Canada’s birth rate has dropped off a cliff (and it’s likely because nobody can afford housing)

Statistics Canada confirmed last week that 351,679 babies were born in 2022 — the lowest number of live births since 345,044 births were recorded in 2005.

The disparity is all the more notable given that Canada had just 32 million people in 2005, as compared to the 40 million it counted by the end of 2022. In 2005, it was already at historic lows for Canada to have a fertility rate of 1.57 births per woman. But given the 2022 figures, that fertility rate has now sunk to 1.33.

…

Of Canadians in their 20s, Statistics Canada found that 38 per cent of them “did not believe they could afford to have a child in the next three years” — with about that same number (32 per cent) saying they doubted they’d be able to find “suitable housing” in which to care for a baby.

…

A January survey by the Angus Reid Group asked women to list the ideal size of their family against its actual size, and concluded that the average Canadian woman reached the end of their childbearing years with 0.5 fewer children than they would have wanted

“In Canada, unlike many other countries, fertility rates and desires rise with income: richer Canadians have more children,” it read.

moitoi,

Financial capitalism is another factor. Investing in the housing to have financial products with high financial return. It’s part of the speculation allowed in our neoliberal economy.

Add that the incomes are the same for decades and you end up with this. Housing or better having a decent place to live has to be a fundamental right.

droopy4096,

at the same time we’ve had the highest immigration numbers. Canada was always immigrant country. I don’t see it as a negative thing in general. Lots of immigrants and their children are higher motivated individuals so it could be a good thing. One thing to watch out for is erosion of values in society. So just welcome newcomers and show them what does it mean to be Canadian 😃

BonesOfTheMoon,

But immigration is mostly made up of refugees who are usually pretty poor, and they come here and we have no housing for them. It’s honestly embarrassing that we welcome so many and yet they end up in shelters.

Szymon,

This is quickly becoming a crisis for the next twenty years but nobody is doing a god damned thing to actually fix the cost of living issue.

We need to vote in people affected by this, not benefitting from it.

Phil_in_here,

Do you have the time or resources to run for office?

Wealth and power is a feedback loop.

Ulrich_the_Old,

There are a few people in my family that are married with good jobs and own their own homes and they are not having children. They are focusing on other things. I am proud of them as I am proud of those in my family who have chosen to have children. This does not need to be one more point of division. It is OK to have kids and it is OK to not have kids.

SnowBunting,

I have friends that decided kids where expensive. But they still want one. This, they adopted a dog. The dog is their kid now.

FireRetardant,

Financial security should not be the biggest factor in deciding if a family wants kids, but it the modern economic system it is a very significant factor. It is hard imagining having another mouth to feed, spend liesure time with, and do parental tasks while both partners are working 50 hours a week while living paycheck to paycheck with little ability for savings to keep up with inflation or costs of living.

Smk,

Fuck cars.

Cars are taking our living spaces, roads, excessive parking. Cars are ruining out health, pollution, no one walk anymore. Cars are expensive for everyone. Cars are a drain on society’s wealth and yet, we made damn sure that everyone need one.

Cars are probably one of the biggest factor, in my opinion, for a lot of problems in society.

Powerpoint,

Tax domestic speculators. It’s such an easy solution. It’s going to be painful because it’s been allowed to happen for so long. Canadians are doing this to other Canadians but no politician wants to do this to help end this gross cycle of exploitation, add in the fact provinces like Ontario that remove things like rent control and things become even further out of reach.

sbv,

You’re right. Supply May be an issue, but it will take decades to rectify. We can change tax, zoning, and immigration policy right now.

psvrh,
@psvrh@lemmy.ca avatar

but no politician wants to do this

Because it’s political suicide. They have a Silver Tsunami coming up, and thanks to a) many companies weakening retirement plans (defined benefit? LOL), b) recessions wiping out people’s savings, there’s been a concerted shift to using home-ownership to bandage over old-age income security.

Prior to this, moderate investment and company pensions were enough to see you through, but that’s largely gone–just another part of our society that we sold off so that the rich can get more tax breaks. The cherry-on-top? We sold off LTCs to private companies, so elder-care is now a for-profit luxury.

