Birth rates across the country are down. Why not in Oshawa? | Canada Voices

Krista Liebscher was driving along Thornton Road North near her home in Oshawa this past fall when she noticed a row of brake lights ahead. In front of her along the four-lane road, past rows of meticulously manicured lawns and trees, was a lineup of cars like you’d expect to see outside of a concert or sports venue. But here, the drivers were waiting to turn into the new city park.

Then she noticed an even more curious sight. Standing in the middle of all the chaos were traffic guards, wearing fluorescent vests. The city had sent staff to direct traffic – to direct the many families circling the lot, over and over again, to find a parking space.

It‘s an extreme example, but one on a theme that Ms. Liebscher says has become common in the Ontario city about an hour’s drive east of Toronto. There are five parks within a kilometre of her house, and they’re all regularly swarmed with families – evidence of Oshawa’s uncommonly high population of children.

“It’s wild,” she said. “There are just so many kids. So many kids.”

For more than six decades, Canada has seen dramatically falling fertility rates. Countries around the world face the same trend, prompting the United Nations last year to warn of an “unprecedented decline.” In Canada, those rates have dropped over the past decade into the ranks of the “ultra-low” fertility countries.

The drop in birth rate has caused a significant amount of hand-wringing by experts and politicians, and has raised existential questions around what this means for our already rapidly aging nation, for the future of our economy – and, of course, for the changing face of our country.

Elsewhere in the world, cities such as Seoul and Taipei are already confronting the very real threat of a future without children – the risk of becoming single-cohort communities where playgrounds and schools sit empty, entire neighbourhoods where the sounds of children playing – the sounds of joy and play, the ruckus of life – are rare.

And while the situation isn’t quite as dire here, already we’re witnessing the changing makeup of our major cities. Almost every one of them has seen its population of children shrink over the past few years. In Victoria, the number of deaths each year already far exceeds the number of births – one of several Canadian cities where this is the case.

But Oshawa is an anomaly. Oshawa – the former rust-belt city still known as one of Canada’s crime capitals – is growing. The city has a higher percentage of kids under the age of 5 than any other large urban centre in the country. And the number of births there continues to climb, by almost 15 per cent between 2020 and 2024.

Even accounting for its relative affordability compared with big cities such as Toronto, and even when compared with other, similarly priced communities, Oshawa is an outlier. A city where the future is still evident. In a country where families have long been shrinking, it’s a city that might be a lesson. If only we can figure out what that lesson is.

‘There are so many families’

In the middle of a baby art class held at a North Oshawa dance studio one recent Monday, there was a sudden burst of excitement. The half-dozen babies present were crawling all over the room, playing with finger paints and tissue paper and shaving cream – more interested in making mess than art – when Ashleigh Grant let out a loud gasp.

“Is she crawling?” she asked. Her daughter, Abigail – an 8½-month-old with big square cheeks and blue paint smeared all across her forehead – had scooted her way across the floor.

Ms. Grant pulled Abigail backward by the waist, urging her to try it again. Her eyes lit up, and she pulled out her phone. “I need to get a video of this.”

Chelsey Gike, who runs the “Baby Picasso” class, stood nearby, cheering Abigail on. Since starting her baby-and-parent programming business in Oshawa two years ago, she’s witnessed many such firsts. The business, she said, is booming. “100 per cent. Booming.” There’s so much demand that many of her classes have waitlists.

Ms. Gike has two kids herself, ages 5 and 9. She moved to Oshawa from Burlington in 2021. When her husband first suggested the move, she said, “I was like, ‘Absolutely not.’” She didn’t want to leave Burlington, which she considered a picture-perfect place to raise kids. But since moving to Oshawa, she’s had no regrets.

She’s discovered Oshawa, too, is a picture-perfect place for kids. “There are so many families,” she said. “So many families.”

That wasn’t always a given.

For more than a century, Oshawa’s fate was entirely tied to the automobile. It’s where Robert McLaughlin founded the McLaughlin Carriage Company in the 1870s, which would eventually become General Motors Canada.

The GM plant grew into one of the world’s largest auto manufacturing factories, employing around 23,000 people by the 1980s. The city grew around it.

Most Canadians will know what happened next. When the automobile plants began shutting down in the early aughts, Oshawa looked poised to follow in the footsteps of Detroit or Buffalo, cities left as ghosts of their former selves.

But something else happened. “Instead of just really relegating ourselves to a one-horse sort of proposition, we looked at having multiple horses,” said Tito-Dante Marimpietri, a local city councillor.

A new postsecondary institution, Ontario Tech University, opened its doors in 2003. The local hospital was redeveloped and expanded into Lakeridge Health in 2011. And the city built giant business parks to create new jobs, such as the 500-acre Northwood Business Park – huge stretches of industrial land that now house giant commercial and distribution centres for companies including Martin Brower and Amazon.

Developers also leaned in on Oshawa’s proximity to the Greater Toronto Area, marketing it as a more affordable, family-friendly bedroom community. The city set a target to build 23,000 new homes by 2031, and rolled out the welcome mat for families, building ice rinks, playgrounds and even a BMX park.

