Immigrants were expected to solve Canada’s aging crisis. Here’s why birth rates are falling

2026/08/03 Leave a comment

This study has deservedly getting a lot of coverage:

…Her story — a 1.5-generation immigrant who arrived as a child, built a career, navigated cultural expectations and made calculated decisions planning a family — is one that researchers say is becoming increasingly common among immigrants and their children in Canada, with significant implications for how we think about population growth.

Over the last two decades, fertility rates among immigrants and their children have shifted markedly, researchers say, and the trend affects debates over immigration levels, which streams to prioritize, and which source countries best support long-term population growth.

“Population aging is about the relative size of different generations,” said Rachel Margolis, a professor in demography and sociology at Western University.

“If we add in a lot of working-age people and they have a lot of kids, it adds to both. But if we add a lot of working-age people and they don’t have that many kids, we still have a smaller kid generation and it contributes even more to population aging.”

Fertility gaps among immigrant groups

Margolis co-authored a new Western University study that used Canadian long-form census data from 2001 to 2021 to estimate birth rates across immigrant subgroups by generation, immigration stream, temporary and permanent status and source country.

Immigrants still have higher fertility than native-born Canadians, but the gap has narrowed over two decades, from 0.24 births in 2001 to 0.11 in 2021. First-generation immigrants — those who arrived after age 15 — have the highest fertility of any group. But the 1.5 generation, those who came as children like Wijesingha, have even lower fertility than both their first-generation and Canadian-born peers.

Fertility rate is the average number of children a woman is expected to have over her lifetime; the magic number of children needed for a generation to replace itself is 2.1, to maintain the population.

Among immigration streams, family-class permanent residents have the highest fertility rates, followed by refugees, with economic immigrants at the bottom of the three. Adding to the mix, temporary residents — international students and foreign workers — have the lowest of all. And across nearly all of Canada’s top 10 source countries, fertility rates have fallen since 2001, with most now below the 2.1 replacement level — and far below what those same countries produce at home. 

Margolis said she was surprised by the wide gap in fertility between the women coming to Canada and their counterparts back home. For instance, in 2021, immigrant women from India had a birth rate that’s three-quarters of a birth less than their counterparts back home; similar trends were observed for newcomers from other countries….

Source: Immigrants were expected to solve Canada’s aging crisis. Here’s why birth rates are falling

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The Population Forecasts Are Grim. They’re Still Too Optimistic.

2026/07/13 Leave a comment

More on demographics:

…There are two major pieces of wishful thinking in the flights of fancy that underpin American population forecasts. The first is immigration. The Census Bureau assumes the United States will have an annual net migration (immigrants minus emigrants) of about one million immigrants through the end of the century. The United Nations and Social Security trustees assume about 1.2 million immigrants a year throughout the 21st century. None of these forecasts are plausible. Net migration under President Trump will most likely turn out to be near zero, and he won’t be the last immigration restrictionist in our nation’s highest office.

Moreover, birthrates are collapsing across the entire planet, not just here at home. The supply of would-be migrants will shrink as more countries run out of young people, and the skilled ones every aging country covets will be fought over. With most countries staring down the same cliff, and with emigration from the United States rising, permanent high net migration is more of an aspiration than a forecast.

But the second act of wishful thinking has an even bigger effect. Many forecasters are assuming that current low fertility rates are temporary, that women are merely delaying having children rather than forgoing it entirely. But this isn’t true: Research shows that delays in childbearing are usually not made up, and, anyway, estimates that take deferred childbearing into account have fallen by just as much as the headline fertility rate.

Up until quite recently, the Social Security trustees’ main scenario assumed that fertility rates will rise from now until 2050, and stabilize at 1.9 children per woman. In 2023, the Census Bureau predicted that fertility rates will only gradually decline from 1.64 to 1.58 by 2075. Spoiler: Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has already shown a 1.57 fertility rate for 2025. The U.N. expects that the U.S. fertility rate will be flat at about 1.65 through the entire 21st century. To its credit, Social Security trustees released new numbers just last month that revised their expectations down to 1.75 in 2050, but that is overly optimistic. The Congressional Budget Office is more realistic, but even it predicts that fertility will decline to 1.53, then stabilize….

 Lyman Stone is the director of the Pronatalism Initiative at the Institute for Family Studies and the director of research for the consulting firm Demographic Intelligence.

Source: The Population Forecasts Are Grim. They’re Still Too Optimistic.

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Canada Case Study Explores the Limits of Immigration to Ease Demographic Decline

2025/03/01 Leave a comment

Good and relevant study by Dan Hiebert on the need for realism and a shift towards population policy framework:

High-income countries globally face a stark demographic transition as their populations age and fertility rates decline, with key implications for productivity and the maintenance of retiree benefits if tax bases decline as workforces shrink. Questions remain about how and to what extent immigration can help slow this transition and soften the impact on labor markets. 

