Canada in Decline… Birth Rate

Ice hockey, maple syrup, gender, diversity and inclusion, Niagara Falls, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau dancing at Pride parades. These are just a few of the things Canada is famous for. But increasingly, Canada is becoming famous for having an incredibly and increasingly low fertility rate. Here’s the latest data from Statistics Canada. At a current rate of 1.33 births per woman – What is a woman? Canada doesn’t know – but one thing that is clear, this is the lowest total fertility rate in more than a century. It’s the lowest on record. Some might call this a crisis, right? How do you think Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is dealing with this? Well, in a recent tweet, he said, “Women should be free to choose the contraceptives they need without cost getting in the way. So, we’re making contraceptives free.”

Look, I’m not here to debate whether contraceptives should be free or not, but when your birthrate is plummeting, is this the right course of action? Making it easier for people to prevent pregnancy? This can only have one result, right? Further declines in the fertility rate. There’s no way this would result in the opposite. It can only result in a fertility decline. I’m not suggesting that Justin Trudeau is intentionally trying to reduce the birth rate, but what else will this logically result in?

Of course, when he says contraceptives will be free, he means the taxpayer will fund people’s contraception. Perhaps a more accurate tweet would have been: “all Canadians will now share the cost of birth control for those that can’t afford it.” Obviously, nothing in Canada is truly free, except perhaps the cold.

Some cynical people might suggest that Trudeau’s announcement for free contraceptives could be translated as: “We want women to work and not have families”.

Despite the dramatic fall in the fertility rate, the population of Canada has been rapidly increasing. For the first time in history, the population grew by more than a million in a single year surpassing 40 million. Why do you think this might be? Immigration, of course! This historic pace of population increase is being driven by immigration and the need for workers, but it’s also causing the already dire housing crisis to get even worse. The solution, according to Justin Trudeau, is not to reduce immigration, but to just build millions of more homes. Whether that’s feasible or not, I don’t know. Time will tell I suppose.

But the message is clear. Fertility is going down, while immigration is ramping up. I don’t know if this what Canadians want, but that’s what’s happening in Trudeau’s Canada.

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Allégro by Emmit Fenn