Reversing Canada’s Declining Birth Rate: Why Cultural Shifts May Hold the Key

June 18, 2024 TruthUSA

Tesla CEO and X owner Elon Musk says the “biggest problem that humanity faces is population collapse.” The business magnate isn’t the only one to point out the severity of the declining birth rates situation that many countries face.

A Lancet study published in March warned that by the end of the century, fertility rates in 198 out of 204 countries will be too low to sustain their populations, with Sub-Saharan Africa accounting for one in every two children born.

While many governments, such as Sweden, Norway, and Taiwan, have attempted pro-natalist economic policies to encourage their citizens to have more children, they have ultimately been largely ineffective in reversing the decline.

“What the evidence shows in terms of the impact of these policies, is that they kind of work, they can increase the birth rate a little, but none of them have been sufficiently successful in raising the birth rate a lot,” Phillip Levine, a Barton Hepburn Professor of Economics at Wellesley College in Massachusetts, told The Epoch Times.

Some experts have suggested that in order to reverse the trend of falling births, a more fundamental change in culture and values is needed.

“Changing culture is very difficult. But to the extent that [change] is going to happen, it’s got to involve making life easier for people to have children—which is not just directly related to the cost, because it clearly goes beyond that,” Mr. Levine said.

All-Time Low

While the global average fertility rate has fallen from around five children per woman in the 1960s to around 2.4 in 2021, the decline has been especially pronounced in developed countries. According to the World Bank’s 2022 data on fertility, high-income countries, such as Canada, the United States, Australia, Japan, and most of the countries of the European Union, have an average fertility rate of 1.5.

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Replacement fertility— the level of fertility at which a population replaces itself from one generation to the next— is 2.1. Countries with lower levels will experience an older demographic and population decreases over time.

Policy Horizons Canada, a federal government body focused on foresight, says this could lead to issues such as strains on health-care services, worker shortage, high savings rates among older populations keeping asset prices high, potentially reduced economic growth, and tensions between generations that undermine social cohesion.

Canada’s fertility rate has mainly been falling since the 1960s, after peaking at 3.94 children per woman in 1959, according to Statistics Canada. The agency notes that the drop in fertility rates coincided with introduction of the hormonal birth control pill in 1960, followed by decriminalization of the pill and legalization of abortion in 1969. These developments contributed to pushing the birth rate down to 1.6 by 1988, which is well below the replacement level of 2.1.

The country’s fertility rate hit an all-time low in 2022, the latest year for which StatCan data is available, at 1.3 children per woman. Additionally, women have decided to delay having children, with the average age of mothers at childbirth increasing without interruption for nearly 50 years, from 26.7 years in 1976 to 31.6 years in 2022.

A man and children play on a climbing apparatus in a playground in Montreal on March 22, 2020. (The Canadian Press/Graham Hughes)

Contributing Factors

Statistics Canada told The Epoch Times that the trend of “lower and later” fertility trend can be attributed to the rapid growth of post-secondary education, increased access to family planning services, rising women’s labour force participation, changing gender roles, increasing infertility issues related to having children at later ages, and “increasingly challenging” economic conditions that make it harder to have multiple children.

Other factors leading to lower birth rates in Canada, said the agency, are shifting societal values such as “increasing partnership instability,” couples choosing civil partnerships or marrying later in life, the influence of parents and peers who encourage having fewer children, more people living with roommates or their parents, and a decrease in the number of religious Canadians, which is one of the predictors of the number of children a woman will have.

Despite the decline in births, Canada’s population surged from 37.9 million in 2020 to 40.1 million in 2024, with the vast majority of the increase coming from temporary and permanent immigration.