Canada offers a unique vantage point on the role that immigration can play in easing demographic decline—and the potential drawbacks. Over the past decade, rising permanent and temporary migration accounted for the entirety of Canada’s labor force growth. But the rapid pace of change has come with challenges. By 2024, Canada’s historic embrace of immigration had cooled amid public concerns about its impact on housing costs and public services. 

In a new report out today for the Migration Policy Institute’s Transatlantic Council on Migration, respected Canadian researcher Daniel Hiebert investigates the efficacy of immigration in addressing population change and the old-age dependency ratio. The report examines Canada’s demographic challenges (its total fertility rate of 1.26 children per woman is among the lowest rates globally) and recent changes in migration policymaking before exploring the consequences of setting immigration rates at different levels. The report uses six scenarios for admissions and population projections over the next half-century that were commissioned from Statistics Canada. 

The report finds that while the six scenarios, which range from high- to near net-zero immigration, would produce very different overall population sizes by 2046 and 2071, the old-age dependency ratio would rise even under the highest immigration rate. “These scenarios point to an important lesson: Immigration can grow the population and slow the effects of falling fertility, but it is less efficient at changing the age composition of the population,” writes Hiebert, emeritus professor of geography at the University of British Columbia. That is because immigrants themselves age and eventually retire alongside their native-born peers. 

To tackle the rising old-age dependency ratio and the prospect of shrinking workforces, policymakers would need to also consider other interventions, such as raising the retirement age, Hiebert writes. 

The report, Understanding the Impact of Immigration on Demography: A Canadian Case Study, argues that for immigration policy to effectively tackle Canada’s challenges, policymakers will need to frame a long-term strategy that considers a number of intertwining realities, including: 

  • Calibrating immigrant admissions together with decisions about social spending and investment in housing stock and infrastructure. 
  • Taking a longer lens than the standard three-year population plan, given the consequences of changing immigration targets play out over decades. This also means recognizing the need for different policy interventions as “fast” regions such as large cities face pressures on housing and infrastructure from above-average population growth, while “slow” regions such as rural areas will need help navigating depopulation and rising old-age dependency ratios. 
  • Effectively communicating with the public to set appropriate expectations for immigration. 

“Canada is frequently seen as an exceptional case, globally, with a population that has been willing—enthusiastic, even—to accommodate a relatively high rate of immigration. This consensus has become frail and the Canadian government (like others around the world) has changed its tone on immigration, acknowledging that there are costs to immigration-led population growth,” Hiebert writes. “Nevertheless, demographic challenges are resolute and ignoring them will, eventually, also carry economic and political consequences.” 

While few governments globally have clearly and forcefully articulated the unprecedented levels of old-age dependency that are looming, and the resulting painful economic adjustments ahead, embarking on a national conversation around demography, engaging with the tough policy trade-offs involved and building a population strategy could help raise Canadian public awareness, the author concludes.

Read the report here: www.migrationpolicy.org/research/immigration-demography-canada. 

Source: Canada Case Study Explores the Limits of Immigration to Ease Demographic Decline

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ICYMI Mason: Immigrants are this country’s best friend. Don’t forget it

2024/10/22 Leave a comment

One of the counter narratives to the current critique of immigration levels (which I share). And of course the equally simplistic rationales used to justify increased levels of permanent residents, and uncontrolled growth of temporary residents, have also come home to roost:

According to a study in The Lancet, by 2050, 155 of 204 countries (75.9 per cent) measured (including Canada) will not have high enough fertility rates to sustain population size over time. This will increase to 97 per cent of these same countries by 2100. “The new fertility forecasts underscore the enormous challenges to economic growth in many middle- and high-income countries with a dwindling workforce, and the growing burden on health and social security systems of an aging population,” the report states. “These future trends in fertility rates and live births will completely reconfigure the global economy and the international balance of power, and will necessitate reorganizing societies.”…

This brings me back to Canada and our national debate around immigration. Blaming a “radical, out-of-control NDP-Liberal government,” for current immigration numbers – as Mr. Poilievre has done – is nothing more than cheap sloganeering that ignores the complexity of the problem.

Source: Mason: Immigrants are this country’s best friend. Don’t forget it





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Global fertility has collapsed, with profound economic consequences

2023/06/03 Leave a comment

Useful reminder that expanded immigration is unlikely to be a viable long-term strategy:

In the roughly 250 years since the Industrial Revolution the world’s population, like its wealth, has exploded. Before the end of this century, however, the number of people on the planet could shrink for the first time since the Black Death. The root cause is not a surge in deaths, but a slump in births. Across much of the world the fertility rate, the average number of births per woman, is collapsing. Although the trend may be familiar, its extent and its consequences are not. Even as artificial intelligence (ai) leads to surging optimism in some quarters, the baby bust hangs over the future of the world economy.Listen to this story.

