don't want kids.
00:08:38.760Whereas, again, there's other research and other data that shows that that's not the case.
00:08:42.480It obviously depends on when in a person's life you ask them.
00:08:45.620But asking a 15-year-old if they want kids, you're not going to get a realistic idea of whether that person actually does want kids until they're a little bit older.
00:09:18.540You can go on three dates with someone and have an amazing time and then never hear from them again.
00:09:23.740A lot of the times, apps lead us to undervalue people that we'd actually like in real life and overvalue people we wouldn't give a second thought to.
00:09:31.740Like, I know people that have met the love of their life on these apps, but also, like, the overwhelming sentiment toward these apps is they don't work.
00:09:39.100A few years ago, Pew asked those who were single and looking to rate how their dating life was going.
00:09:45.80075% said it's been very or somewhat difficult to find a partner in the past year because they had trouble approaching people, trouble finding someone who wants the same type of relationship, or just finding someone who meets their expectations.
00:10:01.340About half of those respondents also agreed that dating has become more difficult over the past decade.
00:10:31.280And then all of a sudden, they're wondering, like, well, hey, why aren't women and men coupling up and having kids?
00:10:35.860It's like, well, because all of society's messages are pushing women in one direction away from wanting to get married and wanting to have children.
00:10:42.880And then, surprise, surprise, many of them are not.
00:10:45.940And then we have this weird, very superficial analysis about how dating apps are really hard and some cherry-picked data, again, about how people who are dating on dating apps don't like it.
00:10:55.680It's like, you know, maybe you're asking the wrong people.
00:10:58.860Maybe these dating apps aren't the right way to find a partner.
00:11:01.860Maybe the best way is still, you know, people finding partners and getting married through their community, being in school, people you meet at work, people that you know, friends of friends.
00:11:10.220I mean, that's the best way to meet someone, someone who comes from a similar background, shares the same values, shares the same goals in life, rather than, you know, the screen-obsessed society where everything we do is online.
00:11:21.720Therefore, when it comes to finding a mate, you have to go online.
00:11:24.240Like, rather than criticizing the entire framework of it, the CBC kind of just, again, does a superficial gloss over job where they just say, like, oh, you know, it's harder than it was 10 years ago.
00:11:36.140Again, if you're dating now, you probably weren't dating 10 years ago.
00:11:39.860Like, most people don't date for 10 years.
00:11:41.840Most of the people who are dating and having a hard time finding someone is because they're, like, you know, they're 25 and they're on an app.
00:12:10.920And they're even more expensive in industrialized nations.
00:12:14.040In Canada, a recent report tried to put a number on just how expensive.
00:12:18.880So let's take a middle-income, two-parent, two-child household, just as an example, since Stats Canada found that was the most common dynamic.
00:12:26.920Their report estimates a family in that category can expect to pay an average of $750,000, raising those two kids from birth to age 22.
00:12:38.960So that's if you add up food, clothes, education, child care, transportation, everything, even accounting for the extra you'd pay for a bigger home.
00:13:15.460Is that, like, specifically focused on someone who is, say, like, low income and relies on daycare and has to have, like, full-time care for their child from the time they're, like, six months or something like that?
00:13:25.300Because that's not the normal experience.
00:13:26.720And you can literally do this with anything if you take the cost of something over 22 years, right?
00:13:32.140So, just as an example, I looked up, like, what is the cost of owning a car in Canada?
00:13:37.240Well, according to an article that I found in the Toronto Star, it says that the annual cost of operating a car each year, so this includes registration, gas, maintenance, and, like, winter tires, wear and tear on the car,
00:13:50.880it breaks down to approximately $1,387 per month, which would make it $16,644 a year to own a car.
00:14:01.860If you take on top of that the cost of actually buying the car, so the average Canadian owns a used car that's worth about $39,000,
00:14:09.640so we're talking about an $8,000 down payment and a loan payment of about $31,000,
00:14:15.800so somewhere around $1,000 a month in car payments.
00:14:19.980So, that would get us to $13,000 a year.
00:14:23.540So, if you add that together, folks, and you want to find out how much it would cost to own that car over a 22-year period,
00:14:29.920you're talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars, probably somewhere around $500,000 or $600,000 just to own a used car.
