Unto Canada, Too Few Children Are Born

Christians this week celebrate the most important birthday in the history of the world. Christmas is a glad event even for those of us not of Christian faith. And yet there is a hint of sadness in all these nativity scenes: For in our day-to-day secular context, nativity is becoming a rarer and rarer event.

Canada's birth rate now hovers at about 1.5 per woman. For people interested in the science of population, that simple statistic portends catastrophe. But statistics don't mean much to most people. Let's look at the raw numbers instead.

In 1959, the peak year of the Baby Boom, almost 480,000 children were born in Canada -- a country of about 17 million people. With rare exceptions, the number of births has been declining ever since. In 2002, there were only 328,000 children born to the 31 million people of Canada.

Canada's population continues to rise of course, and will continue to rise for some time to come. Because Canada's population is so much bigger now than it was when today's elderly were born, births still exceed deaths by a substantial margin. But the number of deaths is increasing even as the number of births drops. Twelve years from now, the first of the Baby Boomers will turn 70, and after that the number of deaths will begin to increase rapidly.

At some point not too far into the next century, the two lines will cross, and the population of Canada will begin to shrink.

Many people imagine that immigration can solve the problem. Canada now runs one of the most open immigration policies on Earth. Between 1991 and 2001, 1.8 million immigrants arrived in Canada. Immigration brought Canada more than half its population growth over the decade of the 1990s. Some demographers believe that if Canada increased its immigration intake to more than two million per decade, the population could be held stable indefinitely.

But immigration is an imperfect way to solve the demographic problem.

The countries from which Canada's migrants have recently tended to come are themselves facing population decline. China's birthrate for example is lower than that of the United States. The decline is steepest among the most educated elements of the population -- the people whom Canada wants most to attract.

Think of things from the point of view of a talented young Chinese who turns 25 in the year 2030. By then, China could well be the world's biggest economy, bigger even than the United States. Against that, Canada will be offering him an alien language, a terrible climate -- and crushing taxes to support the retirement and health care of a lot of elderly people to whom he has no relationship. He might well decide he's better off staying home.

And even if he does decide to come, massive immigration in an era of negative birthrates will present challenges for which the country has not prepared. Canada accepted a lot of immigrants in the 1950s and 1960s. But back then, immigration was a minority experience -- there was a majority culture to which immigrants could and (it was expected) should assimilate.

But in the 2020s and 2030s, immigration will increasingly become the majority experience among Canada's active population. The old will find themselves living among, being cared for by and being supported by taxes paid by people with whom they may feel very little in common. The Baby Boomers may find themselves growing old in a country in which they feel alien and superfluous.

Immigration is to natural population growth as wine is to food: enriching as a supplement; dangerous as a substitute.

So what to do?

The very first step is for Canadians to acknowledge that they have a problem on their hands, and for politicians to acknowledge that the birthrate and family formation are important, even supreme, concerns for policymakers.

Then Canadians must rigorously focus on figuring out what helps and what hurts. For example: Canadian politicians have invested billions -- and are getting ready to invest billions more -- in national daycare systems. Daycare is supposed to ease the burden on working mothers and could theoretically be seen as a pro-natal policy. But does it work?

The nations of Europe provide generous daycare benefits. Yet according to a fascinating article in the current issue of The Public Interest, "What Do Women Want" by Neil Gilbert of the University of California, the consequences of these benefits have been catastrophic: "This spending had an inverse correlation with fertility rates and showed a similar relation to marriage rates." Or, in plain English: the more a country spends to support families and children, the fewer children and families it gets.

Why? To pay for the taxes to pay for the daycare, more and more families need two full-time workers. Women who are full-time workers cannot easily manage two or more children. So the daycare invented to help families ends up squelching them instead.

This vicious cycle explains why the United States, which offers fewer family benefits than Europe or Canada, should have a dramatically higher birthrate, 2.1, than either. America's native-born non-Hispanic whites have a birthrate of 1.9. And that rate actually rose in the 1990s, while others' fell.

As the American example suggests, countries concerned about birth rates need a new approach. Next week, I'll suggest what that approach might look like.