The Story Behind Canada’s Collapsing Fertility Rate

Added: 2026-05-30

[00:00:00]There is still a desire to have kids. If you ask a woman in their 20s, roughly twothirds say they want kids. They're imagining families of two kids. On average, it's actually 2.2. But it's not happening for them.

[00:00:11]>> Whether it be uh environmental issues, uh issues around global conflict and so on. I don't think we're going to solve the world's problems by shrinking the population, shrinking the number of people working on these problems and and hope that leads us to some some salvation.

[00:00:29]>> Demographics hosted by Mike Moffett and Cara Stern.

[00:00:34]>> Hey everyone, we're recording a Missing Middle podcast episode in front of a live audience with all three hosts and special guest Ron Butler at the National Club in Toronto on Monday, June the 1st.

[00:00:45]Please visit missing middleinitiative.ca for more information.

[00:00:49]>> And now on with the show.

[00:00:51]>> Canada's fertility rate is considered ultra low with only 1.25 children per woman. But one of the questions we received last time we mentioned that number was is this a case of fewer women having children or is the number of children each woman is having going down too?

[00:01:08]>> So we decided to take a look at the numbers to find out what is actually happening here. So, let's start with what the fertility rate is measuring.

[00:01:16]It's the number of children a woman has in her lifetime. And it needs to be 2.1 children per woman to replace the population. But of course, much of our economy is based on a growing population. So, if anything, it probably should be higher than that.

[00:01:31]>> And this isn't just a Canada problem.

[00:01:33]Developed countries all around the world are facing this problem, but to different extents. Ours is falling much faster than other developed countries, though. We're now in ultra low territory along with South Korea, Japan, and Italy. And it used to be that we could look at Germany and we'd say, "Oh, that's a low fertility country." And it's a bit of a cautionary tale, but now Canada's actually surpassed Germany. So, there's something happening in some countries such as ours. It's making them fall faster than other countries.

[00:01:59]>> And it's not just Canada versus the world here that it's not falling at the same rate across provinces within Canada. So when we look at fertility rates, Manitoba and Alberta, they're well above the national average, while British Columbia is at the bottom. And it's cities where fertility rates and birth rates are dropping the fastest with Victoria and Vancouver both having fewer than one baby per woman.

[00:02:23]>> Well, it's not very surprising that given that housing costs in Vancouver and Victoria are extremely high. So I'm not surprised that those are some of the worst places for fertility rates in Canada.

[00:02:34]>> Absolutely. Because what happens is that uh you can't really afford to have a child there. So some folks just don't have children there but stay in the city and others decide to move elsewhere uh to raise a family. So we really do see in our big cities big lack of children just because it's gotten too expensive to raise a family.

[00:02:54]>> It reminds me of when you pointed out that the most common age for someone to leave Toronto was zero. And at first I was like that's weird. How is it zero?

[00:03:03]But I guess it's a bunch of people with babies who are deciding to move.

[00:03:06]>> Yeah. It's not the babies themselves that are deciding to move. At least not not directly, but they're certainly influencing their parents' decision.

[00:03:14]Yeah. Because you can imagine a couple living in a high-rise rental apartment or condo, baby comes along, uh, and after a few months, they're like, "This just ain't going to work." So what they do is something called drive until you qualify where you hop in your car. You drive as far away as you need to go in order to qualify for a mortgage. And that's why we're seeing big influx of young families into smaller communities like a Brford, a Woodstock, a Peterborough, and so on because it's simply gotten too expensive to raise a family. You know, not just within the city of Toronto, but much of the GTA. So those are some of the trends, but now we're at the question that I really want to dig into today, which is what is actually happening here.

[00:03:55]>> Well, the first issue is the proportion of women who have never had a child is is increasing. So we're seeing a significant increase in the number of women who by the age of 50 have never had a child. It used to be around 1 in 10 or or 1 in 8. It's now 1 in6. And you know that statistic looks at 50y old women. So it doesn't really account for the fact that millennials and Gen Z are having less kids. So, you know, I wouldn't be surprised over time if that inches up to, you know, one in five or one in four women in Canada who never have a child. So that is a large part of the story here.

[00:04:32]>> That's a good point that like I guess right now we see the trend of fertility rates going down, but we don't know where it's going to end. If fertility is going to push later and if it's there's going to be any increase at all or if it's just like going to get worse and worse over time. And we know that the age of first births is pushing later over time. And we know that fertility becomes a much greater challenge as people get older. So I suspect that's part of the story, too.

[00:04:54]>> Yeah, absolutely. And here's why I think it's uh we're only going to see an increase here that there was a new stat can report and we'll link to it in the show notes. And it used to be that go back to 1991, you know, Nirvana uh started hitting the charts. Back then, if you were 25 to 39 years old, there was a 50% chance that you had a child uh and were a parent. Nowadays, for that cohort, it's only 40%. So, we've gone from 50% to 40%, that's an absolutely massive drop off.