00:14:37.040But you don't think of a used car in terms of a 22-year experience or driving a car in terms of 22-year experience.
00:14:43.560You could do this with the cost of new clothes every year, the cost of vacations, the cost of subscriptions on your phone,
00:14:48.580the cost of going out for dinner or your morning coffee.
00:14:54.500And I think the reason that left-wing journalists and media throw this big, huge number around is to scare people.
00:15:00.920It's a scare tactic designed to make you not want to have kids, designed to make you think that it's just so expensive that you cannot do it.
00:15:09.000But the reality is that, yeah, of course, there's costs associated with having kids.
00:15:12.580I know I have three kids and one on the way.
00:15:54.000You can also just rely on your community, rely on your group of friends or your church or, you know, people in your family to help you with a lot of these things.
00:16:01.020And it doesn't have to be that expensive.
00:16:02.740So, I really cringe and I reject these huge numbers, like $750,000 to have kids.
00:19:28.120We're talking about the Canadian experience.
00:19:30.100So it's just blatantly obvious that this is not a Canadian person because you're talking about something that doesn't apply to us in Canada.
00:19:37.980There is an expectation among society and employers, probably more importantly, that if a woman has children, her job will no longer be her priority.
00:19:55.200They come so close to talking about the real issue.
00:19:57.160So here's this woman, I don't know, some sociologist or some economist, feminist lady coming on telling us that having kids contributes to the wage gap and it's not fair that women don't make as much or something like that.
00:20:11.720You could have someone who has a very successful, very fulfilling career, something like a lawyer.
00:20:15.580And then as soon as they have kids, they realize that law is not their top priority anymore.
00:20:20.400They don't want to go and sit in an office for 14, 16, 18 hours a day when they have a child because they would much rather spend that time with their child.
00:20:28.940They would much rather be at home with the child.
00:20:30.840This is like one of the real issues that we should be talking about.
00:20:33.740They really just gloss it over and they painted it as like a negative, which is like, oh, and this is why women get paid less.
00:20:39.280It's like, yeah, women would, by and large, most women would rather be with their kid.
00:20:45.200And even someone who's like hyper successful, hyper oriented that becomes a lawyer and this very successful lawyer, when they have a child, I've seen this in my friend group.
00:20:53.300I've seen this with friends, with people in my family, even once they become a mother, they realize how important that job is and that nothing can compare to it.
00:21:02.820Like going back to the law firm, going back to the long hours at your desk, it just doesn't seem appealing at all because you would rather be at home with your child.
00:21:10.700It's sort of like they're being awakened to the true nature of human beings that women want to nurture and they have that motherly instinct that really comes out when you have a baby.
00:21:22.840So CBC came very close to hitting on an important point, but instead of making it, they paint it as a negative and then gloss over it.
00:21:58.620It's maybe saying that parents shouldn't be so uptight about all these extracurricular activities.
00:22:03.860And I don't know what's the circumstance in everyone's community.
00:22:06.980But for my son, the afterschool programs at his school that are designed for like further enrichment, like playing sports or being parts of clubs, they're kind of designed so that the kids can stay at school later so that the parents don't have to do the driving around.
00:22:20.320So the parents don't have to pick them up somewhere and take them somewhere else.
00:22:23.160They can just stay at the school until 4 or 4.30 doing their sports or doing their activities.
00:22:27.880And then the parents can come pick them up later.
00:22:29.200So it's like literally the opposite of what they're describing in this CBC video.
00:23:11.360This is maybe the only true point that is made from a commentator in this video, which is that we put so much pressure on young people that they have to be like perfectly ready, that they have to like have everything done in the right order.
00:23:23.960They have to have a job, a career, make enough money, get a down payment, buy a house, and then they can start having kids.
00:23:29.960And for many people, by the time they do that, you know, it might be too late, it might be harder to get pregnant, they might have issues with that.
00:24:45.800So those were some of the most common reasons given for not having kids in that survey.
00:24:50.660But it still feels like something's missing, doesn't it?
00:24:53.700Because if we come back to that pie chart for a second, remember, 56% of people said they weren't likely to have kids because they just don't want to.
