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Canada’s fertility rate now nearing Japan after remarkably sharp 10-year decline

Analysis

Medical staff in the maternity ward at St. Paul’s hospital in Vancouver, June 13, 2020. Jonathan Hayward/The Canadian Press.

Canada’s fertility rate has dropped to the second lowest in the G7, now nearing Japan.

According to new data from Statistics Canada, in 2023, Canada’s fertility rate (the average number of children a woman births in her lifetime) fell to 1.26 from 1.33–the lowest rate ever recorded. “Replacement level,” which allows the population to replace itself from one generation to the next, requires a fertility rate of 2.1.

The agency reported Canada, “has now joined the group of ‘lowest-low’ fertility countries, including South Korea, Spain, Italy and Japan, with 1.3 children per woman or less.” The U.S., meanwhile, had a 2023 fertility rate of 1.62.

The country’s population growth is now 97 percent due to immigration. From 2022 to 2023, Canada welcomed 1.1 million immigrants. However despite this population increase in childbearing women, there were 351,000 births in both years, explaining the decline.

In the decade following 2013, Canada’s fertility rate dropped 21 percent. The two decades previous, from 1993 to 2013, it declined an average of only two percent.

Canada’s 2023 fertility rate is the same as Japan’s in 2022. In 2023, both Japan and Italy’s fertility rates fell to 1.2, tying for last place in G7 developed economies

Japan’s fertility rate has hovered around 1.2 for at least the past two decades. Low births and low immigration have resulted in population decline and warnings of a social cohesion breakdown in Japan’s rural villages, which are facing labour shortages, a shrinking tax base, empty schools, and an elderly population in need of health-care services. Canada has been spared the same solely due to strong population growth through immigration.

Just six decades ago, in 1960, Canada actually led in fertility among countries that would become the G7. Back then, Canada’s fertility rate was 3.81 children per woman, while the second-highest, the U.S., had 3.65 births per woman. That year, hormonal birth control pills were introduced to regulate menstrual cycles and then for contraception in 1969. In 1969, therapeutic abortions were also decriminalised.

Between 1991 and 2023, Germany was the only G7 country to increase its fertility rate. This was reportedly due to the country welcoming more than a million mostly young Syrian refugees in 2015, along with its expansion of parental benefits and childcare. However many pro-natalist government policies have been shown to fall flat or be flawed.

Comparing Canada’s provinces, British Columbia had 2023’s lowest fertility rate, at one child per woman. B.C.’s fertility was behind the Atlantic provinces (Nova Scotia at 1.05; Newfoundland and Labrador at 1.08; Prince Edward Island at 1.16), and Ontario at 1.22.

Saskatchewan has the highest fertility rate of Canada’s provinces, 1.63, which is more than the United Kingdom and Germany.

Prevailing social norms, rising housing costs, and the economic impact of parenthood are driving forces behind Canada’s national and provincial fertility rates.

The concern that parenting is massively time-consuming has deterred young people from beginning families amid burgeoning careers, a Cardus report revealed last year. Women in Canada report having half of the children they had hoped for.

Similarly, income disproportionately lost with motherhood–the result of insufficient childcare and career opportunities–has deterred many Canadian women from becoming mothers.

Canada’s reliance on immigration as opposed to childbirth supported by immigration, poses significant consequences for Canada’s demographics, The Hub’s editor-at-large Sean Speer wrote last summer.

Kiernan Green

Kiernan is The Hub's Data Visualization Journalist. He was previously a journalism fellow for The Canadian Press and CBC News, where he produced for Rosemary Barton Live, contributed to CBC’s NewsLabs and did business reporting. He graduated from the School of Journalism at Toronto Metropolitan University with minors in global…...

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