The only way Boomers can retire is home equity. Heck, it’s the only thing fuelling our economy in general.

Of course, this is fixable: tax the rich. Pay for a society that works for everyone, not just Galen Weston or David Thompson. It would have been easier to do this back in the 1990s (before the problem really started in earnest) or before 2018 (when it got fully out of control) but it’s still possible.

S_204,

Who the fuck is financially prepared for having children?

As a father of two, I sure as shit wasn’t.

sbv,

We were. We started a bit later than average though. I regret that, tbh.

I wasn’t expecting child care to be quite so expensive, but the tax refunds in the first few years were helpful.

gurmif,

I was. Millennial father of two.

LadyAutumn,
@LadyAutumn@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

Well, when your rent is 50% of your income and your food costs take up almost 30% of your income and your bills take up the remainder and you’re constantly one missed paycheck from homelessness and starvation and your family are in equally dire straits and so cannot bail you out - having children becomes entirely impossible.

You say you weren’t financially prepared, but evidently it was financially possible for you to have children. For at least half of my generation it just point blank is not possible.

AceFuzzLord, (edited )

Imagine wanting to have a child in times where the only way to afford a house is to never purchase a single thing with your next 4 decades worth of pay cheques from a high paying job.

Then come find out you get to finally own a single square foot of land because everyone else comes in and swoops up everywhere else or the bar rises quicker than you could ever hope to catch up with or some other dumb reason.

LavaPlanet,

Oh wow, so where everything else is pointing to an idiocracy type apocalyptic future, the movie got the birth rate thing wrong.

OrteilGenou,

I was one third of a baby and let me tell you, it wasn’t easy

TheMightyCanuck,

Oh hey! It’s literally describing my current situation.

Got engaged, got a promotion, have solid long term housing (“renting” from family)

Still can’t keep more than 1.5k in savings month over month. No way in hell in having a baby in these conditions… and i feel like I’m better off than most

Rocket, (edited )

deleted_by_moderator

    •
    jscummy,

    Ah yes, children are only good for manual labor and nothing else

    Rocket,

    deleted_by_moderator

    •
    jscummy,

    What do you think you wrote in the second paragraph? Because I’m seeing “gone the way of the horse” and “usefulness supplanted by modern technology”

    Rocket, (edited )

    deleted_by_moderator

    •
    jscummy,

    I’m pointing out that your second paragraph continues to make the point that the main purpose of having children is for them to perform work

    To be fair, you did include some people “keeping a child around for enjoyment” which is still pretty dehumanizing

    Rocket, (edited )

    deleted_by_moderator

    •
    Anticorp,

    Good! Maybe we can get back to sane population levels and half of these problems with the housing market and global warming will just resolve themselves. The earth’s population has more than doubled since I was born, and let me tell ya, it’s noticeable. It’s noticeable everywhere I look.

    cyborganism,

    LoL no. Let’s import people to continue Canada’s growth and keep providing cheap labor to Canada’s corporations.

    systemglitch,

    Which is exactly what will continue to happen.

    OutlierBlue,

    Our form of capitalism requires constant growth. One way to grow profits is to sell to more people.

    If we stop immigration our economy collapses. If we keep it up, lots of other things collapse.

    cyborganism,

    That’s the thing. We NEED the opposite of growth. We need a decrease, a decline. Less production, less people.

    Otherwise we all know what’s the alternative. Global irreversible climate disaster and massive death.

    Son_of_dad,

    All you’re advocating for is a world in which the rich get to have kids and the rest of us get to work until we die, and have no families or lives.

    Anticorp,

    No, that’s not at all what I said. You just formulated your own scenario and ran with it.

    Moneo,

    Could you clarify what you meant? You think it’s a good thing that people cannot afford to have kids?

    Anticorp,

    Nope, but I think it’s good that people are deciding not to have kids, especially if they can’t afford them. I think the best scenario is if people can afford kids and still decide not to have them, or only have one of them.

    xc2215x,

    Groceries and housing cost way too much for many people to make babies.