00:25:30.980That doesn't mean that she's going to live a fulfilled life.
00:25:32.920It doesn't mean that she's going to be 60, 70, 80 years old and feel good and fulfilled about her life.
00:25:38.260Like ask that same lady, go find her when she's old and ask her if she still feels that way that like, I'm free.
00:25:44.180I can just go out for dinner and go day drinking and go to Paris and just have so much fun all the time.
00:25:48.560Like, like that's not going to give you fulfillment in the long term.
00:25:51.540And it's sad that that's the message that they're promoting and the CBC, again, shame on the CBC for even putting that clip in this segment.
00:26:11.920Okay, so she says that the studies say that there's no evidence that having kids makes you happier and that somehow Gen Z are more in tune with this.
00:26:19.280Like they're wiser than the rest of us because they don't want kids because they know this like eternal truth or something like that.
00:26:25.640That's, I mean, that's just such a nihilistic way of looking at the world.
00:26:29.020The fact that they somehow know that having kids will make you unhappy.
00:26:33.040I think that the research on that is really questionable.
00:26:35.700They asked Americans to rank what they considered most important to them in order to live a fulfilling life.
00:26:53.820Now that's something that is, according to the researchers we spoke to, a pretty noticeable shift from previous generations.
00:27:01.640This generation actually really values their free time, their leisure time.
00:27:05.580They spend more time socializing than previous generations.
00:27:08.880And so they're not really clear they want to give up on those elements of their lives in order to have children.
00:27:16.400Okay, so I have to stop it right there because that is not true.
00:27:19.520Like everything you read about Gen Z is that they are the loneliest generation, that they're addicted to their screens, that they spend upwards of like 7, 8, 9, 10, something like 15 hours a day on their screens.
00:27:30.260That they're horribly depressed, that they're unprepared, they need safe spaces.
00:27:34.240Like this idea that somehow like Gen Z are this like carefree, happy generation that just cares about socializing and that they're out in person having fun with their friends and that's why they don't want kids.
00:27:44.440That's just the opposite of everything that I've seen in my life with Gen Zers that I know in my family or in like reports and sociologists looking at them.
00:27:55.000They're just trying to make a point here that doesn't make sense.
00:27:57.480It's that one economist lady, it's like, you know, she somehow says that Gen Zers earlier are like wiser than the rest of us, that they know that having children won't bring them happiness.
00:28:07.620And so they're more interested in just like day-to-day like joy and living for the moment.
00:28:27.920If I had kids, all of that time would be spent focusing on their schedule, focusing on their needs, focusing on all the stuff that helps make them successful humans as opposed to myself.
00:28:39.180Okay, so this woman says that she wants to focus on herself and her own inner child and that having children will get in the way of her own inner self-fulfillment.
00:28:47.660I mean, I probably agree that this person shouldn't have kids because she seems horribly selfish and narcissistic.
00:28:52.660But the message that she's portraying is the exact opposite.
00:28:55.280Look, the reality is that when you have kids, you kind of, in a way, you get to relive your own childhood, right?
00:29:00.920You get to live, see the joy of childhood and learning and developing through the eyes of a child, but you get to be present as the adult in their life, guiding them through it.
00:29:10.720And having that experience, I mean, you kind of like get to relive parts of your own childhood, like watching Disney movies with them.
00:29:18.220You remind yourself of, when you watch Disney movies or, you know, first day of school, all these kind of milestones that happen in your child life, it brings you back to your own childhood.
00:29:27.540And if that's what you want to focus on, I mean, being a parent gives you that opportunity.
00:29:32.760Being like a selfish, narcissistic, singleton living in an apartment somewhere and focusing entirely on like your inner self, that's going to take you further away from that.
00:29:42.860So the advice this person is trying to give is just terribly all wrong.
00:29:47.900And again, the fact that these are the kind of people that the CBC is including in their segment just tells you everything you need to know.
00:29:55.680It may be that historically the stress on career would have been framed as in, I want to have this good career because I need to be able to support my family.
00:30:04.020Now we're hearing people talk about it more about their own personal satisfaction about it.
