The CBC attempted to find out why Canadians are having fewer kids, and they failed miserably. It's Fake News Friday, hosted by Candice Malan, and today she's talking about why Canadian women are choosing not to have kids.
00:00:00.000The CBC attempted to find out why Canadians are having fewer kids, and they failed miserably.
00:00:06.600It's Fake News Friday, I'm Candice Malcolm, and this is The Candice Malcolm Show.
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00:00:40.800Okay, 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.
00:00:50.460The 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.
00:01:08.920I think it's the biggest issue facing our country.
00:01:11.700Even Elon Musk recently said that he believes that it is the biggest issue facing our civilization.
00:01:49.740He's made similar comments over and over.
00:01:51.980You 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.
00:02:05.460So he's raising the alarm bell in a very public way.
00:02:08.340Demographers and researchers and sort of conservative writers and thinkers have been talking about this issue for a very, very long time.
00:02:15.920And so I was very pleased to see that the CBC covered it.
00:02:19.680The CBC had a documentary or a segment on one of their news shows that ended up on YouTube.
00:02:25.620It 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.
00:02:33.800And given my conversation with Erin Lee Woodrick, I thought, hey, this is great.
00:02:37.220The CBC is finally covering this issue.
00:02:49.320And basically, the CBC managed to get every aspect of this issue wrong.
00:02:53.960Not only that, they produced a very cheap, very lazy, very sort of low-quality, low-budget attempt to answer this question.
00:03:02.760So I'm going to play you parts of this documentary or part of this segment today.
00:03:06.040And 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.
00:03:16.440And this is the best that they can come up with.
00:03:18.600This 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.
00:06:04.360So the Gallup poll from 2003, rather than following up with another Gallup poll, they follow up with a Pew Research poll, which is inexplicable.
00:06:12.840When 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.
00:06:21.720So I pull up this article from Gallup, and it says that Americans' preference for larger families, the highest since 1971.
00:06:29.320Again, this is a follow-up to that 2001 study, the same study.
00:06:32.420This is released in 2023, and it says in this article that 47% think that one or two child is ideal.
00:06:40.440That includes 44%, say two children is ideal.
00:06:44.940Even more, 45% of U.S. adults say that three or more children is the ideal family size.
00:06:51.320Just 2% of Americans, 2%, think the ideal family includes no children at all.
00:06:57.120And it notes that Black families, religious families, and younger adults favor larger families.
00:07:03.160That is what the Gallup report from 2023, the latest result, shows.
00:07:07.220So 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.
00:07:18.960Rather 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.
00:07:31.300So CBC not starting out very good with this segment.
00:08:00.180So 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, and that's where you get 75% saying that they don't want kids.
00:08:15.160Sorry, 65% saying they don't want kids.
00:08:16.820The 2001 study was asking adults, Canadian adults, between 20 and 34.
00:08:23.120You're asking a 15-year-old, do you want kids?
00:08:24.940You're going to get a different answer than if you ask a 30-year-old.
00:08:27.840And 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.
00:08:38.780Whereas, again, there's other research and other data that shows that that's not the case.
00:08:42.520It obviously depends on when in a person's life you ask them, 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.
00:08:56.200This is actually census data, because if you look at the survey size, it's saying that they talked to 16 million Canadians, which is not a survey.
00:09:03.700This is just what people write down in the census.
00:09:07.700It's not entirely clear why it's taking people longer and longer, but the dating world has changed a lot over the past couple of decades.
00:09:17.340Think about this. You can go on three dates with someone and have an amazing time and then never hear from them again.
00:09:23.980A 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.
00:09:31.520Like, 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.
00:09:39.120A few years ago, Pew asked those who were single and looking to rate how their dating life was going.
00:09:45.36075% 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.
00:10:00.960About half of those respondents also agreed that dating has become more difficult over the past decade.
00:10:08.500Okay, let's just pause it here. I think that it's an interesting perspective, and yes, I think part of the reason why our fertility rate's falling is because people are waiting longer and longer.
00:10:18.720The CPC kind of just glosses over why and pretends it's entirely because people just can't find the right partner.
00:10:24.620In our society, young women are told to get educated, get a career, become self-sufficient, become financially independent.
00:10:30.120You don't need a man. And then all of a sudden they're wondering like, well, hey, why aren't women and men coupling up and having kids?
00:10:35.880It'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.
00:10:42.900And then surprise, surprise, many of them are not.
00:10:46.060And 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.
00:10:58.700Maybe these dating apps aren't the right way to find a partner.
00:11:01.900Maybe the best way is still, you know, people finding partners and getting married through their community, people you meet in school, people you meet at work, people that you know, friends of friends.
00:11:10.540I 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.
00:11:21.620Therefore, when it comes to finding a mate, you have to go online.
00:11:24.260Like, 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.
00:11:36.260Again, if you're dating now, you probably weren't dating 10 years ago.
00:11:39.780Like, most people don't date for 10 years.
00:11:41.880Most 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.
00:12:10.980And they're even more expensive than industrialized nations.
00:12:13.960In Canada, a recent report tried to put a number on just how expensive.
00:12:18.500So, 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.
00:12:27.600Their 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.
00:12:38.580So, that's if you add up food, clothes, education, childcare, transportation, everything.
00:12:45.100Even accounting for the extra you'd pay for a bigger home.
00:13:15.680Is 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?
00:13:25.360Because that's not the normal experience.
00:13:26.760And you can literally do this with anything if you take the cost of something over 22 years, right?
00:13:32.480So just as an example, I looked up, like, what is the cost of owning a car in Canada?
00:13:37.280Well, 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,
00:13:50.920it breaks down to approximately $1,387 per month, which would make it $16,644 a year to own a car.
00:14:01.900If 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,
00:14:09.680so we're talking about an $8,000 down payment and a loan payment of about $31,000,
00:14:15.840so somewhere around $1,000 a month in car payments,
00:14:20.020so that would get us to $13,000 a year.
00:14:23.580So 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,
00:14:29.960you're talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars, probably somewhere around $500,000 or $600,000 just to own a used car.
00:14:37.080But 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.
00:14:43.600You could do this with the cost of new clothes every year, the cost of vacations, the cost of subscriptions on your phone,
00:14:48.620the cost of going out for dinner or your morning coffee.