Juno News - CBC promotes a childless life

00:00:00.000 The CBC attempted to find out why Canadians are having fewer kids, and they failed miserably.

00:00:06.560 It's Fake News Friday, I'm Candice Malcolm, and this is The Candice Malcolm Show.

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00:00:40.760 Okay, 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.

00:00:50.420 The 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.

00:01:08.880 I think it's the biggest issue facing our country.

00:01:11.680 Even Elon Musk recently said that he believes that it is the biggest issue facing our civilization.

00:01:17.340 Let's play that clip.

00:01:18.100 What the world will face in 20 years is population collapse.

00:01:22.940 Collapse.

00:01:23.800 I want to emphasize this.

00:01:25.120 The biggest issue in 20 years will be population collapse.

00:01:30.180 Not explosion, collapse.

00:01:34.520 It's very easy to see what the world will look like in 20 years, because humans have a 20-year boot sequence.

00:01:40.720 So like you said, okay, well, who was born last year?

00:01:43.180 Okay, now you know what the world looked like in 20 years.

00:01:44.880 That's exactly right.

00:01:46.040 And good for Elon Musk for raising this issue.

00:01:48.360 That was back in 2022.

00:01:49.700 He's made similar comments over and over.

00:01:51.940 You 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.

00:01:59.880 Elon Musk sees it the complete opposite, that we're not replacing our populations.

00:02:04.080 You can look at the demographics.

00:02:05.420 So he's raising the alarm bell in a very public way.

00:02:08.300 Demographers and researchers and sort of conservative writers and thinkers have been talking about this issue for a very, very long time.

00:02:15.880 And so I was very pleased to see that the CBC covered it.

00:02:19.640 The CBC had a documentary or a segment on one of their news shows that ended up on YouTube.

00:02:25.580 It 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.

00:02:33.760 And given my conversation with Erin Lee Woodrick, I thought, hey, this is great.

00:02:37.180 The CBC is finally covering this issue.

00:02:39.280 All Canadians need to be aware of it.

00:02:40.780 We need to be talking about it.

00:02:41.540 We need to be thinking about how to solve this issue.

00:02:44.920 And so you can imagine my surprise when I watch this clip from the CBC.

00:02:48.220 It's about 10 minutes.

00:02:49.280 And basically, the CBC managed to get every aspect of this issue wrong.

00:02:53.920 Not only that, they produced a very cheap, very lazy, very sort of low-quality, low-budget attempt to answer this question.

00:03:02.720 So I'm going to play you parts of this documentary or part of this segment today.

00:03:06.000 And just point out all the very many ways that the CBC gets it wrong.

00:03:11.400 Look, we're talking about an organization that gets $1.4 billion from the taxpayers every year.

00:03:16.400 And this is the best that they can come up with.

00:03:18.400 This 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.

00:03:28.520 So let's go through it now.

00:03:29.700 I 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.

00:03:40.080 So let's play this clip.

00:03:40.840 Do you want kids?

00:03:42.920 That's a pretty sensitive question, right, for a lot of people.

00:03:45.660 And maybe now more than ever.

00:03:48.380 Do I really want this?

00:03:50.100 Because kids are the ultimate decision.

00:03:52.400 There's a no-return policy on that.

00:03:54.440 Why is it so permanent?

00:03:57.120 How am I supposed to make that decision?

00:03:58.420 In the U.S.?

00:04:00.580 Pause it right there.

00:04:01.900 First, right off the bat, we have some TikTokers. 1.00

00:04:04.600 So 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.

00:04:11.420 And we'll see there's a trend throughout this clip that these are not even Canadian people, right?

00:04:15.640 These are influencers on TikTok.

00:04:18.480 We looked into them.

00:04:19.760 Those 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. 1.00

00:04:26.400 Okay, let's resume.

00:04:28.320 The survey suggests only about half of people between the ages of 18 and 34 say, yes, I want to be a parent.

00:04:36.620 Now, maybe that number alone isn't shocking, but compared to 2003, when 86% of Americans in that age group said they wanted kids.

00:04:45.580 Okay, pause it there.

00:04:46.660 Okay, so first of all, this is the CBC.

00:04:49.440 We pay them $1.4 billion to do Canadian research and tell Canadian stories.