    Rocket,

    Costs too little, you mean. When housing and groceries are actually unaffordable, people have children to help grow food and prepare supplies for shelter. This is why birth rates are still quite high in poor countries and why birthrates fall off a cliff when people have plenty of resources readily available.

    beetus,

    Please show me on the map where I can take my future family and farm the land on my theoretical meager wealth.

    There is none.

    We don’t live in a world where the average human can farm their own food meaningfully anymore. Not at scale at least. The lands been bought, built on, or industrialized for large scale crop harvest.

    What you are proposing doesn’t work in most places on this planet anymore.

    Rocket,

    Lots and lots and lots of crown land that is more than suitable to provide for a family. If the people are not permitted to settle on that crown land… change that. Said land is literally owned by the people. The people can do whatever they want with it.

    Only the super high productive land is used for large scale crops. You do not need anything of the sort to feed a family. You’re not becoming a farmer here. Farmers don’t need children. They have tractors.

    TotallyHuman,

    Well, you’re not becoming a modern farmer. You’re becoming a preindustrial farmer. Modern life has its problems but I’d rather not become a peasant, thanks.

    Rocket, (edited )

    You’re becoming a preindustrial farmer.

    Growing food doesn’t make you a farmer. A farmer, by definition, is an owner of a farm business. In Canada, we take it further and require the business has at least $7,000 in gross farm sales to legally consider its owner a farmer.

    So, let’s say you want to make it a business. Who will be your customers? You are definitely not going to be able to produce the food more cheaply than large scale agriculture working Canada’s most prime land. What’s your value proposition?

    Let’s be realistic: You’re not becoming a farmer. You are growing food for yourself in this scenario because your time is otherwise worthless. If your time was not worthless, you would use that time to generate value and use that value to buy food from a farmer.

    Modern life has its problems but I’d rather not become a peasant, thanks.

    I don’t follow. Because food and shelter is still quite affordable (even if not nearly as cheap as you wish it were) and with both starting to fall in price you think you’re going to become a peasant? You may want to clarify.

    TotallyHuman,

    The way I see it, a farmer is one who operates a farm, and a farm is an area dedicated to the production of food or other plant or animal products, but that’s irrelevant. We can use the word “homesteader” if you prefer.

    Life as a homesteader sucks. It’s very hard work with long hours. If you get a few bad crop years in a row, you starve. If you become disabled, you starve. If you become seriously ill, far away from decent medical care, you die. Of course the community can help you, but you’re surrounded by other homesteaders with the same problems.

    That is, more or less, the way it was for most of human history. These days, we specialize. We assign a few people to produce food, a few people to educate the young, a few people to treat illness, and so on. In most of the Western world, we organize this with money. If I opt out of the system to become a homesteader and work the land for food for my family, that is my full-time job. I don’t contribute anything extra to society, and so I have no (or little) money. My life becomes essentially that of a peasant. Oh, sure, I have vaccines and civil rights and maybe running water, so my life isn’t as bad as that of a medieval peasant, but it’s still fundamentally similar: I give up most of the advantages of living in a modern, industrialized society.

    Rocket,

    You make it sound like we are talking about actively choosing to become a homesteader.

    If you read the thread (a lot to ask, I know) you would know that we are talking about one ending up as a homesteader because they have failed to provide value to society. If one was providing value to society then one could easily afford to live in modern society, including having their food produced by a farmer.

    If you did read the thread then you are not making yourself clear. Why would someone purposely stop providing value to society?

    new_acct_who_dis,

    And student loans and healthcare and transportation

    nueonetwo,

    I would love to pump some baby batter into my gf and start having a kids, can’t do that while we’re stuck living paycheque to paycheque on a combined 130k in my parents basement.

    bananaw,

    I hate the beginning of this comment

    nueonetwo,

    I hate that I can’t do it so I guess we’re even?

    bananaw,

    Yeah fair XP. Apologies for totally disregarding the larger issue, bud. Didn’t mean to minimize one of our generational issues

    nueonetwo,

    All good man lol, just trying to add a little humour to the devastating reality of maybe never having kids.