The pitch was this: all of the big-city amenities, at a fraction of the cost.

The numbers back that up. An average detached home in Toronto costs about $1.6-million. In Pickering, it’s $1.2-million and in Whitby, $1-million. In Oshawa, meanwhile, the average price is about $826,000.

Drive until you qualify, or so the saying goes (though in the case of Oshawa, “ride until you qualify” might be more fitting, as Oshawa is the easternmost stop on the GO Train line.)

Take Ms. Liebscher. She’s a teacher, and grew up near Port Perry, about half an hour north of Oshawa. “When I was growing up, they’d call this ‘the dirty Schwa,’” she said. But when her husband got a job in Toronto in 2021 and they were looking for a home closer to the city, Oshawa offered the most value for their money.

They were able to buy a four-bedroom house that backs onto a ravine. There’s a creek in the backyard where her two boys can play. They bird-watch and feed deer from their property. She likes the diversity here, too. Their neighbours come from different walks of life and from all around the world. “There’s a lot of great areas here. A lot of great schools,” she said. “We love it.”

Still, affordability only tells part of the story.

Hamilton is similarly affordable. A detached house there costs about the same as in Oshawa. Barrie, too. And both those cities are within a similar commuting distance from Toronto. But neither has seen growth on the same scale as Oshawa.

“What’s specifically going on in Oshawa?” said Don Kerr, a demographer at King’s University College at Western University. “It’s hard to say.”

What sent the fertility rate downward?

Experts who study population change are always careful to note that there’s nothing inherently positive, or negative, about a low fertility rate.

“It’s just a demographic reality,” said Maxwell Hartt, a Queens University professor who focuses on populations and planning. And there is a long list of potential factors.

The fertility rate first began dropping in Canada around the latter half of the 20th century, between 1960 and 1980. This was the result of the rise of women’s rights and birth control – leading to a dramatic increase of women in education, their growing participation in the labour force and subsequent greater economic power. Women who chose to have children had fewer of them, and later in life.

“A lot of it,” Prof. Hartt said, “had to do with people having a choice.”

Over the past decade, that rate has gone down even further. As of 2024, Canada’s fertility rate, which estimates how many children the average woman will have over a lifetime, sat at 1.25 – well below 2.1, the figure experts say would keep our population stable.

This recent drop is likely owing to a long list of factors, said Prof. Kerr. Affordability is a major driver. He also cited changing gender roles and a shift in priorities among women toward careers instead of motherhood. “Motherhood isn’t the be-all and end-all of young women anymore,” he said.

Even if Canada’s population were to decline, as it did last year when the country saw the biggest drop in decades, both he and Prof. Kerr emphasized that there’s no imminent crisis. Immigration has long helped to keep our population stable. Even under its most conservative estimates, Statistics Canada projects the country’s population to continue rising through until 2075.

Still, the government has moved in recent years to cap the number of newcomers entering the country as part of its plan to tackle housing affordability.

And there are negative consequences associated with a low fertility rate over a long period. Here in Canada, the obvious economic concerns include labour shortages and an aging population with fewer young people to support them.

There are also social ramifications, Prof. Kerr said. “As our population ages, and our family networks get smaller and smaller,” he said, “it means we’ll have smaller networks to rely on.”

Which brings us to Oshawa. The fertility rate for Oshawa in 2024 was 1.4 – not exactly an eye-popping figure, and still below the replacement rate. But it’s well above the national average of 1.25. Oshawa’s birth rate, too – which calculates the number of births per 1,000 people – has continued to rise, meaning the number of births has outpaced population growth.

It’s impossible to know the real driver behind all of this: whether couples are choosing Oshawa because they want to have families, or whether it’s something about living in Oshawa that makes people want to have kids. It might be both.

“People love making babies here. It’s part of life,” said Mr. Marimpietri, the city councillor. “And Oshawa is a great place to start your life as a young family.”

Experts trying to understand a population’s fertility rate will often look to a number of variables. High newcomer population, for instance, has traditionally been associated with higher fertility rates – often because immigrants tend to be young adults in their core working ages. In 2024, about 42 per cent of babies born in the country were born to immigrant women.

Brooks, Alta., for instance, a small town about two hours east of Calgary, has seen a huge jump in its fertility rate, likely owing to the presence of a large meat-processing plant there, drawing thousands of newcomers as workers.

Religion, too, is often cited as a factor, given that many faiths explicitly encourage large families. That’s likely the explanation in Steinbach, Man., which calls itself “Canada’s most Bible-minded city,” and where the fertility rate is 2.6.

But Oshawa is a mixed bag. The city consistently ranks among the top three in Ontario for homicides. In 2023, it was named by Numbeo, a website that ranks the quality of life in cities around the world, as the “sixth most dangerous city in Canada.”

Oshawa also has one of the highest rates of unemployment in Canada, and in recent years has seen increased challenges of drug use and homelessness. Many of its most vulnerable residents are centred around downtown and the south end of the city – apart from the newer, more affluent developments in the north.