00:04:53.500 Right off the bat, we have two American TikTokers. 1.00

00:04:55.360 The CBC is presenting American data.

00:04:57.480 They're looking at a Pew research study and a Gallup research study.

00:05:00.040 So my question is, why can't you find the Canadian equivalent?

00:05:02.320 Why don't you show Canadian numbers?

00:05:03.840 This is a Canadian segment for the Canadian news.

00:05:06.140 It's the CBC, for goodness sake.

00:05:07.640 You get $1.4 billion a year to report Canadian stories.

00:05:10.960 And yet here you are lazily taking TikToks from the internet to show what two American women believe is the problem. 1.00

00:05:18.660 And then you're showing this data and we're not even comparing apples to apples.

00:05:22.340 Like it seems alarming at first glance, 51% versus 86%.

00:05:26.100 You read the five print and the studies are different, right?

00:05:29.360 There's different age groups.

00:05:30.800 So on the left, the 2024 one is asking Americans aged 18 to 34.

00:05:36.200 On the right, 18 to 40.

00:05:38.400 One is a research study.

00:05:40.900 The other one is Gallup.

00:05:43.080 And you don't even know what the question is.

00:05:45.260 What exactly is the question?

00:05:46.300 And who is it to?

00:05:47.340 Are you asking both men and women?

00:05:49.340 Or are you asking both?

00:05:50.240 Because there's going to be a difference.

00:05:51.140 So 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.

00:06:03.280 And just a further point.

00:06:04.540 So the Gallup poll from 2003, rather than following up with another Gallup poll, they follow up with a Pew Research poll, which is inexplicable.

00:06:12.580 When 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.

00:06:21.680 So I pull up this article from Gallup, and it says that Americans' preference for larger families, the highest since 1971.

00:06:29.280 Again, this is a follow-up to that 2001 study, the same study.

00:06:32.580 This is released in 2023.

00:06:34.080 And it says in this article that 47% think that one or two child is ideal.

00:06:40.380 That includes 44% say two children is ideal.

00:06:44.320 Okay.

00:06:44.900 Even more, 45% of U.S. adults say that three or more children is the ideal family size.

00:06:51.280 Just 2% of Americans, 2%, think the ideal family includes no children at all.

00:06:57.360 And it notes that Black families, religious families, and younger adults favor larger families.

00:07:03.000 That is what the Gallup report from 2023, the latest result, shows.

00:07:07.240 So 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.

00:07:19.340 Rather 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.

00:07:31.060 So CBC not starting out very good with this segment, let's resume.

00:07:36.260 Pretty good shift over just a couple of decades.

00:07:38.920 And in Canada, it's not all that different.

00:07:42.360 When young adults here were asked in a survey a couple of years ago how many kids they planned on having, 34% said none.

00:07:51.880 But a similar question in 2001, only around 7% of Canadians in the same age group said the same thing.

00:07:58.760 Okay, pause for a second there.

00:08:00.300 So 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.

00:08:12.120 And that's where you get 75% saying that they don't want kids, sorry, 65% saying they don't want kids.

00:08:16.460 In 2001, the study was asking adults, Canadian adults, between 20 and 34.

00:08:22.000 So that's a different age group.

00:08:23.080 If 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.

00:08:28.440 And 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.

00:08:38.760 Whereas, again, there's other research and other data that shows that that's not the case.

00:08:42.480 It obviously depends on when in a person's life you ask them.

00:08:45.620 But 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.

00:08:53.060 So not a great study.

00:08:54.280 And also, this isn't a survey.

00:08:55.500 This isn't a study.

00:08:56.220 This is actually census data.

00:08:57.740 Because if you look at the survey size, it's saying that they talked to 16 million Canadians, which is not a survey.

00:09:03.660 This is just what people write down in the census.

00:09:06.380 Okay, let's keep that going.

00:09:07.720 It's not entirely clear why it's taking people longer and longer.

00:09:12.200 But the dating world has changed a lot over the past couple of decades.

00:09:17.620 Think about this.

00:09:18.540 You can go on three dates with someone and have an amazing time and then never hear from them again.

00:09:23.740 A 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.

00:09:31.740 Like, 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.

00:09:39.100 A few years ago, Pew asked those who were single and looking to rate how their dating life was going.

00:09:45.800 75% 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.