00:30:23.460It's like they're purposefully choosing non-Canadians to highlight here, even though it's a Canadian segment on a Canadian television show.
00:32:42.900And having children and being married is important to the majority of Canadians.
00:32:48.060So it doesn't really make sense that they were like pitting those reasons against each other.
00:32:51.280And also, obviously, there's going to be a difference between men and women because men might value having a career as being the most important thing,
00:32:58.640whereas women might value having children as the most important thing.
00:33:02.100So just like even taking a step back, again, this documentary is entirely one side.
00:33:08.460They didn't talk about the other side at all.
00:33:11.260They didn't talk to anybody who wanted to talk about the upsides of having children.
00:33:14.800They didn't talk about anyone who might feel regretful or remorseful once they're older about not having children at all.
00:33:21.440And then on top of that, it's not it's not at all critical of this mindset about not having kids and how that's superior.
00:33:27.780They just talk to like two researchers who, I'm sorry to say, they both seem like middle aged women who don't seem very happy in their lives.
00:33:34.580They're not like they're not exactly like role models in our society.
00:33:38.160They're talking about like all the negatives and how bad things are.
00:33:41.120They don't talk about anything positive.
00:33:43.320And then every single TikTok that they grabbed went one way.
00:33:49.100The CBC glossed over any kind of societal problems that could come from falling fertility rates.
00:33:54.080Right. You had Elon Musk talking about how this is the biggest problem in the world.
00:33:57.720CBC didn't even mention the fact that with low fertility rates and 2022, by the way, was the lowest year on record in Canada.
00:34:05.260We saw a stat scan report come out saying that 2022 were way below replacement rate here, folks.
00:34:12.380We're talking about one point three, three children per women, the lowest in recorded history.
00:34:18.100Basically, it's just gone downhill since the pandemic.
00:34:21.640Not talking about, you know, what are the social consequences?
00:34:24.020What will happen to big government programs?
00:34:25.320What will happen to our health care system?
00:34:27.220What will happen to OAS and GAS and all these unfunded liabilities that we have when you have retirees making up a bigger and bigger percentage of the population?
00:34:35.860They didn't talk at all about the shift in gender roles.
00:34:38.700The idea that feminism tells women to go on this certain path and this certain path leads to them not having as many children as they want.
00:34:47.520So if you want to do a deep dive and you want to learn more about this issue, I think it's really important.
00:34:52.580I recommend a documentary called Birth Gap by the documentarian and journalist Stephen Shaw.
00:35:03.800He goes all over the world, talks to women, talks to people who have, you know, unfortunately not been able to find a partner and how hard it is for them and how it's not just this like, you know, carefree YOLO life that most of them end up deeply regretting it.
00:35:19.220And you can see that in the numbers as well.
00:35:21.780Like I mentioned earlier in this segment that 2% of people say that they don't want kids.
00:35:29.420When you look at the data, there's something called childless versus being childfree.
00:35:34.900And if you look at the numbers, it's pretty consistent that the number of people who are childfree because they don't want children has consistently been somewhere between 1% and 2%, right?
00:35:47.040And then the people who are childless, people who don't have kids, that's the number that's more concerning because there is a gap.
00:35:53.460We're talking about somewhere between 10% and 15% of women wanted kids and don't have them.
00:35:59.200And I think that that is a bigger reason why we see the declining birth rate, why we see the declining fertility rate.
00:36:06.540So the CBC at least attempted to cover this, which is, again, the most important issue of our time facing our civilization in 10, 20, 30 years to come.
00:36:16.420And rather than promoting a real alternative, rather than getting to the bottom of what the problems are and promoting a solution, even presenting it as a problem that needs to have a solution promoted.
00:36:26.360Instead, the CBC just shows us this, like, impulsive, selfish, self-fulfilling, like, I-want-it-now nihilistic view of this upcoming generation and kind of applauds them for not wanting children.
00:36:38.620It is absolutely the wrong message, completely backwards to what we should be hearing, what we should be telling young people.
00:36:45.860But what more do you expect from the CBC?
00:36:47.820They are ideological and their journalism is very low quality, despite the $1.4 billion they get from taxpayers every year.