Canada’s Baby Bust: What’s Really Driving the Fertility Collapse?
Canada’s fertility rate has fallen into ultra-low territory. Is the problem rising childlessness, shrinking family size, or both?
Canada’s fertility rate has dropped to just 1.25 children per woman and is now considered in ultra-low territory. But what’s really behind the decline? Are more Canadians choosing not to have children at all, or are families simply having fewer children than they once did?
In this episode of DemograFix, Mike Moffatt and Cara Stern unpack the data behind Canada’s falling birth rate. They explore why childlessness is rising, why one-child families have become increasingly common despite the number of children women say they want, and how housing costs, delayed parenthood, childcare, culture, and shifting lifestyles are reshaping family life across the country.
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Below is an AI-generated transcript of the Missing Middle podcast, lightly edited.
Cara Stern: 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?
Mike Moffatt: So we decided to take a look at the numbers to find out what is actually happening here.
Let’s start with what the fertility rate is measuring. It’s the number of children a woman has in her lifetime, and it needs to be 2.1 children per woman to replace a population. But of course, much of our economy is based on a growing population, so if anything, it probably should be higher than that.
Cara Stern: And this isn’t just a Canada problem. 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. It used to be that we could look at Germany and say, “Oh, that’s a low-fertility country,” and see it as a bit of a cautionary tale. But now Canada has actually surpassed Germany. So something is happening in some countries, such as ours, that is making them fall faster than other countries.
Mike Moffatt: And it’s not just Canada versus the world here. It’s not falling at the same rate across provinces within Canada. When we look at fertility rates, Manitoba and Alberta are well above the national average, while British Columbia is at the bottom. 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.
Cara Stern: Well, it’s not very surprising 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.
Mike Moffatt: Absolutely. Because what happens is that you can’t really afford to have a child there. Some folks just don’t have children there but stay in the city, and others decide to move elsewhere to raise a family. So we really do see a big lack of children in our big cities, just because it’s gotten too expensive to raise a family.
Cara Stern: It reminds me of when you pointed out that the most common age for someone to leave Toronto was zero. Of course, I was like, “That’s weird, how is it zero?” But I guess it’s a bunch of people with babies who are deciding to move.
Mike Moffatt: Yeah, it’s not the babies that are deciding to move, at least not directly, but they’re certainly influencing their parents’ decision. You can imagine a couple living in a high-rise rental apartment or condo. A baby comes along, 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 and drive as far away as you need to go in order to qualify for a mortgage.
That’s why we’re seeing a big influx of young families into smaller communities like Brantford, Woodstock, Peterborough, and so on, because it’s simply gotten too expensive to raise a family, not just within the city of Toronto, but much of the GTA.
Cara Stern: 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?
Mike Moffatt: Well, the first issue is that the proportion of women who have never had a child is increasing. 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 1 in 8; it’s now 1 in 6. That statistic looks at 50-year-old women, so it doesn’t really account for the fact that Millennials and Gen Z are having fewer kids. I wouldn’t be surprised if, over time, that inches up to 1 in 5 or 1 in 4 women in Canada who never have a child. So that is a large part of the story here.
Cara Stern: That’s a good point. 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 there’s going to be any increase at all, or if it’s just going to get worse and worse over time. 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.
Mike Moffatt: Yeah, absolutely. And here’s why I think we’re only going to see an increase here: there is a new StatCan report, and we’ll link to it in the show notes.
Go back to 1991, when Nirvana started hitting the charts. Back then, if you were 25 to 39 years old, there was a 50% chance that you had a child and were a parent. Nowadays, for that cohort, it’s only 40%. Going from 50% to 40% is an absolutely massive drop-off.
Cara Stern: Yeah. And that’s not a long period of time; I guess that’s basically one generation, right?
Mike Moffatt: Yeah, absolutely. It wasn’t that long ago. I was in high school back then, and I know I’m old, but I’m not that old. This is in the span of about 30 or 35 years or so, where, again, you’ve gone from 50% to 40%. If we keep on that pattern, you’re getting close to zero pretty quickly.
Cara Stern: Who are these women? Is it evenly distributed, or are there patterns in their life stages or in the choices they’re making?
Mike Moffatt: Yeah, there are patterns regarding which women are more likely to have kids and which women are less likely. If we start with the more likely, it tends to be women who are either currently married or have been married at some point. Where it gets to be less likely is if you’re in a common-law relationship, or you were a couple but are now living apart, or you’re not in a couple at all. Those, not surprisingly, are less likely to ever have a child in their lifetime.
Cara Stern: I guess that seems obvious. Marriage and then children are still the traditional path for most people, so that seems pretty straightforward. 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 are places like Quebec where marriage in general is on the decline, so there are a lot of people who are in common-law relationships who may as well be married. Many will have kids. Quebec, actually, I believe, has a higher rate of fertility compared to a lot of other provinces. I guess we’ll see if that changes over time, because there is a cultural change happening there.