The average age, income and education level in Oshawa, meanwhile, are in line with the rest of the country. So, too, are its religious and immigrant populations. In other ways, Oshawa is an average city. About as average as it gets. The numbers alone don’t explain it.

Giving kids ‘that nineties childhood’

Baby Abigail’s mom thinks she might have part of the answer. To Ms. Grant, people are gravitating to the lifestyle and culture of a kid-centric city.

She attended the baby art class that day with Nicole Osinga, her best friend since Grade 1. The two women grew up together, on opposite ends of Arnhem Drive in North Oshawa.

Picture the Brady Bunch house, and that’s more or less what their childhood homes looked like. Sixties and seventies-style brick homes with second-floor vinyl siding. Homes on wide lots with double-car garages. Big backyards, quiet sidewalks and lots and lots of space to run.

“There were always a lot of kids around, and we’d just go outside and play,” said Ms. Grant.

Now, the two women are raising their own babies: Abigail and Ms. Osinga’s son, Jack, a little blonde boy wearing only a diaper, who had purple paint rubbed all over his belly. By coincidence, the two children were born on the same day. Ms. Grant still lives in Oshawa, in a home with a layout almost identical to her childhood Arnhem Drive home. Ms. Osinga is in nearby Courtice.

It’s easier to raise kids in a city like Oshawa, said the women, precisely because there are so many other kids. They can take their little ones to EarlyON centres together, to baby swim classes, to stroller fit classes. Many of their friends live nearby, and many of them, too, have kids.

They can go out to eat at a local restaurant without having to worry about being the only ones with kids there. There’s no apologizing, because there are always other children shouting and crying.

“It feels like Oshawa is built for families,” Ms. Osinga said.

It also makes them happy to give their kids a childhood that feels familiar – a childhood similar to their own. When they picture a family-friendly neighbourhood, they picture Arnhem Drive. And Oshawa is filled with Arnhem Drives.

“Just nice, little, suburban areas,” said Ms. Grant. “It feels like we’re giving them that nineties childhood.”

This desire is something economists have identified as a phenomenon. In 1961, Richard Easterlin, an American economist and professor, outlined his theory linking fertility rates and income – not absolute income, but relative income.

For couples deciding whether to have children, the late Prof. Easterlin wrote, what matters most is how their income or status compares with how they themselves were raised. In other words, more people will have kids if they can achieve at least the same – if not a higher – standard of living that they’ve grown up with.

It’s a theory that fits for a country as suburban as ours.

But it doesn’t entirely hold up once you look outside of our borders, said Prof. Hartt.

Young people who grow up living in apartments in Hong Kong or Manhattan would, in theory, be happy to raise their own children in similar spaces, he said. They’re not waiting for a detached home or a backyard in order to have kids. And yet, birth rates are dropping in those cities.

And so, the enigma of Oshawa remains.

“The extent to which these things, like housing and affordability, are the real driving factors,” he said, “it’s hard to know. It’s probably impossible to know.”

‘You still feel like you’re in a small town’

Baby Picasso wasn’t the only class Ms. Gike taught that morning. She also had on the schedule a baby gymnastics class. For that one, she set up a trampoline, a climbing gym and a small ball pit in the dance studio.

Nine-month-old Jameson Duck was transfixed by the ball pit. He had a wisp of light brown hair and a face that was all cheek, no chin. Eyes as round as marbles. As he sat contemplating a ball in each hand, his mom, Jamie Duck, chatted with Ms. Gike.

Jameson’s name is a combination of her name and his dad Jason’s, she said. They met in elementary school, and both grew up in Oshawa.

Just two months ago, they moved into their four-bedroom home in a North Oshawa neighbourhood called Taunton. It’s a newer, detached brick home surrounded by other newer, large, detached brick homes.

“It was important for me to have a backyard and sidewalks, and parks,” said Ms. Duck.

“And parking,” Ms. Gike added.

Ms. Duck nodded. “And parking.”

Driving through Taunton, past rows of near-identical beige-and-brown brick homes, it’s easy to mistake it for Markham, or Mississauga, or Milton. To think a suburb is a suburb is a suburb.

Except, Ms. Gike and Ms. Duck said, Milton now has traffic. Markham has condos. Mississauga has both. They’re suburbs that have become major cities themselves.

Oshawa is still small enough that people know their neighbours, they said. Small enough that they run into each other at the grocery store. Small enough that, when they meet someone else who grew up in Oshawa, the first question they ask is, ‘Where did you go to school?’

“Even though it’s such a big city that’s growing so rapidly, you still feel like you’re in a small town,” Ms. Gike said.

From the park in Taunton, perched atop a rolling slope, you can see all the way to Lake Ontario – nothing but wide, flat land and dense, wooded areas. It’s the edge of the region.

From there, it feels like space is limitless. Like there’s nothing but room to grow.

Speaking of which, is the Duck family considering more children? Ms. Duck paused a moment to consider. There were a lot of factors she and Jason still have to think about.

But then she smiled. Because beyond all the calculations – beyond the questions of affordability, income and space – there was the picture, in her head, of the family she’d always imagined.

“The idea of a sibling for Jameson-” she said. “It’s nice.”

With data reporting by Yang Sun