In Canada’s major cities, fertility rates are in steep decline. What happened? | Canada Voices

Every major city across Canada has seen a drop in fertility rates over the past five years – with many cities falling to record new lows – according to data obtained by The Globe and Mail.

While Canada’s fertility rate has been declining for more than six decades, it’s fallen especially steeply over the past decade, earning Canada entry in 2023 into the club of “lowest-low” fertility countries, alongside South Korea, Italy and Japan. The Globe and Mail requested data from Statistics Canada on fertility rates for major urban areas between 2020 to 2024, in order to understand how this has played out in our largest cities.

What the data illustrate is the changing face of our cities – where the average age in our biggest cities keeps climbing, and the percentage of young people is dramatically shrinking. What’s left are aging cities, with mushroom-shaped age distribution, and fewer and fewer young people to support them.

“It’s astounding,” said Don Kerr, a demographer at King’s University College at Western University, with whom The Globe shared the data. In his analysis, he said that of the 42 cities for which Statistics Canada had provided fertility rate information, 29 of them were likely showing new record lows.

“We’re losing out on something,” he said. “Losing the vitality of our cities as they continue to age.”

According to demographers, 2.1 is the fertility rate that Canada needs in order to sustain its population. Fertility rates estimate the average number of children a woman will have over a lifetime. Currently, the average for Canada is 1.25.

Between 2020 and 2024, all of Canada’s 42 major cities saw drops in their fertility rates.

The most dramatic drops happened in cities on the country’s two coasts. On the West Coast, Victoria had the country’s lowest fertility rate, at 0.82. (Unlike birth rates, fertility rates account for the age structure of a population – in the case of Victoria, taking into account the older average age.) And in Vancouver, the fertility rate dropped from 1.09 in 2020 to 0.94.

It’s likely no coincidence, said Prof. Kerr, that these are also cities where the cost of living is especially high. It’s a region, he said, where “the cost of housing has risen dramatically, where we have concerns around the precarious working conditions for young people, we have a lot of young adults trying to establish themselves” – all of that, often, before having kids.

“How can you start a life in that context?” he said.

The East Coast saw similarly low fertility rates. Until the 1980s, the Atlantic provinces were associated with higher-than-average fertility rates. But St. John’s (0.98), Halifax (1.0), Fredericton (1.12) and Moncton (1.14) all dropped to new record lows in 2024.

In the case of the Atlantic cities, even Prof. Kerr was stumped. “I’m baffled by it,” he said.

Canada’s declining fertility rates are part of a larger global story that has been taking place across North America, Europe and East Asia for many decades, said Rania Tfaily, a sociology professor who focuses on demographics at Carleton University.

Many smaller towns and rural regions across Canada, too, are seeing a drop in fertility rates. The data from Statistics Canada show that even many areas with traditionally higher fertility rates – including communities with large religious or Indigenous populations – are seeing a similar decline.

As our economic models have moved away from agricultural toward industrial – and with the invention of the Pill, and as women have seen an increase in political and economic power, she said, “marriage and having kids became optional, or choices, rather than economic and social necessity.”

And over the past decade, she said, other factors have come into play.

“Nowadays, when you ask young people, they say they don’t want to have children. Sometimes it’s because of climate change or the state of the world,” she said. “Other times, it’s because they want to enjoy their life and do things that fulfill them.”

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Persistent gender inequities, too, play a large role, said Andrea O’Reilly, professor of gender studies at York University.

“Even though women might be making the same or more money than their male partners, they are still doing the bulk of labour in the homes,” she said. “Whether that’s domestic labour, home management, rearing of children, or holding the household in their head.”

On top of all that, she said, the standards for motherhood keeps getting higher and higher. “The definition of the good mother has changed over the last 40 years, and it’s become impossible to attain that standard – yet all women are judged by it,” she said.

“Considering how time consuming it is, how much space it takes up in women’s heads, how exhausting it all is,” she said, it’s no surprise that women are “voting with their wombs.”

Despite all of this, experts say a population crisis is not imminent. Here in Canada, immigration has long been viewed as a tool to help offset our declining birth rates.

Still, said Prof. Kerr, while immigration helps to sustain overall population numbers, it doesn’t necessarily address the age imbalance in our cities.

Aging cities could result in fewer schools and parks and community centres, he said. Smaller families and smaller family networks. Fewer young people for older adults to rely on.

“It’s going to have an impact on the communities that we live in, in a rather fundamental and profound manner,” Prof. Kerr said. “For better or for worse – I think for the worse.”