    LarryTheMatador,

    Ssshplort

    Mkengine,

    How bad is housing in Canada right now? This is not a prominent topic here in Europe, so let’s say you look for a 200 m² house in the outer parts of a bigger city, what would be the price for that?

    saigot,

    I bought a townhouse that was 1700sqft (~150m^2) in Markharm, a suburb of the GTA (1hr to the center of toronto by car, 1.5hrs by bus), in a pretty bad area for 800K CAD during a slight market crash during covid. By all accounts this was an exceptionally good deal, by realtor didn’t think we could get anything for under 900. I sold that townhouse for 1.1 mil in 2023.

    CyanFen,

    The issue is that investors are buying houses 100k over asking price same or next day because they don’t plan on living in them, they just want to make the investment and prop up the housing market bubble for as long as they can.

    bionicjoey,

    Everything is worth what people will pay for it. The problem is that we aren’t building anywhere near enough housing.

    kofe,

    In America conservative estimates are 4 empty homes for every person.

    bionicjoey,

    That can’t possibly be true. Just using simple logic: if someone owns a vacant house or unit, why wouldn’t they rent it out considering the absurd rents that can be charged in this market?

    kofe,

    www.census.gov/…/vacant-seasonal-housing.html#:~:….

    bionicjoey,
    1. That’s a US statistic. Their housing market is very different from Canada’s.
    2. It’s clearly referring to seasonal residences, many of which are properties that aren’t suitable for year round use. My uncle owns a cabin up north that is only accessible by sled in the winter. Should that really be considered an “empty house”? It’s a huge red herring to measure every single building someone can sleep in as housing, rather than measure the buildings people are actually treating as housing.
    3. It isn’t “4 empty homes for every person”. That’s a crazy number. It says some counties (again in the US) (specifically rural counties) have more seasonal vacant residences than non-seasonal. Which makes total sense. The county where my uncle’s cabin is located doesn’t have any major towns in it. It’s just cottage country.

    None of that has anything to do with the housing crisis.

    Powerpoint,

    Speculators need to be heavily taxed. We need to discourage this and put a stop to it ASAP.

    Numpty,

    Start with income perspective. The average annual salary in 2022 was just under $60,000. Nationally, the average house price in summer 2023 was a bit over $750,000. These incomes and house prices are affected pretty strongly by the lower incomes and lower housing costs in rural Canada vs the major cities like Vancouver and Toronto

    So… shift attention to the cities. In Toronto and Vancouver, the average house price is around $1,200,000 give or take a little. You need at a combined income of least $280,000 to qualify for a house like that (or have substantial equity built up in previous home purchases). Most people are earning at or close to the national average… with a few - especially those in STEM careers (sw devs for example) up over $100,000 per year.

    I live in a suburb city (I own my house)… it’s inconveniently located if you want/need to be in the core city centre for work (I’m about 3 hours commute right now if I needed to go in to a downtown office… thankfully I don’t). Houses on my street are relatively new (most built in 2019 and 2020). The houses currently for sale are listing between $1,250,000 and $2,350,000.

    Renting can be really awful in Canada too… you get stunts like this …ctvnews.ca/this-is-egregious-sisters-shocked-whe… simply because they can…

    tl;dr Housing in Canada is bonkers

    Mkengine,

    Thanks for the insight, this is crazy. We are looking for houses right now here in Germany, and and the last one we visited was 269 m² for around 500.000€ and 30 minutes drive away of the inner city of the next major city. I hope politics does something about your problem, it can not stay like this.

    Numpty,

    Germany has its own insanity in the housing market :-P I lived in Germany or several years. I rented vs buying and I dreaded moving because facing that shit show of a rental process (at least in places like Hamburg) was… too much. Queuing up with 100 other people all racing to fill in the rental application form first just so they’d get a chance at a place. I quickly learned to use an agency to line up rentals… and ended up renting a VERY nice newly built flat for the same price as the old many-times-renovated flats in the same district.

    I did buy a house elsewhere in Europe and it was… interesting as an expat. It was substantially cheaper than Canada… granted it was many years ago, so not a fair comparison.

