In the coming weeks, the federal government is anticipated to announce immigration targets for the next three years.
It’s expected those levels will be a notable retreat from the aggressive, expansionist immigration program that has been under way in Canada recently. The pace at which temporary foreign worker and student visas have been granted is likely to be reduced significantly.
This is largely in response to public backlash over the pressure new immigrants are putting on the existing housing supply. Federal Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has not hesitated on weaponizing the issue, saying Canada needs “smaller population growth” that is tied to the rate at which new homes are being built.
It’s been a winning issue for him, but also one that is largely short-sighted.
The fact is, Canada is battling the same problem most of the Western world is: declining fertility rates. And it has the potential to become a crisis far greater than housing stock – not that that is insignificant.
The latest figures show that Canada’s fertility rate fell to 1.33 children per woman in 2022. A country requires a fertility rate of 2.1 to keep its population steady and without the need for immigration. The last time that a natural-replacement rate existed in Canada was in the late 1960s. It’s been downhill ever since.
What’s exacerbating the problem, however, is that at the same time as fertility rates are dropping, the population has been aging at an unprecedented rate. In two years, the first boomers will reach 80.
There is no question that immigration is the key driver of population growth in Canada. It’s not difficult to imagine population growth being close to zero in a couple of decades absent the number of immigrants we are admitting every year. But it’s even more complicated than that.
Fertility rates have declined by half in countries that are part of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (including Canada) in the last 60 years. According to the 2024 edition of the OECD report “Society at a Glance,” low fertility rates could lead to population decline in the coming decade, with “deaths outpacing births for the first time in at least half a century.” Meantime, the number of people aged 65 and over for every 100 persons of working age is expected to double from 30 in 2020, to 59 in 2060 across the OECD area. This will inevitably place pressure on governments to increase pension and health services.
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 is powerful, heavy stuff. And admittedly it’s difficult to get people’s attention about problems that might not surface in a profound way for decades. But sophisticated countries are already thinking about these things and giving thought to ways in which they can circumvent some of the most extreme consequences of declining fertility rates (a task that has neither been easy or successful).
A recent piece in The New York Times chronicled Japan’s efforts to arrest its fertility problems. By the late 1980s, Japan was sounding the alarm about its declining birth rates, which by 1989 had fallen to 1.57 children per woman. The following decade, the government began promoting policies aimed at reversing that trend, including subsidized daycare, mandatory childcare leave, and direct cash allowances for having even one child. None of it worked. Last year, Japan’s fertility rate stood at 1.2.
Other countries are having the same problem and resorting to similar solutions to try and cauterize this phenomenon. No one has found a magic bullet. The high costs of just about everything, including housing, are just one category of impediment that is proving extremely difficult to overcome.
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.
If he becomes prime minister one day, Mr. Poilievre will learn that immigrants are this country’s best friends – ones who will become even more important to Canada’s success in the years ahead.
They should neither be demonized nor used as convenient political scapegoats.