In 2000 the world’s fertility rate was 2.7 births per woman, comfortably above the “replacement rate” of 2.1, at which a population is stable. Today it is 2.3 and falling. The largest 15 countries by gdp all have a fertility rate below the replacement rate. That includes America and much of the rich world, but also China and India, neither of which is rich but which together account for more than a third of the global population.

The result is that in much of the world the patter of tiny feet is being drowned out by the clatter of walking sticks. The prime examples of ageing countries are no longer just Japan and Italy but also include Brazil, Mexico and Thailand. By 2030 more than half the inhabitants of East and South-East Asia will be over 40. As the old die and are not fully replaced, populations are likely to shrink. Outside Africa, the world’s population is forecast to peak in the 2050s and end the century smaller than it is today. Even in Africa, the fertility rate is falling fast.

Whatever some environmentalists say, a shrinking population creates problems. The world is not close to full and the economic difficulties resulting from fewer young people are many. The obvious one is that it is getting harder to support the world’s pensioners. Retired folk draw on the output of the working-aged, either through the state, which levies taxes on workers to pay public pensions, or by cashing in savings to buy goods and services or because relatives provide care unpaid. But whereas the rich world currently has around three people between 20 and 64 years old for everyone over 65, by 2050 it will have less than two. The implications are higher taxes, later retirements, lower real returns for savers and, possibly, government budget crises. 

Low ratios of workers to pensioners are only one problem stemming from collapsing fertility. As we explain this week, younger people have more of what psychologists call “fluid intelligence”, the ability to think creatively so as to solve problems in entirely new ways . 

This youthful dynamism complements the accumulated knowledge of older workers. It also brings change. Patents filed by the youngest inventors are much more likely to cover breakthrough innovations. Older countries—and, it turns out, their young people—are less enterprising and less comfortable taking risks. Elderly electorates ossify politics, too. Because the old benefit less than the young when economies grow, they have proved less keen on pro-growth policies, especially housebuilding. Creative destruction is likely to be rarer in ageing societies, suppressing productivity growth in ways that compound into an enormous missed opportunity. 

All things considered, it is tempting to cast low fertility rates as a crisis to be solved. Many of its underlying causes, though, are in themselves welcome. As people have become richer they have tended to have fewer children. Today they face different trade-offs between work and family, and these are mostly better ones. The populist conservatives who claim low fertility is a sign of society’s failure and call for a return to traditional family values are wrong. More choice is a good thing, and no one owes it to others to bring up children. 

Liberals’ impulse to encourage more immigration is more noble. But it, too, is a misdiagnosis. Immigration in the rich world today is at a record high, helping individual countries tackle worker shortages. But the global nature of the fertility slump means that, by the middle of the century, the world is likely to face a dearth of young educated workers unless something changes.

What might that be? People often tell pollsters they want more children than they have. This gap between aspiration and reality could be in part because would-be parents—who, in effect, subsidise future childless pensioners—cannot afford to have more children, or because of other policy failures, such as housing shortages or inadequate fertility treatment. Yet even if these are fixed, economic development is still likely to lead to a fall in fertility below the replacement rate. Pro-family policies have a disappointing record. Singapore offers lavish grants, tax rebates and child-care subsidies—but has a fertility rate of 1.0. 

Unleashing the potential of the world’s poor would ease the shortage of educated young workers without more births. Two-thirds of Chinese children live in the countryside and attend mostly dreadful schools; the same fraction of 25- to 34-year-olds in India have not completed upper secondary education. Africa’s pool of young people will continue to grow for decades. Boosting their skills is desirable in itself, and might also cast more young migrants as innovators in otherwise-stagnant economies. Yet encouraging development is hard—and the sooner places get rich, the sooner they get old. 

Eventually, therefore, the world will have to make do with fewer youngsters—and perhaps with a shrinking population. With that in mind, recent advances in ai could not have come at a better time. An über-productive ai-infused economy might find it easy to support a greater number of retired people. Eventually ai may be able to generate ideas by itself, reducing the need for human intelligence. Combined with robotics, ai may also make caring for the elderly less labour-intensive. Such innovations will certainly be in high demand.

If technology does allow humanity to overcome the baby bust, it will fit the historical pattern. Unexpected productivity advances meant that demographic time-bombs, such as the mass starvation predicted by Thomas Malthus in the 18th century, failed to detonate. Fewer babies means less human genius. But that might be a problem human genius can fix. 

Source: Global fertility has collapsed, with profound economic consequences

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“The Times They Are A-Changin’?” – Immigration debates and discussions

2023/05/29 Leave a comment

A few years ago, it was rare to find critiques of the government’s expanding levels of immigration, and the overall consensus among the provinces, business organizations and lobby groups, media and academics organizations in favour of this approach.