    The Canadian government makes noises about “fixing” the housing crisis in Canada, but… I honestly don’t think they can. Houses are currently priced out of reach… WAY out of reach for the average new home buyer. People can’t save up a 5% to 20% down payment fast enough to keep up with the rising cost of living. The cost of everything is increasing at multiple times their potential salary increases (if they even get any).

    Moneo,

    Sorry but how are you living paycheck to paycheck with that income and little to no rent?

    nueonetwo,

    Without writing out my whole life story: student loans, unexpected vehicle issues (public transit isn’t an option where I live), out of pocket medical costs not covered by benefits or gov’t, long commutes with expensive gas and no feasible alternatives and few job opportunities closer to home in my field. Can’t afford to move due to high rents so I’m stuck driving.

    There’s more but I’m hungry and wanna eat dinner and don’t feel like going into it. We save everything that isn’t essential and barely go out for fun, anything extra goes towards a down payment but the way things are going right not it doesn’t look like we’ll be able to buy for years unless we can put away like 2k a month.

    DiscussionBear,

    I don’t know what province youre in but also the skyrocketing cost of food and groceries.

    What I got a couple years ago with $100 doesn’t buy shit now a days.

    Fuck our government both federal and provincial, and all parties. Fuck every politician that sits in parliament collecting a pretty 6 figure paycheque and watching their real-estate asset appreciate as Canadians get perpetually fucked over time and time again.

    nueonetwo,

    Yup that too.

    My partner got food poisoning a few years ago and kicked her food intolerances up a level where even trace amounts now wreck her so we’ve had to go to the dairy free route which is expensive and very limiting. Her doctor recently told her to try cutting gluten so now I have to relearn how to shop and cook to accommodate that which adds more to the bill. She’s essentially a gluten free vegan who eats meat.

    Powerpoint,

    When people say pay cheque to pay cheque in this type of situation they’re still putting money away into savings typically but are out of reach of where they need to be. There’s usually large debts, medical costs or other financial burdens that aren’t mentioned like maybe taking care of a family member. Their pay cheque to pay cheque situation is a bit different than someone working minimum wage and will be out on the streets as they still have money going into some sort of savings

    RagingNerdoholic,

    Or they just live in Toroncouver.

    derpgon,

    You technically can, but she has to be on the pill.

    nueonetwo,

    She does have an iud so I could before, but her Dr put her on medication for her rheumatoid arthritis last year that causes birth defects so at the moment we gotta double up. Even if that wasn’t the case, still couldn’t afford to have a kid right now.

    derpgon,

    Oof, well, no love baby juices for her.

    Unless there was another hole where it could be injected 🤔

    nueonetwo,

    (◕ヮ<)

    rekabis,

    It’s wild to consider that $130k combined income can’t even get you on the lowest rung of the housing ladder.

    Now consider that the average wage - half of all people make less - is only $48k in Canada.

    spacecowboy,

    There’s too many people on this planet anyways.

    LostWon,

    By what measure? Industry and a small minority of extremely wealthy people are setting the agenda to destroy the planet, not average people.

    datavoid,

    …should we eat them?

    senbonzakura,

    Yes

    systemglitch,

    Yes

    spacecowboy,

    Look at what we did to the planet with the current (and smaller) population sizes. You think adding MORE people isn’t going to become an issue?

    We are, in the near future, going to have a mass migration of people away from no longer inhabitable land.

    Those people you’re talking about aren’t going to give up power and let “average people” right the ship. And those same “average people” have been placated and conditioned to buy shiny trinkets and celebrate touchdowns and home runs instead of organizing and uprooting the real problem makers.

    Anticorp,

    By just about every measure? Would you rather have a smaller population and the same standard of living, or a larger population and a considerably lower standard of living? The earth’s resources and abilities to heal itself are finite. The more people we have, the more restrictive our quality of life needs to be. Instead of having a house on some usable land, a garden, and some chickens, you’re forced into a stacked box, with one window, and no yard, surrounded by other stacked boxes. Plus the impact of everything you do is magnified. Oh, you want to drive to the store? Better walk 20 blocks instead, because we’re already at our carbon capacity. That last example was hyperbole, but it’s not that far fetched. Basically a lower population gives us a lot more leeway to live our lives comfortably.