00:10:01.340 About half of those respondents also agreed that dating has become more difficult over the past decade.

00:10:08.300 Okay, let's just pause it here.

00:10:10.060 I think that it's an interesting perspective.

00:10:12.840 And yes, I think part of the reason why our fertility rates falling is because people are waiting longer and longer.

00:10:18.340 The CPC kind of just glosses over why and pretends it's entirely because people just can't find the right partner.

00:10:24.640 In our society, young women are told to get educated, get a career, become self-sufficient, become financially independent. 0.90

00:10:30.460 You don't need a man. 0.89

00:10:31.280 And then all of a sudden, they're wondering, like, well, hey, why aren't women and men coupling up and having kids?

00:10:35.860 It'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. 1.00

00:10:42.880 And then, surprise, surprise, many of them are not.

00:10:45.940 And 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.

00:10:55.680 It's like, you know, maybe you're asking the wrong people.

00:10:58.860 Maybe these dating apps aren't the right way to find a partner.

00:11:01.860 Maybe 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.

00:11:10.220 I 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.

00:11:21.720 Therefore, when it comes to finding a mate, you have to go online.

00:11:24.240 Like, 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.

00:11:36.140 Again, if you're dating now, you probably weren't dating 10 years ago.

00:11:39.860 Like, most people don't date for 10 years.

00:11:41.840 Most 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.

00:11:47.320 They weren't dating 10 years ago.

00:11:48.960 They were 15 years old.

00:11:49.740 So they don't really know by comparison what it was like.

00:11:53.520 And, again, not really getting into very deep analysis here.

00:11:57.240 Okay, let's keep playing.

00:11:58.160 Another reason on that list of reasons not to see kids in one's future was financial.

00:12:09.240 Children are expensive.

00:12:10.920 And they're even more expensive in industrialized nations.

00:12:14.040 In Canada, a recent report tried to put a number on just how expensive.

00:12:18.880 So 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.

00:12:26.920 Their 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.

00:12:38.960 So 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.

00:12:48.340 Okay, just stop it right there.

00:12:49.840 Okay, you hear this kind of claim a lot, so I want to go through it in a bit of detail.

00:12:53.340 The CBC claims that it costs $750,000 to raise kids.

00:12:58.180 You kind of hear these big, huge numbers thrown around a lot in the media.

00:13:00.900 Notice that the CBC doesn't give you a source at all.

00:13:03.280 They don't tell you where this data comes from.

00:13:04.800 They don't show you how it's broken down.

00:13:06.400 Like, what is the monthly breakdown?

00:13:08.180 What are you talking about in terms of, like, child care costs and a bigger house and more cars?

00:13:13.660 Like, is that universal?

00:13:15.460 Is 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?

00:13:25.300 Because that's not the normal experience.

00:13:26.720 And you can literally do this with anything if you take the cost of something over 22 years, right?

00:13:32.140 So, just as an example, I looked up, like, what is the cost of owning a car in Canada?

00:13:37.240 Well, 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,

00:13:50.880 it breaks down to approximately $1,387 per month, which would make it $16,644 a year to own a car.

00:14:01.860 If 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,

00:14:09.640 so we're talking about an $8,000 down payment and a loan payment of about $31,000,

00:14:15.800 so somewhere around $1,000 a month in car payments.

00:14:19.980 So, that would get us to $13,000 a year.

00:14:23.540 So, 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,

00:14:29.920 you're talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars, probably somewhere around $500,000 or $600,000 just to own a used car.

00:14:37.040 But 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.

00:14:43.560 You could do this with the cost of new clothes every year, the cost of vacations, the cost of subscriptions on your phone,

00:14:48.580 the cost of going out for dinner or your morning coffee.

00:14:51.400 You add it up over time.

00:14:52.700 The number seems really shocking.

00:14:54.500 And I think the reason that left-wing journalists and media throw this big, huge number around is to scare people.

00:15:00.920 It'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.

00:15:09.000 But the reality is that, yeah, of course, there's costs associated with having kids.

00:15:12.580 I know I have three kids and one on the way.

00:15:15.140 And so, you have to buy diapers.

00:15:16.440 You have to buy new clothes.

00:15:17.680 The reality is you can get a lot of this stuff used.

00:15:19.900 You can get a lot of this stuff for free off of, like, a Facebook group or a mom group.