However, over the past year or so, there has been significant commentary questioning the approach given the impact on housing availability and affordability, healthcare and infrastructure. In addition to my 2021 Increasing immigration to boost population? Not so fast, former head of the British Columbia public service, Don Wright, wrote one of the stronger critiques, Will Trudeau make it impossible for Eby to succeed?

National unity and the demographic weight of Quebec in Canada has become a second major critique. A series of articles in Quebecor papers (LE QUÉBÉC PRIS AU PIÈGE PAR OTTAWA) highlighting an accelerating decline of Quebec’s population relative to the rest of Canada, reflecting different immigration rates has provoked considerable political debate and commentary in Quebec and English Canadian media.

While the Quebecor were written in an incendiary manner, the substance was correct. The approaches continue to diverge, there is, IMO, an unhealthy consensus in favour ot the current and projected levels of permanent and temporary migration among federal and provincial politicians, business organizations, academics among others.

Some of the commentary recognized that. Stuart Thompson the The Hub, A new era of immigration politics has started in Canada was one of the first to recognize the potential importance to immigration debates and discussions. Chris Selley chimed in, noting that Ottawa has no answer to Quebec’s anti-immigrant narrative. Campbell Clark stressed that Two solitudes emerging on immigration in Quebec, and noted the lame arguments on both sides of the debate. Formally, the Quebec government reject[ed] Trudeau’s immigration plan, fears decline of French.

The role of the Century Initiative received increased prominence given that these debates were happening around the time of one of its Globe and Mail sponsored conferences. Immigration Minister Fraser’s denial that the government had not adopted the 100 million population goal of the Century Initiative was met with understandable cynicism by Robert Dutrisac, Blanc bonnet, bonnet blanc, Konrad Yakabuski, L’«initiative du siècle» n’est pas l’idée du siècle among others, along with more reporting and analysis, Serons-nous vraiment 100 millions de Canadiens en 2100?.

English media commentary focussed more on the politics, with Chantal Hébert asking whether Hébert: Quebec’s separatists were searching for a way to revive their cause. Is this it? and Konrad Yakabuski, another rare journalist who writes in both English and French media, noting that François Legault’s anti-immigration crusade is coming back to bite him. Andrew Phillips in the Star dismissed Quebec concerns, framing it as a Panic attack in Quebec over immigration threat. Althia Raj, also in the Star, argued that: Pierre Poilievre is courting voters by capitalizing on immigration fears in Quebec, both discounting the substance of Quebec concerns and not questioning the federal government approach.

And of course most English language was focused on the less important issue of the passport redesign (not a fan, but my worry is that the controversy will make the government even more skittish about releasing the revised citizenship guide, Discover Canada, first promised in 2016).

Surprisingly, Andrew Coyne focussed more on Quebec, politics and demography, rather than contributing his usual economic take on issues. Almost a childish approach in 100 million Canadians by 2100 may not be federal policy, but it should be – even if it makes Quebec howl, largely ignoring the negative impacts on housing, healthcare and infrastructure and, more bizarrely, falling into the trap of overall GDP rather than productivity and per capita GDP (which most of his economic-related columns focus on).

All this being said, the Quebec government took advantage of the controversy to announce changes to its immigration program Six éléments à retenir des annonces de Québec en immigration, including increased levels to 60,000 new permanent residents while allowing ongoing temporary resident growth. This slight-of-hand was of course noted by Michel David, Et la lumière fut and Plus d’immigrants pour éviter une « louisianisation » ici ? 

This modest increase will not, of course, make any significant change to the ongoing divergence in population growth between Quebec and the Rest of Canada and Quebec’s relative weight in the country.

A recent Statistics Canada study, Unemployment and job vacancies by education, 2016 to 2022, highlighting the disconnect between immigration policy, which favours university-educated immigrants, and immigrant employment, which favours lower-skilled immigrants, provides another example of how our immigration policies appear more to be “policy-driven evidence” rather than “evidence-based policy.”

Questions on immigration levels have broadened from housing, healthcare and infrastructure impacts to the impact on the Canadian federation given the imbalance between Quebec and the Rest of Canada. A potential sleeper issue, parallel to Quebec’s relative share of the population is with respect to Indigenous peoples, given that high immigration levels dwarf Indigenous growth (visible minorities increased by 26.5 percent, Indigenous peoples by 9.4 percent, 2021 compared to 2016).

As I have argued previously, we need to find a way to have more productive discussions on immigration rather than the various solitudes between the “more the merrier” and “great replacement” camps (where most Canadians are). The disconnect between Quebec and the Rest-of-Canada is a long-term threat to the federation.

A focus on the practicalities – housing, healthcare and infrastructure impacts – is likely the best way forward and may provide a means to reduce the divergence between the “two solitudes.”