Mike Moffatt: Yeah, there really is. And there are, again, these trends more towards common-law couples. I wouldn’t be surprised if the rates of childbirth go up with common-law couples as it continues to get more common.
When we look at 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, is not all that surprising, but it’s nice to see Statistics Canada confirm some of the stereotypes that we might have.
Cara Stern: I guess a lot of religions still encourage having children, and some prohibit birth control. I guess that as society is getting less religious, that correlates with fewer children. That’s another one that seems pretty obvious.
Mike Moffatt: Absolutely. I think there is a whole bundle of things—you mentioned birth control and just general beliefs and so on. We also see that women who have immigrated to Canada are more likely to have kids compared to those who were born here.
Cara Stern: What about education level? Because that’s what I constantly hear: as women became more educated, they wanted fewer kids. So we can look at that and say, “Well, 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?
Mike Moffatt: This is really interesting. This is where it starts to get a little counterintuitive.
The latest StatsCan data calls that into question. They find that if you’re looking at women in their 40s, there’s no meaningful difference between women who went to university or higher ed and those who didn’t on whether or not they ever have kids. Though it turns out that women in their 20s and 30s who haven’t gone to university or college are more likely to have kids than those who have attended higher education.
Cara Stern: That’s interesting. So there’s a big difference there between looking at whether women in their 30s have any kids based on whether they had post-secondary education, but not much difference between the two cohorts in their 40s. It sounds like university might be delaying people having kids, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that they aren’t having kids at any higher rates?
Mike Moffatt: This data is just a snapshot in time. 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, though we won’t know for sure until 10 or 20 years from now.
It looks safe to say that over the long run, your probability of having a child as a woman doesn’t really depend on whether or not you went to university.
Cara Stern: And I can’t say it enough: 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 there’s been some cultural change where we say, “Okay, well, lots of people are having kids in their 40s. You can delay it as much as you want.” And the truth is, 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 go. If you’re in your late 30s, it just becomes harder.
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?
Mike Moffatt: No, they’re not. This is not just the probability of a woman having zero kids going up, but we are seeing that drop from being more likely to have three going down to more likely to have two, and so on. And this drop began decades ago.
If you go back to the late 1970s and early 1980s, the most common family type among families with children was three or more kids. Sometime in the early to mid-80s—the Family Ties era, I’m thinking of all those great family shows from the 80s—two children became the norm. So there was this drop from having three or four kids in the 70s down to two kids in the mid-to-late 80s.
Cara Stern: And what is it now?
Mike Moffatt: Well, now it turns out that one-child households are the most common in Canada.
Cara Stern: That’s a huge drop, man. When you think about three children or more in the 80s to one now. And that’s not a long period of time in history. I feel like when I was growing up in the 90s, I hardly knew anyone who was an only child, and now it’s so common. I wonder how much of that is due to choices versus economic constraints. Any idea?
Mike Moffatt: Yeah, well, it’s funny because I kind of grew up the same way. I had one friend who was an only child, and that was actually noteworthy, so we always kind of pointed it out to him.
Cara Stern: Oh no, you were being mean to him.
Mike Moffatt: I’m sorry, Greg, if you’re listening; it was nothing personal.
But it turns out it’s a bit of both: it’s choice and economic responses. Because the big inflection points track with major societal changes. Obviously, the widespread availability of the pill and other forms of birth control started in the early 1970s, and women entered the labour force in much larger numbers in the mid-to-late 1970s. Then you get into economic responses like the 2008 financial crisis and COVID—all of these shocks have left a mark. Some of them are choice-based, but some of them are responses to changing economic conditions.
Cara Stern: And there’s that U of T study that we talked about in another episode on the connection between housing and fertility, which attributed half of the drop to housing costs. There’s a sense that you need to have your housing situation figured out before you can even think about having kids. 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.
A lot of people just wanted more kids than they had bedrooms. Even if you can get away with it when they’re little, it’s tough. I can tell you firsthand, with two kids sharing a room, when one wakes up, the other one wakes up. Especially when you’re trying to sleep train and do things to help your kid sleep through the night and help your other kid be rested for school. I can tell you firsthand that is very tough.
Mike Moffatt: It is. And I actually think that’s weirdly probably even more common now than it was in the 1990s, because family sizes were larger then, but you had a lot more four, five, or sometimes six-bedroom homes. Nowadays, young families are in a lot of two-bedroom apartments or smaller townhouses. You get a lot of folks my age or Boomers saying, “Well, you should have like six kids in two-bedroom homes.” But they didn’t do that; maybe their grandparents did. So it is a real problem nowadays that it’s almost impossible in a lot of bigger communities for a young, middle-class family to get a home that has three, four, or five bedrooms suitable for raising multiple kids. It’s just not economically feasible in many cases.