[00:05:27]>> Yeah. And that's not that's not a long period of time. Like, I guess that's one generation basically, right?

[00:05:31]>> Yeah. No, absolutely. It wasn't uh wasn't that long ago. I was uh I was in high school back then, and I know I'm old, but I'm not uh that old. So yeah, this is you know the the area of about 30 years 35 years or so where again you've gone from 50% to 40% and you know if we keep on that pattern you're getting close to zero you know pretty quickly.

[00:05:55]>> Who are these women like is it evenly distributed across? Are there patterns in their life stages or what choices they're making?

[00:06:01]>> Yeah, there are patterns on which women are more likely to have kids and which women are less likely. So, if we start with the more likely, it tends to be women who are either currently married or they've been married at some point.

[00:06:15]They're more likely. Now, where it gets to be less likely is if you're in a common law relationship or you were a couple but now living apart, like an unmarried couple but living apart, or you're not in a couple at all. You know, those, not surprisingly, are less likely to ever have a child in their lifetime.

[00:06:33]>> I guess it seems obvious. I mean, marriage and then children is still the traditional path for most people. So, that seems pretty straightforward.

[00:06:40]Although, it's worth noting that marriage is still a key part of the story. I do suspect a lot of those common law couples are people who will eventually get married. And then there's places like Quebec where just marriage in general is on the decline. So, there's a lot of people who are in common law relationships who may as well be married. Like they they will have kids. And Quebec actually, I believe, has a higher rate of fertility compared to a lot of other provinces. So I guess we'll see if that changes over time because there is a cultural change happening there.

[00:07:06]>> Yeah, there really is. And there are again these these kind of trends, you know, more towards common law couples.

[00:07:12]And again, I wouldn't be surprised if the rates of of child birth goes up with common law couples as it continues to get more common. And and when we go to tradition, it turns out that women who more actively practice religious beliefs are more likely to have kids than those who do not. Which again, it's not all that surprising, but it's nice to see Statistics Canada uh confirm maybe some of the the stereotypes that we might have.

[00:07:37]>> Yeah, I guess a lot of religions still encourage having children. Some prohibit birth control, and I guess as societyy's getting less religious, that correlates with fewer children. But yeah, I guess another one that seems pretty obvious.

[00:07:49]>> Yeah, absolutely. I I think there is kind of a whole bundle of things there.

[00:07:52]You mentioned birth control and just just general beliefs and and so on. And we also see women who have immigrated to Canada are more likely to have kids compared to those who are born here.

[00:08:04]>> What about education level? Because that that's what I constantly hear that is that as women became more educated, they wanted fewer kids. So we can look at that and say, well, that's that's the headline. That's the main story here of the dropping fertility rate. Did they find a relationship there between education and whether people are having any kids at all?

[00:08:21]>> Yeah. And this is really interesting.

[00:08:23]This is where it starts to get a little uh counterintuitive. I would say that the latest Stascan data calls that into question. So they find if you're looking at women in their 40s, there's no meaningful difference between women who went to university, went to higher ed, and those who didn't on whether or not they ever have kids. It turns out women in their 20s and 30s uh who haven't gone to university or college are more likely to have kids than than ones who have attended higher education.

[00:08:53]>> Okay, that's interesting. So, there's a there's a big difference there between looking at whether women in their 30s have any kids based on whether they had post-secary education, but not much difference between the two cohorts in their 40s. So, I guess like when I'm thinking what that means, it sounds like university might be delaying people having kids, but it doesn't necessarily mean that they they aren't having kids at any higher rates.

[00:09:15]>> So, this data is just a snapshot in time. So, you know, we can make conclusions about women who are currently in their 40s, but we can't really say what's going to happen 20 years from now to women who are in their 20s. But I do think it is fairly safe to say that it seems to be mostly a delay issue rather than women in university never having children. But we won't know for sure until you know 10 or 20 years from now. But it looks safe to say that over the long run uh your probability of having a child as a woman doesn't really depend on whether or not you went to university. And I can't say it enough that delaying having a kid leads to fewer kids because it's harder to have kids as you get older. I think we have to always remember that because I think that there's been some cultural change where we say, "Okay, well, you know, lots of people are having kids in their 40s. You can you can delay it as much as you want." And the truth is like you can't delay it as much as you want. You can delay it to a certain extent, but it becomes harder and harder the later you are. But if you're in your late 30s, like it it just becomes harder. And so that probably leads us to the next part of this, which is when they do have kids, are they having as many as they used to?