Ideally, of course, some form of commission examining demographics, immigration, and these impacts would provide deeper analysis and recommendations than current IRCC consultations or any other internal review.

To end with a quote from another favourite musician of mine:

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in

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With falling births, pensions will suffer, taxes will rise – but the alternative is worse

2023/04/22 Leave a comment

Of note:

Birth rates are falling throughout the world. Some countries are losing population now, and the global population is projected to decline some time later in the century.

Many people are alarmed by this: people in China, Russia, Western Europe and even Canada, where the population growth rate would be close to zero were it not for substantial immigration. They want to reverse the trend, to raise birth rates.

They are wrong. Low birth rates and falling populations do, to be sure, create significant problems that we must face. Retirement, health care and other end-of-life costs will soar. The French government is proposing an increase in the retirement age, an unpopular decision that will likely spread to other countries. We will also likely need higher tax rates.

But the alternative – high birth rates and growing populations – would be much worse. We should welcome the falling birth rates. Here is why.

If the human race is to survive – indeed, if any species is to survive – its growth rate will be zero. Why? Because if the growth rate is positive, eventually there will be standing room only, an obvious impossibility unless we venture into the science fiction realm of space colonies. How long until we get to that point? It depends on the rate of growth, but with any positive rate we will eventually get there. In 1964, demographer Ansley Coale estimated that with an annual human growth rate of 2 per cent, standing room only would occur in just 650 years.

On the other hand, if the growth rate is negative, eventually the population will disappear.

Therefore, in the long run, if our species is to survive, our growth rate will be zero. Not zero every year, or even every century, but over the long haul. Any positive rates will have to be balanced by negative rates.

How to get to zero population growth? Easy. The birth rate has to equal the death rate.

Given that we want long, healthy lives for ourselves and for those we love, we must have low birth rates to balance that out.

With high birth rates, we will not be able to maintain low death rates. The proponents of higher birth rates don’t mean to put it this way, but they are actually prescribing an early death sentence for us.

What about the problems created by low birth rates?

The essence of the age-distribution problem is that we will have fewer working people to support more retired people. With falling populations, the incentive for investment will likely also fall. It will be harder to bring new technologies to market, and it will be harder to maintain a full-employment level of overall production.

We will thus need to find ways that working people can be more productive, that they can create more goods, services and income, so that they can provide more adequately for their own old age, and also afford higher tax rates to provide the funds for health care and other services for the elderly.

Many measures facing stiff resistance, such as the French government’s raising of the retirement age, will have to be part of the response – all of these changes are difficult and some of them are deeply unpopular. But they will turn out to be less unpopular than the early death needed to balance out high birth rates.

There is reason to be optimistic about this, however. Over the decades we have seen remarkable increases in productivity, and governments have a lot of tools to encourage this to continue. We will face many problems that public policy must address and mitigate, if not completely avoid.

In any case, the current population puts so much pressure on our limited natural resources and on our ecology that the geological, biological and chemical basis of our civilization may collapse. We could deal with these issues more effectively if there were fewer of us. That births in many countries are below replacement level means that we may be moving naturally to a more sustainable size.

What the optimum population size should be is debatable. What is not debatable, at least in my opinion, is that we very much want low birth rates.

John Isbister is a professor of economics at Toronto Metropolitan University.

Source: With falling births, pensions will suffer, taxes will rise – but the alternative is worse

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The Alternative, Optimistic Story of Population Decline

2023/02/01 Leave a comment

Of note. Perhaps instead of trying to delay the trend, more thought and preparation is needed to prepare and manage the decline:

The shoe has dropped. The big one. China, the most populous country on the planet for centuries, this month reported its first population decline in six decades, a trend that is almost certainly irreversible. By the end of the century China may have only around half of the 1.41 billion people it has now, according to U.N. projections, and may already have been overtaken by India.

The news has been met with gloom and doom, often framed as the start of China’s inexorable decline and, more broadly, the harbinger of a demographic and economic “time bomb” that will strain the world’s capacity to support aging populations.

There is no doubt that a shrinking global population — a trend expected to set in by the end of this century — poses unprecedented challenges for humanity. China is only the latest and largest major country to join a club that already includes Japan, South Korea, Russia, Italy and others. Germany would most likely be in decline too if not for immigration, and many others could begin shrinking in the years ahead. (The United States is expected to grow moderately in coming decades, largely because of immigration.) Median U.N. projections point to global population peaking in the mid-2080s at more than 10 billion, but if fertility rates continue to drop, the decline could begin decades earlier.

But the alarmist warnings are often simplistic and premature. The glass is at least half full. Shrinking populations are usually part of a natural, inevitable process, and rather than focus excessively on concerns like labor shortages and pension support, we need to look at the brighter spots for our world.

There is no need for panic; we’ve made that mistake before.