Cara Stern: Yeah, I’ve heard that argument many times from people like, “Oh, if you go back historically, people didn’t have their own bedrooms. You had many people sharing a bedroom; that’s how it used to be.” And the homes that are now considered starter homes were people’s full homes that they had several kids in. I get that; that is fair.
But when you grow up having your own bedroom, basically that was just the norm, so you don’t want to give your kids a lower lifestyle than what you had, right?
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 two-thirds say they want kids. 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, or maybe deciding one is enough work after they have one.
Mike Moffatt: Absolutely. I get a little frustrated at people saying, “Well, back in the 50s, people raised these large families in 900-square-foot homes.” Those 900-square-foot strawberry box homes in a lot of places in Canada cost over $1 million right now. So I don’t know that many young people whose noses are turned up, going, “Oh, a $1.2 million house is not enough for me.”
We have to make it clear here that those types of strawberry box homes that are 900 square feet, which had decent-sized yards where you could let your kids out to play, are really expensive.
Nowadays, when we’re talking about a smaller home, it’s like 500 or 550 square feet in a high-rise, and you’re living on the 37th floor. If you want your kid to go play outside, you’re telling them to take an elevator and walk through a car park. It’s a very different existence, and it’s one of the reasons why families just aren’t having as many kids as they used to. We’re seeing the StatCan report, the U of T 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.
Cara Stern: Yeah, I’m thinking back to when I was looking at pre-construction condos, and I would go to the developer and say, “Hey, I’m looking for something where I can raise a family, so maybe 800 square feet.” And they were like, “Oh, that is like our big units; this is going to be the most expensive option.” Every one of them was out of our budget.
Even if you’re willing to raise them in a condo that is 800 or 900 square feet, it is just not affordable. It’s not going to happen because 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, it was wild to think of the reactions that I got. It was like, “Oh, you’re looking for luxury living.” Like, am I really? It’s very strange.
Mike Moffatt: Yeah, it is. And again, I think if we offered Millennials and Gen Z 1950s-style homes at 1950s-style prices adjusted for inflation, they would absolutely leap at that.
Cara Stern: Even at 20% interest, for sure.
Mike Moffatt: Yeah, even at 20% interest, which they didn’t have in the 1950s. But yeah, this idea that people are turning up their nose at family-size homes that cost two times their income is just ridiculous. I really wish it would come to an end.
Cara Stern: The StatsCan report said that we’re seeing young people wanting more kids now than they did five years ago, which I thought was interesting. I wonder if that’s just a pandemic thing. They’re looking at 2021 to now, so I think about how that must have played a role.
But also, I wonder about this: when I was in my 20s, I kept hearing about how the world was overpopulated, and maybe it’s unethical to want more than two kids because we have too many people in the world. With climate change, everyone needs to have fewer kids, and it would be irresponsible to have two or more. Now that narrative has shifted drastically; I hear a lot about population collapse, and not much about overpopulation.
Mike Moffatt: Yeah, you don’t hear it at all. These comments go back in time. There was a whole movement in the 60s, 70s, and 80s—there’s The Population Bomb book—and a whole group of folks advocating for zero population growth. We don’t talk about that as much. One of my favourite characters from The Mary Tyler Moore Show once said that he was hoping to have six or seven kids in the hopes that one of them could solve the population problem. That’s kind of my hope with climate change.
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 and new solutions to this. So I’ve never been a believer in this idea that fewer people are 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 figure out how we deal with these issues, whether it be environmental issues, issues around global conflict, and so on. How we’ve always solved these problems as a species is having really smart people get together, bounce ideas off each other, and try new things. 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 hoping that leads us to some salvation. I just don’t think it’s coming.
Cara Stern: 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. Underneath both of those, there’s a widening gap between what Canadians say they want and what they’re actually achieving.
Mike Moffatt: Yeah, and that’s the important thing. 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 higher is better or lower is worse; it’s all about choice. The thing that stays with me from all of this is that the desire for family, the desire to have kids, hasn’t gone away. But we’ve created a country where it’s become harder and harder to have kids.
My question for policymakers is: What are you going to do about it? What are you going to do to make family-size homes attainable by having childcare options, by creating a society where it’s okay to let your eight-year-old play in a forest or ride the bus and not be taken away in handcuffs? This idea that we constantly have to be helicopter parenting our kids all the time. 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 required to have children?
Cara Stern: Thanks, everyone, for watching and listening. Our producer is Meredith Martin, and our editor is Sean Foreman.
Mike Moffatt: And if you have any thoughts or questions about mid-1980s family sitcoms, please send us an email to [email protected].
Cara Stern: And we’ll see you next time.
Additional Reading/Listening that Helped Inform the Episode:
‘One and Done’ is the new norm: inside Canada’s growing one-child family trend
Living arrangements of children in Canada: A century of change