My recent post titled "Canada must become a global superpower" has quickly become one of my most-read posts in the almost 12 years that I have been writing this daily blog. Within a few days, it quickly got to 11x the number of daily views that I typically get.
One of the points that I made was about Canada's population, and specifically the target set by the Century Initiative of 100 million Canadians by 2100. Today I'd like to expand on this point, because I'm seeing more people talk about it on the socials.
At the time of writing this post, Canada's official population clock from Statistics Canada was sitting at 41,591,151 people. So to reach 100 million in the next 75 years, it would mean we would need to grow our population by 58,408,861 people. At first glance, this seems like a big number. And to some, it has proven to be an unsettling proposition. But 75 years is a long time for compounding to work its magic.
For us to reach 100 million Canadians by 2100 it would mean that we would need to grow our population by a compounded annual growth rate of just 1.18% per year. On our current population base, that would mean about 490,000 new people next year. To put this into perspective, since Confederation in 1867, Canada's population growth rate has averaged around 1.2% per year.
So by arguing that we want to reach 100 million Canadians by 2100, we are, in a way, just saying "we should continue what we've been doing since 1867 and not change a whole lot." The status quo should inevitably lead us to 100 million people during this time period.
Of course, history isn't exactly the same. Canada's fertility rate was much higher in previous years. At the beginning of the 20th century it was nearly five children per woman. And in 1960, it was 3.81 births per woman, which placed us ahead of the US.
Today, we are 1.26 births per woman (2023), compared to 1.66 in the US (2022). We are now among the countries classified as having "lowest-low fertility." Meaning, we're sub 1.3. What this means is that we are now more dependent on immigration to maintain the same growth rate as before.
At the same time, it's not like we're unaccustomed to high immigration. Between 1901 and 1921, Canada's population increased by almost 3% a year on average. This was in large part because of immigrants from Europe, specifically the British Isles. And between 1901 and 1911, alone, Canada welcomed 1.2 million people. This is at a time when we had just over 5 million people in the entire country.
So in the end, 100 million Canadians by 2100 is probably not all that ambitious. A compound annual growth rate of 1.5% would, for example, have us grow to over 127 million people. That would be more of a stretch. There's also the important question of how quickly are we growing relative to other countries.
Whatever the exact target, I stand by what I said before. We should be aiming to lower the cost of living for Canadians, and in particular housing costs. We should make it easier for families to have more babies, should they choose to. And we should continue to attract the smartest and most ambitious people from around the world.
In 2023, there were 379,000 babies born in Italy. This is down from 393,000 babies in the prior year and represents a new record low. Already in 2022, the number of births was noted as being the fewest since Italy's unification in 1861. The result is a "demographic winter." Of course, this challenge is not unique to Italy. It is happening in most developed countries. Korea, for example, has a fertility rate somewhere around 0.72 babies per woman. Because of this, there are a lot of people in the world trying to figure out how to encourage more births.
Here is Italy's Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni:
Meloni, herself a mother of a single child, has said it is a priority for her government to increase the birth rate and encourage women to have more babies “for the simple reason that we want Italy to have a future again”.
So what's causing this?
One seemingly logical explanation could be that the employment rates for women and men are basically the same now. Fewer women are staying at home and so there's less time to have and raise children. In fact, the opposite is true. If you look at fertility rates across Europe, high birth rates tend to correlate with high employment rates for women. I guess families need to be able to afford children. Here's an excerpt from a Guardian article (c. 2015) on the topic of fertility:
The map of the fertility rate in European countries more or less overlaps with that of women in work. In countries with relatively buoyant populations, such as France and Scandinavia, women play an important part in the labour market. According to data for 2010 published by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the employment rate for women aged 24 to 54 in work was 83.8% in France, 84.4% in Finland, 85.6% in Denmark and 87.5% in Sweden, barely lower than the equivalent figures for men. In contrast, in southern Europe and Japan the share of women in work was much lower: only 64.4% of them had a job in Italy, 71.6% in Japan, 72.2% in Greece and 78.3% in Spain.
Staying on the theme of being able to afford kids, another possible explanation might be that kids are expensive and so you need strong family-friendly government policies to help support them. While this I'm sure helps, there's data to suggest that the correlation between these policies and birth rates is actually fairly weak. That's why, even though many developed countries have expanded such policies, birth rates continue to fall. Here's a graphic by John Burn-Murdoch from FT:
So what the hell is it then? Well there is another possible explanation and it is that it's more of a cultural thing. In the above article, John makes the argument that a number of other more important factors are leading to declining birth rates. Namely, more people are choosing to live alone, and not as a couple. Priorities have shifted, where family formation is no longer seen as central to a fulfilling life. And more young people are generally anxious. (He doesn't get into why but I'm sure that it's possible to blame TikTok.)
But what really stood out to me was this graphic:
Since the 1960s, parenting has gotten systematically more intense for parents. The average number of hours per day spent by mothers on "hands-on parenting activities" has grown significantly in most developed countries. However, there is one clear exception: France. It turns out that the French are, at least based on this data, less likely to be so-called helicopter parents. Parenting is less hands-on, kids get more freedom and -- perhaps because of this -- France has the highest fertility rate in Europe at over 1.8 babies per woman.
This is not to say that France's family-friendly policies aren't doing something as well. I would imagine they are. But the above makes intuitive sense to me. If you create an environment where the threshold to be considered a good parent is constantly becoming more duanting and more life-consuming, it's no surprise to me that more and more people are simply saying, no thank you.
According to this recent Bloomberg article, the world is expected to add more than 3 billion people by 2100. At the same time, the global average fertility rate is dropping. In 1960, it was five live births per woman. As of 2017, it had dropped to 2.43.
About half of all countries are now below the rate of replacement, which means they're relying on immigration (places like Canada) and/or they're relying on labor productivity gains to keep their economy growing (places like China).
The article is also fascinating in that it begins to consider the economic and cultural forces that shape the above fertility rates. Women in Saudi Arabia, for example, have one of the lowest labor force participation rates in the world. Only about 25% are in the workforce.
If you'd like to read the full article, you can do that here.
Image: Bloomberg