In the second half of the 20th century the world was panicking about unstoppable population growth. The number of people on the planet more than tripled in seven decades, from 2.5 billion in 1950 to around eight billion in 2022. Turns out, that was a transitory phase when mortality rates fell faster than fertility rates because of improved nutrition and public health, and relative peace.

But panic can lead to hasty policy and human tragedy. This reached its fullest form with China’s extreme birth-control campaigns launched in the late 1970s and which caused immense suffering, mostly for women, through forced abortions or fines and other penalties for breaking rules that restricted most couples to having only one child. Until those limits were scrapped beginning in 2015, hundreds of millions of Chinese women underwent sterilization procedures or had intrauterine devices inserted.

The population declines seen today in some countries have come about largely as a happy story of greater longevity and freedom. Fertility rates worldwide dropped from more than five births per woman in the early 1960s to 2.3 in 2020. Credit greater investment in child and maternal health everywhere: A mother who successfully brings her child to term and an infant who survives to childhood lower birthrates because parents often don’t feel the need to try again. Greater availability of free or affordable contraception has also reduced unwanted births.

China, South Korea and Japan are now all in population decline, but this is in part because of rapid increases in income, employment and education. The number of South Korean women who went on to postsecondary education rose from 6 percent in 1980 to more than 90 percent by 2020; China and Japan also have seen big gains. Lower birthrates stem in part from greater personal and reproductive freedom, such as the choice to stay unmarried, higher pay and more professional opportunities for women in these nations.

More women in the work force is a recipe for even greater productivity and prosperity and could help ease labor concerns among falling populations. More women than ever are rising to leadership positions in business, media and politics.

Compared with a half-century ago, people in many countries are richer, healthier and better educated and women are more empowered. China’s population, for example, is shrinking and aging, but its people are more educated and have a longer life expectancy than at any time in the country’s history. Expanded educational opportunities guarantee a spot in a university for almost every person born today in China, including more women than men.

Average world life expectancy has increased from 51 years in 1960 to 73 in 2019, and even more so in China, from 51 in 1962 to 78 in 2019. Increases of that magnitude reshape lives and open up opportunities unimaginable when life spans were shorter, such as workers remaining productive later in life and growing markets for older consumers in areas like tourism, nutritional supplements and medical devices, among others.

Fewer people on the planet, of course, may reduce humanity’s ecological footprint and competition for finite resources. There could even be greater peace as governments are forced to choose between spending on military equipment or on pensions. And as rich nations come to rely more on immigrants from poorer countries, those migrants gain greater access to the global prosperity currently concentrated in the developed world.

This new demography brings new challenges, including the need to offer quality and affordable child care, make college education more affordable and equitable, provide guaranteed minimum income and make societies more gender equal. Governments should abandon the mindless pursuit of economic growth in favor of well-being for citizens.

There is no reason the world’s population must keep growing or even remain level. And just as earlier panic led to harmful policies in China and elsewhere, efforts to raise fertility — which may prove futile — risk viewing women once again as birth machines.

Global population will inevitably decline. Rather than trying to reverse that, we need to embrace it and adapt.

Source: The Alternative, Optimistic Story of Population Decline

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Mohamed: The Line’s Naughty List: The demographic crisis isn’t going away

2023/01/04 Leave a comment

Another article on the limits of immigration to address weak economic growth although ignoring the productivity issue. But just like increasing immigration is unlikely to significantly counter demographic trends of an aging population, a focus on increasing fertility is, given experience in other jurisdictions, unlikely to move the needle significantly.

Governments and policy makers need to consider alternative scenarios of how to manage an aging population rather than just focussing on semi-effective measures to slow down the trend:

The nearly concluded year of 2022 may well be remembered as the year generational politics finally arrived in Canada, even if nobody wants to talk about the root of our demographic dilemma. 

Saddled for over a decade with stagnating wages, escalating day-to-day living costs, and one of the world’s least-affordable housing markets, Canadians under the age of 40 finally said “enough” in 2022; making generational inequality, for the first time, a major nationwide political issue. 

Some of Canada’s pissed off young adults have found their messiah in 43-year-old Conservative party leader Pierre Poilievre, a rather cantankerous fellow himself. Poilievre has masterfully used Canada’s housing affordability crisis to tap into a groundswell of support among younger Canadians — recent polling show Poilievre’s Conservative party holding a double-digit leadamong voters between the ages of 18 and 34.

But even if their voices are finally being heard, young Canadians have precious little to look forward to as they start their working lives in earnest. The OECD projects that Canada’s economic growth will be dead last among advanced countries over the next decade. This means that young Canadians entering the workforce in the 2020s can expect the same grim job prospects, stagnant real incomes, and diminished purchasing power as their older cohorts who graduated into the Great Recession (insert James Franco “First time?” meme here). 