00:15:23.340 Because whenever there's new kids, it's like other people's kids are growing older and they have all this stuff that they can give to you.

00:15:29.820 It doesn't have to be incredibly expensive.

00:15:32.180 You don't have to use formula.

00:15:33.580 You can nurse your child.

00:15:34.680 You don't have to buy diapers.

00:15:35.800 You can use cloth diapers.

00:15:36.840 Like, there's all kinds of ways that you can make it less expensive.

00:15:40.660 There's also all kinds of ways that you can make it even more expensive.

00:15:43.060 If you want to have, like, the latest top-of-the-line stroller or, you know, brand-new designer clothes for kids.

00:15:49.000 Like, you can do a lot of things to make it really expensive to have kids.

00:15:52.740 But you don't really have to.

00:15:54.000 You 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.

00:16:01.020 And it doesn't have to be that expensive.

00:16:02.740 So, I really cringe and I reject these huge numbers, like $750,000 to have kids.

00:16:08.440 I think it's just totally false.

00:16:09.820 It's the wrong way of thinking about it, wrong way of looking at it.

00:16:11.940 Whenever you see statistics like this thrown around, just know it's propaganda.

00:16:15.540 It's propaganda and fear-mongering designed to make people not want to have kids.

00:16:19.440 Okay, let's resume the video.

00:16:21.660 For bedroom, for child.

00:16:22.640 And when you factor in all those things, it has to be just the base cost of feeding, clothing, educating a child is out of reach.

00:16:31.940 And I can't imagine bringing a child.

00:16:34.900 Okay, just stop for a second because this is just so much of this in this video.

00:16:39.060 It's like we keep seeing these American TikTokers with their superficial analysis. 1.00

00:16:43.100 Now we finally hear from this individual.

00:16:44.880 He sounds like he's from Australia to me.

00:16:47.020 We don't know who he is.

00:16:48.040 Is he like an expert?

00:16:49.080 Is he some kind of an expert in not having kids?

00:16:51.580 I mean, he looks like a pretty young guy to me.

00:16:53.520 And we're told that he's just some guy who doesn't want kids.

00:16:56.880 We Googled this individual's name, Arden Matthews.

00:16:59.540 And he was featured in another CBC story, oddly, on the same topic.

00:17:04.300 We learned that Arden Matthews is 26 years old.

00:17:07.760 He's engaged to their longtime partner.

00:17:10.180 So, pardon me, it's not a he. 0.99

00:17:11.920 It's a they. 1.00

00:17:13.340 And they, he says that they're not having kids because it's too expensive, even though he has a well-paying job in Vancouver.

00:17:20.940 So, again, I have no idea why the CBC chose this person to be the spokesperson for his generation, their generation.

00:17:29.220 Again, who is he?

00:17:31.500 He works in tech.

00:17:32.460 He's like, he's like a guy off the street.

00:17:34.720 And somehow he is representative of all Canadians. 0.94

00:17:38.220 Okay, great, great journalism from the CBC.

00:17:40.720 Let's keep playing here.

00:17:42.720 Well, that I couldn't afford to help thrive.

00:17:45.240 And here's the thing.

00:17:46.780 That study used data from 2014 to 2017.

00:17:51.440 Since then, the cost of pretty much everything has gone up.

00:17:55.100 Thanks to terrible liberal policies, including the printing of money, shutting down our economy during COVID.

00:18:00.740 And uncontrollable inflation.

00:18:03.960 So, he kind of just finally got to the point there, brushes over it.

00:18:07.760 Yeah, the cost of living has exploded basically since Justin Trudeau got elected.

00:18:11.880 But no analysis, nothing deeper there.

00:18:14.100 Just kind of like a throwaway line.

00:18:15.860 Oh, and by the way, these numbers are old and the new numbers are even worse because of how devastated our economy is now.

00:18:23.100 So, again, just glossing over the truth and not really hitting the nail on the head at all.

00:18:28.600 Okay, let's keep playing.

00:18:30.320 Prenatal care, doctor's appointments, the hospital bills.

00:18:33.500 Then after the baby is actually born, you have, you know, diapers, food, wipes.

00:18:39.260 Okay, just stop it right there.

00:18:41.200 I don't want to be a dead horse.