    Uranium3006,
    @Uranium3006@kbin.social avatar

    The fact the nearest store is 20 blocks away is a consequence of bad urban planning

    Anticorp,

    Yes, but that knowledge doesn’t change the distance you need to travel to go there.

    Moneo,

    There are more people on the planet than ever and QOL is up overall. Resources are not the problem, it’s resource allocation and wealth inequality.

    Anticorp,

    QOL is not up overall. Well I guess it depends on your standards for QOL. Sure, entertainment options are plentiful and you can get well made products delivered to your door in 12 hours. But housing affordability is at an all-time low, cost of living near all-time highs, and we’re hitting record high and low weather events every single freaking day. These are all fallouts from rapid population expansion and using old systems to maintain an ever changing reality. An influx of 1 million people into an area that only builds a few thousand houses per year is going to cause massive spikes in demand, which attracts the attention of investment bankers, who then fund real estate acquisition, further exacerbating the problem. The carbon footprint of 8 billion people is more than double the carbon footprint of 4 billion people. Sure, many issues still remain with a smaller population, but every issue is magnified by a larger one. There are some benefits to large populations, but I think we’re beyond sustainable now.

    LostWon,

    Amputation doesn’t cure a systemic disease. Very little has to change about most people’s status of living in order for the vast majority of people to live comfortably without being forced into buying plastic, driving everywhere, etc. These are bad planning and poor oversight issues that have nothing to do with numbers of people in a population.

    The majority of the remedy that would solve the issue long-term is opportunities and competition in green tech (which is being held back in favour of propping up a few fossil fuel giants), refusing to excuse wasteful and damaging industry practices, fugitive emissions, wastes of resources, etc. The ones who would be most likely to see significant change to their lives are the ones who are also individually wasting the most resources (with private jets, yachts, powering multiple homes, etc.)

    But sure, give that small minority of super-wasteful people an excuse to waste even more and kill people off (since we don’t have time for natural causes or accidental deaths to make a difference) to prop up their lifestyle.

    Anticorp,

    Yes I agree, those are all good strategies. But to implement all of those things on a global scale takes generations. In the meantime, we’re stuck with an old system, designed for a much smaller populace. Our growth outpaced our progress.

    Edit: and to be clear I never said a damned thing about killing people. You added that. Choosing to not have kids is not even remotely similar to killing people.

    rexxit,

    Totally agree. We should have <1B people living like kings, not 10B people living like peasants. A lot of environmentally unsustainable things become perfectly sustainable if there are fewer people on the planet. Like, we shouldn’t have to be worried about the impact of beef production or overfishing - the planet should be able to sustain the number of humans that want to eat those things. At 8-10B it obviously can’t.

    grte,

    There’s also the fact that heavily developed nations with declining birth rates are also overwhelmingly responsible for climate change.

    jimbo,

    By what measure?

    Literally every objective measure of our planet’s health? We are permanently changing the atmosphere, simultaneously causing a mass extinction event, and virtually every environmental preserve and tourist attraction is facing huge damage from overuse.

    Every human being has a carbon cost, none of us are carbon negative or neutral, until we build systems that change that, every extra human we add is destroying our planet faster.

    LaChaleurDeLaNuit,

    I mean if you’re concerned about the actual planet then don’t worry the Earth will survive with or without humans lol. If your concern is our survival as a species then that’s a different story.

    Fogle,

    No there’s not. There’s too many people for capitalism

    LaChaleurDeLaNuit,

    Ugh, I hate this argument. I always wonder: so what do you propose ? Many countries’ retirement system are built on the active population paying for the retired population. What do you think happens when there are more retired than actives?

    Low birth rate is a real serious issue for many countries. The problem is not overpopulation, it’s poverty and how we manage our resources.

    rexxit, (edited )

    Capitalism and retirement is set up as a pyramid scheme. We shouldn’t be looking at situations that were recklessly arranged assuming endless growth and saying “how do we prevent population contraction” - that’s insanity. We need to figure out how to retool society for a post-growth world.

    If the only way to prevent the music from stopping is a pyramid scheme, we’re all fucked.

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