Barring a miraculous change of course, Millennial and Gen-Z Canadians will not only be worse off than their parents but will also see their standards of living deteriorate relative to people the same age in other countries. 

Yet for all his bluster and this real opportunity for a political breakthrough, Mr. Poilievre has offered no genuine solutions to this generational slide. 

So what can be done to reverse Canada’s great inter-generational stagnation? For one thing, we can attack the demographic underpinnings of our dismal growth projections.

The biggest challenge will be to mitigate the effect of our aging population on our labour markets. A record 307,000 Canadians retired last year and a further one-in-five workers are nearing retirement age. Retirements are pushing job vacancies to record levels and leaving behind a shrinking workforce to pick up the slack. By 2027, there will be just three working-agedCanadians for each senior citizen.

Policymakers in Ottawa are acutely aware of this problem and are banking on an already overburdened immigration system to provide an easy fix to our labour market woes. Last month, the Trudeau government unveiled an ambitious plan to bring in 500,000 immigrants per year by 2025 (an increase of nearly two-thirds from average annual admissions between 2015 and 2019). Since this announcement, even progressive outlets have voiced concerns about our capacity to absorb such a sharp influx of new Canadians.

As Andrew Potter recently wrote in The Line, the new immigration target places Canada’s fragile pro-immigration consensus at risk. New Canadians may well bear the brunt of intensifying populist anger if they’re seen as contributing to the country’s health-care and housing-affordability crises. (Chinese immigrants, for example, have already incurred a racial backlash for their alleged role in driving up housing prices in British Columbia’s Lower Mainland.)

But even under ideal conditions, immigration would not be a silver-bullet solution to the labour-market challenges created by an aging native-born population. The average Canadian immigrant arrives in their late 20s and may need years to become licensed to work in their chosen occupation. Further, working immigrants often bring both non-working spouses and elderly relatives with them. These are just a few of the frictions that make the economic benefit of large-scale immigration subject to the law of diminishing returns. 

We also need to weigh the potential economic gains of increased immigration against the challenge some new immigrant communities may pose to our political climate by “importing” combustible ethno-cultural grievances. As I wrote in The Line earlier this year, diaspora politics is becoming increasingly visible in Canada and played a central role in Patrick Brown’s Conservative party leadership campaign.

Large-scale immigration has been a massive economic and cultural boon to Canada over the past half-century but it’s becoming increasingly evident that we’re fast approaching an inflection point. Future increases to immigration are likely to generate diminishing economic returns and escalating political costs. 

This leaves us with a rather simple equation. To reverse our forecasted economic slide, we must increase the supply of young Canadians relative to the number of older ones. To do this, we must find ways to encourage reproductive-aged Canadians to have more children. The arithmetic could not be more straightforward.

Unfortunately, this is the exact opposite of what’s happening. As I wrote back in August, Canada’s birth rate, which has long been the lowest in the Anglosphere, hit a record-low of 1.4 births-per-woman (bpw) during the height of the COVID pandemic in 2020. While it bounced back slightly last year, it still falls well below the OECD average of 1.7 bpw. 

A quick glance at the average price of a single-family home or daycare space in any major Canadian city should explain why cash-strapped millennials aren’t rushing to bring more children into the world. Indeed, beyond tackling our broader affordability crisis, all orders of government could be doing more to make starting families more affordable for young Canadians — Canada’s level of public spending on family benefits falls well below the average among OECD countries. 

The Trudeau government’s recently concluded bilateral agreements mark the third attempt at Canada-wide child care. Yet fewer than nine months after the last deal was inked, political will already appears to be faltering.

Part of the problem is that the bilateral agreements were pitched as a mechanism to guide Canada out of the “she-cession” created during the first year of the pandemic. This rationale rings hollow now that women’s labour force participation has bounced back to (and exceeded) pre-pandemic levels. 

Tying new family policies to Canada’s longstanding fertility crisis and, by extension, our future economic vitality, could give these initiatives more staying power.

One thing’s clear: the “f-word” (fertility) can no longer be a forbidden term in Canada’s political lexicon. Until we get serious about that, our demographic and political challenges will only get worse. 

Rahim Mohamed is a master’s student at the University of Calgary’s School of Public Policy. His writing has appeared in The Hub, the National Post, and CBC News Calgary.

Source: The Line’s Naughty List: The demographic crisis isn’t going away 

Filed under Immigration Tagged with , ,

Le Devoir editorial: Impasse fédérale en immigration

2022/09/26 Leave a comment

Of interest, Le Devoir’s take on the positions of Quebec parties on immigration, ending with the understandable (and traditional) concern that Quebec will have less demographic weight in Canada given its more restrictive policies.