00:18:42.820 But this person right here is an American influencer.

00:18:46.240 Her entire TikTok shtick is that she doesn't want kids. 1.00

00:18:49.020 You can look at her profile, child-free, happy.

00:18:52.280 Like, her whole audience is built around this young woman in Washington, D.C. who just doesn't want kids. 1.00

00:18:57.480 Leave her alone. 1.00

00:18:58.200 It's all about advocating for not having kids.

00:19:01.120 Again, she's American. 0.64

00:19:01.880 And this example that she's giving us about the costs of, like, health care costs is so irrelevant in Canada.

00:19:07.260 It's like, hello, we have government-funded health care.

00:19:09.440 No one pays out of pocket for this stuff.

00:19:11.260 Even in the United States, they don't pay out of pocket for this kind of stuff.

00:19:15.060 Like, when talking about, you know, neonatal care and having an OB and going for your doctor's visits.

00:19:21.100 Like, it's so irrelevant.

00:19:22.460 Why would the CBC decide to put this clip into this documentary?

00:19:26.360 Because we're talking about Canada.

00:19:28.120 We're talking about the Canadian experience.

00:19:30.100 So 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.

00:19:37.060 Okay, let's keep playing.

00:19:37.980 There is an expectation among society and employers, probably more importantly, that if a woman has children, her job will no longer be her priority. 1.00

00:19:48.060 And this is a measurable cost.

00:19:49.580 We know that women who have children earn less than women who don't. 0.98

00:19:53.400 And one more thing about cost.

00:19:54.320 Oh, they come so close.

00:19:55.200 They come so close to talking about the real issue.

00:19:57.160 So 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. 1.00

00:20:09.560 It's like, it's like, yes, that's exactly right.

00:20:11.720 You could have someone who has a very successful, very fulfilling career, something like a lawyer.

00:20:15.580 And then as soon as they have kids, they realize that law is not their top priority anymore.

00:20:20.400 They 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.

00:20:28.940 They would much rather be at home with the child.

00:20:30.840 This is like one of the real issues that we should be talking about.

00:20:33.740 They 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. 1.00

00:20:39.280 It's like, yeah, women would, by and large, most women would rather be with their kid. 0.99

00:20:45.200 And 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.

00:20:53.300 I'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.

00:21:02.820 Like 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.

00:21:10.700 It'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.

00:21:22.840 So 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.

00:21:29.940 Okay, let's keep playing.

00:21:30.700 Parents ever told you, back in my day, we just went outside and climbed trees until it got dark.

00:21:37.860 And meanwhile, you're zipping back and forth between soccer and gymnastics and swimming and piano, if you can even afford that.

00:21:44.160 And don't do those things.

00:21:45.500 This is really simple, right?

00:21:46.700 It's like, don't overprogram your child.

00:21:48.500 If you're worried about things being too expensive, then don't enroll them on all those things.

00:21:52.300 Just let them have like a simple carefree childhood where they can run around and play with their friends in their neighborhood.

00:21:57.620 Like that's not a negative thing.

00:21:58.620 It's maybe saying that parents shouldn't be so uptight about all these extracurricular activities.

00:22:03.860 And I don't know what's the circumstance in everyone's community.

00:22:06.980 But 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.

00:22:20.320 So the parents don't have to pick them up somewhere and take them somewhere else.

00:22:23.160 They can just stay at the school until 4 or 4.30 doing their sports or doing their activities.

00:22:27.880 And then the parents can come pick them up later.

00:22:29.200 So it's like literally the opposite of what they're describing in this CBC video.

00:22:33.080 Okay, let's keep playing.

00:22:34.400 Don't have kids till you can afford them.

00:22:36.260 What does that mean?

00:22:37.120 That is so subjective.

00:22:38.660 Afford what?

00:22:39.320 Okay, so first of all, this documentary, this clip is so out of order.

00:22:44.120 Like it's just randomly inserting different opinions about different topics here and there.

00:22:48.460 It's almost hard to keep up with it.

00:22:49.840 It's so schizophrenic.

00:22:51.000 But here we had a woman who said, you know, why is the emphasis so much on whether you can afford children?

00:22:56.260 It's kind of out of place.

00:22:57.400 But this is the first comment that I've actually agreed with in this entire segment here.

00:23:02.300 Because she says, you know, why is that the emphasis?