[00:10:23]>> No, they're not. So this is not just the sort of probability of a woman having zero kids going up, but we are seeing that drop from, you know, more likely to have three going down to more likely to have two and so on. And this drop began decades ago. So if you go back to the late 1970s, early 1980s, the most common family type among families with children was three or more kids. Sometime in the kind of early to mid80s, you know, the sort of family ties era, I'm thinking of all those great shows from family shows from the 80s. You get that two children become the norm. So there was this drop from having three or four kids in the 70s down to two kids in the the mid to late 80s.

[00:11:11]>> And what's it now?

[00:11:12]>> Well, now it turns out that one child households are the most common in Canada.

[00:11:17]>> That's a huge drop, man. When you think about three children or more in the 80s to one now. And like that's not a long period of time in history. Like I feel like when I was growing up in the '9s, I hardly knew anyone who was an only child. And now it's so common. I wonder how much of that is like due to choices, due to economic constraints. Any idea?

[00:11:37]>> Yeah. Well, it's funny because I kind of grew up the same way. Like I had one friend who was an only child and that was actually noteworthy. So, we always kind of pointed pointed it out uh to him.

[00:11:46]>> Oh, no. You're being mean to him.

[00:11:47]>> I'm sorry, Greg, if you're uh listening.

[00:11:50]It was not nothing uh nothing personal, but it's you know, it turns out it's a bit of both. It's bit of choice and economic responses. So because the big inflection points track with major societal changes, you know, obviously the widespread availability of the pill and other forms of birth control starting in the early 1970s, women entering the labor force in much larger numbers in the mid to late 1970s, and then you get into economic responses like the 2008 financial crisis, COVID, all of these shocks have left the mark.

[00:12:19]Some of them are choice based, but some of them are responses to changing economic conditions. And there's that UFT study that we talked about in another episode on the connection between housing and fertility, which attributed half of the drop to housing costs. And there's a sense that you need to have your housing situation figured out before you can even think about having kids. So, we we talk a lot on this program about how three-bedroom apartments are very hard to find, and people like to drive until they qualify for one of those three-bedroom units, whether they're apartments, houses, whatever. Most likely a house if they're not in the city. Um, and a lot of people just won't have more kids than they have bedrooms. even if you can get away with it when they're little, like it's tough.

[00:12:57]I can tell you firsthand with two kids sharing a room that one wakes up, the other one wakes up. And especially when you're trying to sleep train and do things that are like trying to help your kid sleep through the night, trying to help your other kid be rested for school, like I can tell you firsthand that is very tough. It it is. And I actually think that's weirdly probably even more common now than it was in the 1990s because a lot of families in the 1990s, yeah, the family sizes they were larger, but you had a lot more four, five, some kind times six uh bedroomedroom homes where nowadays, you know, young families are in a lot of two-bedroom apartments or smaller town houses and so on. And yeah, you get a lot of folks, you know, my age or boomer saying, you know, well, you should have like six kids in two-bedroom homes, but you know, they they didn't do that. You know, maybe their grandparents did. So, it is a real problem nowadays that it's almost impossible in a lot of bigger communities for a middle class, young middle class family, uh, to get a home that has three or four or five bedrooms suitable for raising two or three or or four kids. It's just not economically feasible in many cases.

[00:14:07]>> Yeah, I've heard that argument many time from people like, oh, you know, if you go back historically, people didn't have their own bedrooms. Like, you had many people sharing a bedroom. That's how it used to be. And like the homes that are now considered starter homes were people's like full homes that they had a number of kids in. And I get that. That is fair. But when you grow up having your own bedroom and like basically that was just the norm. And so you don't want to kind of like give your kids a lower lifestyle than what you had, right? And people don't have to have kids. So it has to be desirable. And we know that there is still a desire to have kids. If you ask a woman in their 20s, roughly 2/3 say they want kids. And for those who do still want children, the number hasn't shrunk. They're imagining families of two kids. On average, it's actually 2.2. But it's not happening for them. Whether it's decisions based on economics, fertility issues, maybe deciding one is enough work after they have one.

[00:14:59]>> Yeah, absolutely. And yeah, I get a little uh frustrated at people saying, well, you know, back in the the 50s, people raised these large families in 900 ft² homes. Those 900 foot strawberry box homes a lot of places in Canada cost over a million dollars, right? So, I don't know that many young people who have their noses turn up and going, "Oh, I you know, no, a $1.2 2 million house is not enough for me. Right? So, we got to make it clear here that those types of strawberry box homes that are 900 square ft, you know, that had decent sized yards and you can go let your kids out and play, those are really expensive. You know, nowadays when we're talking about a smaller home, it's like 500 550 square feet in a high-rise and you're living on the 37th floor and you want your kid to go play outside, then you're telling them to to go take an elevator, you know, walk through a car park. It's a very different existence and it's one of the reasons why families aren't just having as many kids as they're used to. And you know, we're seeing the Stackhan report, the U of report, all of these reports basically saying that families want to have more kids, but the economics of raising a child just aren't making that feasible.