While the Liberal government has embraced increasing immigration, rightly or wrongly there is a general consensus among the major federal parties and provinces other than Quebec in favour of increased immigration:

Pour la plus grande partie de la campagne électorale, le débat sur l’immigration s’est limité à une affaire de seuils dans l’accueil des nouveaux arrivants. Les propos malencontreux du chef caquiste, François Legault, qui a présenté l’immigration comme une menace à la paix sociale, avant de s’excuser, ont inutilement teinté les discussions.

Pour le premier ministre sortant, il aurait été si simple de s’élever au-dessus de la mêlée et de rappeler, sans sacrifier la protection de la nation québécoise, que le Québec est une terre d’accueil riche de sa diversité et de ses métissages culturels. Ses maladresses font en sorte que les positions raisonnées et les réalisations de la Coalition avenir Québec (CAQ) en matière d’immigration attirent la suspicion.

La CAQ propose entre autres d’accueillir 50 000 immigrants par année et d’exiger qu’une plus grande proportion de ceux-ci parlent déjà le français à leur arrivée. M. Legault en fait une condition essentielle pour assurer l’avenir du français au Québec, car il y a des limites à la vélocité de l’intégration des immigrants au tissu et à la culture francophones. Son gouvernement a doublé les budgets alloués à la francisation pour les faire passer à 168 millions de dollars par année, une excellente initiative qui souffre des inégalités dans la qualité et l’accessibilité de la formation. L’État québécois ne sait même pas combien d’entreprises participent aux cours de francisation. Les incohérences sont nombreuses, comme en témoigne le cas récent du programme de francisation exemplaire de Peerless, dont le financement a été retiré, puis reconduit à la suite d’un reportage du Devoir.

Il est à souhaiter que la création de Francisation Québec puisse servir à améliorer le bilan. Le Québec peut et doit faire mieux en matière d’intégration et de francisation si nous souhaitons aborder le débat sur l’immigration au-delà de l’insécurité linguistique.

Le Parti québécois (PQ) envisage aussi les seuils d’immigration à l’enseigne de la pérennité du fait français. Son chef, Paul St-Pierre Plamondon, ramène la cible à 35 000 immigrants par année et exige une connaissance du français de tous les immigrants économiques avant leur arrivée. Il est le seul, avec François Legault, à lier immigration et pérennité du français sans passer par le raccourci illusoire de la pénurie de main-d’oeuvre.

Le Parti conservateur du Québec (PCQ) rejoint le PQ sur les affres du multiculturalisme, mais il le dépasse par la droite en proposant de sélectionner les immigrants en fonction d’une « compatibilité civilisationnelle » (adhésion aux valeurs occidentales et capacité d’intégration). Cette nostalgie pour une cohésion sociale fantasmée est enrobée dans un épouvantable déterminisme qui fait fi des capacités d’intégration et d’adaptation de l’être humain.

À l’autre extrémité du spectre, Québec solidaire(QS) fixe la cible maximale à 80 000 immigrants par année, sans trop s’inquiéter des conséquences. Le co-porte-parole de QS, Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois, a l’heureuse idée de proposer une bonification additionnelle des budgets de francisation (à 230 millions par année) et de vouloir faire découvrir la culture québécoise aux nouveaux arrivants par un « billet culture » de 200 $ par année. La mesure peut sembler anodine, mais elle a le mérite d’offrir une main tendue.

Le Parti libéral du Québec (PLQ) mise sur son habituelle approche débonnaire en matière d’immigration, dans le prolongement de son positionnement historique en faveur des droits des minorités. Dominique Anglade ne souffre d’aucune insécurité linguistique. Son invitation à « arrêter de diviser » et de présenter l’immigration comme « un problème et une menace » est apaisante en comparaison des amalgames douteux de M. Legault. Elle fait toutefois l’impasse sur les solutions nécessaires pour faciliter le transfert linguistique des nouveaux arrivants vers le français. Elle évoque sans trop de conviction la francisation et la régionalisation de l’immigration, qu’elle présente comme une solution à la pénurie de main-d’oeuvre (tout comme Québec solidaire). Cette relation de causalité entre immigration et emploi ne fait pas l’unanimité.

À force de traiter de la question de l’immigration à partir des capacités d’accueil du Québec, nous avons tendance à oublier que le réel problème se situe à Ottawa, où loge un premier ministre postnational qui embrasse un projet de croissance démographique basé sur l’apport migratoire. Les libéraux de Justin Trudeau ne respectent pas l’entente Canada-Québec sur l’immigration. Le processus migratoire fédéral désavantage les francophones, notamment chez les étudiants étrangers. Toutes les actions du fédéral en matière d’immigration nous portent à conclure qu’il ne se soucie pas du déclin du poids démographique des francophones au Québec et au Canada.

Le rapatriement des pleins pouvoirs en immigration est la mesure qui compte le plus, mais aucune des formations ne sera en position de réussir ce tour de force. Tel est notre véritable drame en matière d’immigration.

Source: Impasse fédérale en immigration

 

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