00:23:04.900 I don't know what else she says afterwards because, again, it's like a three or five second clip.

00:23:09.940 But I think this is a true point.

00:23:11.360 This 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.

00:23:23.960 They have to have a job, a career, make enough money, get a down payment, buy a house, and then they can start having kids.

00:23:29.960 And 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.

00:23:36.860 I think that's wrong, right?

00:23:38.140 There's no perfect timing to have kids.

00:23:40.300 Like, especially if you have a career.

00:23:41.560 The more you work in your career, get established, it's always going to be hard.

00:23:45.620 It's never going to be easy to take that break.

00:23:47.900 You can say, oh, maybe in two years I'll have more money.

00:23:49.840 And then two years comes and you still don't.

00:23:52.100 Like, you don't need to own a home in order to have a baby.

00:23:56.000 My husband and I rented a house and we were renting when we had our son.

00:23:59.620 And a couple of years later, we bought a house.

00:24:01.520 It doesn't matter.

00:24:02.720 It doesn't matter at all.

00:24:03.760 So I think this is right.

00:24:05.580 Like, if you're waiting for some perfect time to have a baby, you may wait too long, you may regret it.

00:24:11.040 Instead, we should just encourage people, you know, once you find your partner, once you're happily in a stable relationship, go for it.

00:24:18.000 Go have kids.

00:24:18.700 Have kids while you can, while you're young, while you're energetic, while you can enjoy them.

00:24:22.520 Don't wait.

00:24:23.100 Don't put it off.

00:24:23.820 That's the message that we should be sending to young people rather than this, like, doom and gloom message.

00:24:29.160 Like, it's so expensive.

00:24:30.340 You can't afford it.

00:24:31.100 It's going to cost you three quarters of a million dollars.

00:24:33.360 No, just ignore all that.

00:24:35.100 Just, just, there's no perfect timing.

00:24:36.540 It's never going to be perfect.

00:24:37.480 Just go and have kids. 0.99

00:24:38.660 That's, that's the best advice that I think you can get.

00:24:40.620 Okay, let's keep playing.

00:24:45.800 So those were some of the most common reasons given for not having kids in that survey.

00:24:50.660 But it still feels like something's missing, doesn't it?

00:24:53.700 Because 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.

00:25:03.260 How can we explain that?

00:25:04.780 Randomly, my husband will look over at me and be like, you want to take a train to Paris this weekend?

00:25:09.140 Yes, do what you want.

00:25:10.420 Have kids, don't have kids.

00:25:11.720 But hear me when I say you can live a fulfilled life without them.

00:25:16.140 Okay, just, just stop right there.

00:25:17.820 What she described is not a fulfilled life.

00:25:19.680 Okay, jumping on a plane, jumping on a train, going to Paris, like YOLO, you only live once, have fun.

00:25:24.600 You know, hearing this from like a 25-year-old.

00:25:26.840 That's not good advice.

00:25:27.880 That's not good life advice.

00:25:29.000 She's having fun now.

00:25:30.980 That doesn't mean that she's going to live a fulfilled life.

00:25:32.920 It doesn't mean that she's going to be 60, 70, 80 years old and feel good and fulfilled about her life.

00:25:38.260 Like 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.

00:25:44.180 I can just go out for dinner and go day drinking and go to Paris and just have so much fun all the time.

00:25:48.560 Like, like that's not going to give you fulfillment in the long term.

00:25:51.540 And 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.

00:25:58.520 Okay, let's resume.

00:25:59.240 It's having children makes people happier.

00:26:03.980 And I think that for young people, I think they recognize that.

00:26:08.440 And so they are prioritizing other things.

00:26:10.780 Okay, just stop right there.

00:26:11.920 Okay, 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.

00:26:19.280 Like 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.

00:26:25.640 That's, I mean, that's just such a nihilistic way of looking at the world.

00:26:29.020 The fact that they somehow know that having kids will make you unhappy.

00:26:33.040 I think that the research on that is really questionable.

00:26:35.700 They asked Americans to rank what they considered most important to them in order to live a fulfilling life.

00:26:43.020 Number three was having children.

00:26:45.740 But ahead of kids were two other factors.

00:26:48.720 And they both commanded a lot more enthusiasm.

00:26:51.360 Number two was having close friends.