[00:16:15]>> Yeah. I'm thinking back when I was looking at pre-construction condos and I would go to the developer and say, "Hey, I'm looking for something and what I'm thinking is something I can raise a family in, so like maybe 800 ft." And they were like, "Oo, that is like our our big units. like this is going to be the most expensive and every one of them was out of our budget that it was like even if you're willing to raise them in a condo that is 800 900 square feet it's like this is just not affordable. It's not going to happen because it it's a lot. It was actually cheaper to go look at these old small homes that of course need a lot more upkeep but still like it was wild to think of the reactions that I got. Like it was like oh you're looking for a luxury living. I'm like am I really? It's very strange.

[00:16:54]>> Yeah it is. And again, I think if uh we offered millennials and and Gen Zed uh 1950 style homes at 1950 style prices adjusted for inflation, they would absolutely leap at that.

[00:17:09]>> Even at 20% interest for sure.

[00:17:12]>> Yeah. Even even at 20% interest, which they didn't have in the in the 1950s.

[00:17:17]But yeah, this idea that people are turning up their nose at familysized homes that, you know, that cost two times income, it's just it it's ridiculous and I I really wish it would come to an end.

[00:17:29]>> The stats can report said that we're seeing young people wanting more kids now than they did 5 years ago, which I thought that was interesting. And I wonder if that's just a pandemic thing like when I think, you know, 2021, I guess they were looking at Yeah, they're looking at 2021 till now. Um, so I think about how that must have played a role.

[00:17:45]But also I wonder about that when I was in my 20s, I kept hearing about how the world was overpopulated and like maybe it's unethical to want more than two kids because that's just like we have too many people in the world. And with climate change like we need everyone needs to have fewer kids and it'd be irresponsible to have two or more. And now that narrative has shifted drastically. I hear a lot about population collapse, not much more about overpopulation.

[00:18:08]>> Yeah. Yeah, you don't hear it all. And you know that these comments go back in time. Like if you there was a whole in the ' 60s, '7s, and 80s, you know, there's the the population bomb book. Uh there was a whole group of folks advocating for for zero population growth and and and so on. You know, we don't talk about that uh as much. One of my favorite characters from the Mary Tyler Moore show once said that uh he was hoping to have six or seven kids in the hopes that one of them could solve the population problem. You know, and that's kind of my hope as with with climate change, right? That there's this idea that we should have fewer kids and that would help with emissions. But we have to remember that if we have more kids, we're going to get more geniuses who figure out new technologies, new solutions to this. So, I've never been a believer in this idea that fewer people is going to be our environmental salvation. I actually think it's the opposite. We need to have lots of people working together towards a common goal to sort of figure out, you know, how how we deal with these issues, whether it be uh environmental issues, issues around global conflict and so on.

[00:19:20]that how we've always solved these problems as a species is having really smart people get together, bounce ideas off of each other and and try new things. And I don't think we're going to solve the world's problems by shrinking the population, shrinking the number of people working on these problems and and hope that leads us to some some salvation. I just I don't think it's coming. So to wrap up, the fertility decline in Canada is a combination of more women never having children at all, which is partly a partnership formation story and smaller family sizes among those who do find a partner and decide to have kids. And underneath both of those, there's a widening gap between what Canadians say they want and what they're actually achieving.

[00:20:05]>> Yeah. And that's the important thing.

[00:20:06]Like I don't think we should be setting a target birth rate or fertility rate or anything like that. I don't think we necessarily should be saying, you know, higher, better, lower, worse. It's all around choice. And the thing that stays with me from all of this is that the desire for family, the the desire to have kids hasn't gone away. But we've created a country where it's become harder and harder uh to have kids. And you know, my question for policy makers is like, what are you going to do about it? What are you going to do around making uh familysized homes attainable?

[00:20:41]Uh by having child care options by creating a society where it's okay to let your 8-year-old uh play in a forest or ride the bus and, you know, not be taken away in handcuffs. This idea that we constantly have to be helicopter parenting our kids all the time, you know. So, what are we going to do as a society and what are our governments going to do to make it easier and more attainable to have kids and all of the things that are kind of required uh to have children?

[00:21:13]>> Thanks everyone for watching and listening. Our producer is Meredith Martin and our editor is Sean Foreman.

[00:21:18]And >> if you have any thoughts or questions about mid1980s family sitcoms, please send us an email to missing [email protected] >> and we'll see you next time.