00:26:53.820 Now that's something that is, according to the researchers we spoke to, a pretty noticeable shift from previous generations.

00:27:01.640 This generation actually really values their free time, their leisure time.

00:27:05.580 They spend more time socializing than previous generations.

00:27:08.880 And so they're not really clear they want to give up on those elements of their lives in order to have children.

00:27:16.400 Okay, so I have to stop it right there because that is not true.

00:27:19.520 Like 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. 0.99

00:27:30.260 That they're horribly depressed, that they're unprepared, they need safe spaces.

00:27:34.240 Like 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. 0.93

00:27:44.440 That'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. 0.92

00:27:53.860 It's like the opposite.

00:27:55.000 They're just trying to make a point here that doesn't make sense.

00:27:57.480 It'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.

00:28:07.620 And so they're more interested in just like day-to-day like joy and living for the moment.

00:28:14.720 There's just nothing true about that.

00:28:16.420 It's really superficial and it's not true.

00:28:19.060 The evidence shows us the opposite.

00:28:20.940 Okay, let's keep playing.

00:28:21.820 Indulging my inner child.

00:28:27.920 If 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.

00:28:39.180 Okay, 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. 1.00

00:28:47.660 I mean, I probably agree that this person shouldn't have kids because she seems horribly selfish and narcissistic. 1.00

00:28:52.660 But the message that she's portraying is the exact opposite.

00:28:55.280 Look, the reality is that when you have kids, you kind of, in a way, you get to relive your own childhood, right?

00:29:00.920 You 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.

00:29:10.720 And having that experience, I mean, you kind of like get to relive parts of your own childhood, like watching Disney movies with them.

00:29:18.220 You 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.

00:29:27.540 And if that's what you want to focus on, I mean, being a parent gives you that opportunity.

00:29:32.760 Being 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. 0.64

00:29:42.860 So the advice this person is trying to give is just terribly all wrong.

00:29:47.900 And 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.

00:29:53.760 All right, let's finish this up.

00:29:55.680 It 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.

00:30:04.020 Now we're hearing people talk about it more about their own personal satisfaction about it.

00:30:10.180 You can be ambitious and have kids.

00:30:11.540 I'm not saying you can't.

00:30:12.460 But my business is my baby.

00:30:14.240 It takes up so much time and energy, stress.

00:30:17.720 I just couldn't do that and have a kid.

00:30:19.220 It is now.

00:30:19.640 Okay, sorry.

00:30:20.320 Just final thought there.

00:30:21.960 They're just totally gaslighting us.

00:30:23.460 It's like they're purposefully choosing non-Canadians to highlight here, even though it's a Canadian segment on a Canadian television show.

00:30:29.340 Okay, that's final thought.

00:30:30.580 Let's just keep playing.

00:30:33.280 In society to choose to not have kids.

00:30:35.840 So you can talk about making this choice.

00:30:38.940 Oh, I want to pursue my career and not have kids.

00:30:42.220 And that's okay.

00:30:43.740 Now, to be clear, all of these studies we're talking about are capturing people's intentions at a single point in time.

00:30:50.920 It's impossible to know how many of them will change their minds.

00:30:54.260 The number of women over 50 without children has been rising steadily in both Canada and the United States over the past decade.

00:31:01.720 And StatsCan projects the financial reasons holding people back in particular will do much to shape what future generations look like.

00:31:09.860 Okay, and that's it.

00:31:14.880 We don't even get like concluding thoughts.

00:31:17.040 They just kind of randomly say, you know, this is a snapshot.

00:31:19.720 People's mind could change.

00:31:21.120 And people over 50 who don't have kids, the number is growing.

00:31:24.240 So we just really like lack of thought, lack of analysis going into this.

00:31:28.640 There was a really interesting study that came out from Cardis about a year ago, January 2023.

00:31:33.920 You'd think that they would include in this.

00:31:35.540 The Cardis study showed that through an Angus Reid survey of 2,700 women in Canada, age 18 to 44,

00:31:42.640 they learned that basically more than half of Canadian women are having fewer children than they want.

00:31:48.840 So Canadian women want children, but because of their circumstances, they're not having as many children as they want. 1.00

00:31:56.580 So they call this like the missing children, right, which makes women unhappier. 1.00

00:32:02.260 And, you know, you'd think that that's like an important element to choose, that it's not necessarily that women don't want children. 0.97

00:32:07.620 It's that because of their circumstances, they can't have as many children as they want.

00:32:11.860 And there's a number of reasons for that, which some of them were mentioned in the documentary here, but not very many.

00:32:16.920 We also have other Canadian studies that show, again, the opposite.

00:32:21.260 It's like an Ipsos poll from February 2024 showed that seven in 10 Canadians rated having children as important.

00:32:28.080 So when they showed those three points of why people weren't having children in the documentary,

00:32:34.020 you know, this is like all things that people would want simultaneously.

00:32:37.300 It's like, yes, I want to have a good job.

00:32:39.200 Yes, I want to have close friends.

00:32:40.800 Sure, you need money to live.

00:32:42.900 And having children and being married is important to the majority of Canadians.

00:32:48.060 So it doesn't really make sense that they were like pitting those reasons against each other.

00:32:51.280 And 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,

00:32:58.640 whereas women might value having children as the most important thing. 1.00

00:33:02.100 So just like even taking a step back, again, this documentary is entirely one side.

00:33:08.460 They didn't talk about the other side at all.

00:33:10.160 They didn't talk to any parents.

00:33:11.260 They didn't talk to anybody who wanted to talk about the upsides of having children.

00:33:14.800 They didn't talk about anyone who might feel regretful or remorseful once they're older about not having children at all.

00:33:21.440 And 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.

00:33:27.780 They 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.

00:33:34.580 They're not like they're not exactly like role models in our society.

00:33:38.160 They're talking about like all the negatives and how bad things are.

00:33:41.120 They don't talk about anything positive.

00:33:43.320 And then every single TikTok that they grabbed went one way.

00:33:47.200 None of them went the other way.

00:33:49.100 The CBC glossed over any kind of societal problems that could come from falling fertility rates.

00:33:54.080 Right. You had Elon Musk talking about how this is the biggest problem in the world.

00:33:57.720 CBC didn't even mention the fact that with low fertility rates and 2022, by the way, was the lowest year on record in Canada.

00:34:05.260 We saw a stat scan report come out saying that 2022 were way below replacement rate here, folks.

00:34:12.380 We're talking about one point three, three children per women, the lowest in recorded history.

00:34:18.100 Basically, it's just gone downhill since the pandemic.

00:34:21.640 Not talking about, you know, what are the social consequences?

00:34:24.020 What will happen to big government programs?

00:34:25.320 What will happen to our health care system?

00:34:27.220 What 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? 1.00

00:34:35.860 They didn't talk at all about the shift in gender roles.

00:34:38.700 The 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. 1.00

00:34:47.520 So if you want to do a deep dive and you want to learn more about this issue, I think it's really important.

00:34:52.580 I recommend a documentary called Birth Gap by the documentarian and journalist Stephen Shaw.

00:34:58.880 He talks about it.

00:34:59.560 It's called Birth Gap, A Childless World. 0.98

00:35:01.460 And he does a tough, tough journal.

00:35:03.800 He 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.

00:35:19.220 And you can see that in the numbers as well.

00:35:21.780 Like I mentioned earlier in this segment that 2% of people say that they don't want kids.

00:35:28.040 That's pretty consistent.

00:35:29.420 When you look at the data, there's something called childless versus being childfree.

00:35:34.900 And 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?

00:35:47.040 And 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.

00:35:53.460 We're talking about somewhere between 10% and 15% of women wanted kids and don't have them. 1.00

00:35:59.200 And I think that that is a bigger reason why we see the declining birth rate, why we see the declining fertility rate.

00:36:06.540 So 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.

00:36:16.420 And 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.

00:36:26.360 Instead, 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.

00:36:38.620 It is absolutely the wrong message, completely backwards to what we should be hearing, what we should be telling young people.

00:36:45.860 But what more do you expect from the CBC?

00:36:47.820 They are ideological and their journalism is very low quality, despite the $1.4 billion they get from taxpayers every year.

00:36:56.960 Thanks so much for tuning in.

00:36:57.920 It's Fake News Friday.

00:36:58.760 I'm Candace Malcolm, and this is The Candace Malcolm Show.

Juno News - March 22, 2024

CBC promotes a childless life

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