The proportion of babies from immigrant backgrounds has jumped in Quebec in five years, going from 15% in 1998 to 26% in 2021-2022.
This is what reveals, among other things, the ISQ report entitled The living environment of babies, the first carried out based on the longitudinal study Growing up in Quebec.
Among babies whose mothers were born abroad, the mothers of about 22.0% of them were born in North Africa or the Middle East, 24.7% in sub-Saharan Africa, 16.4% in South America, 12.7% in Europe, 4.0% in Eastern Europe and 16.2% in an Asian country
Furthermore, in 2020-2021 – therefore before the spiral of inflation and the worst hours of the housing crisis – Quebec families were less poor than five years earlier.
In 1997-1998, there were 26% of low-income households. Five years earlier, the proportion had fallen to 21%.
For this proportion of babies living in a family that is struggling financially, life is not rosy, as the study describes: 8% of babies lived in 2021 in a family that lacked money to buy food; 11% lived in a family that lacked money to pay the rent or mortgage; 8% had experienced a move between birth and the age of around five months and one in ten babies was in accommodation considered overcrowded.
Furthermore, the proportion of babies whose mother worked has fallen significantly in five years, going from 17% in 1998 to 4.7% in 2021-2022, a decrease which “can be explained in part by the implementation place of the Quebec Parental Insurance Plan,” we can read in the report.
In 1997-1998, almost one in ten babies (9%) aged around five months was already in a single-parent family. When the ISQ studied the thing five years later, in 2020-2021, we were 5 percentage points less.
The age of parents at the birth of their child is also higher. The proportion of babies born to women aged under 20 or to women aged 20 to 24 decreased between the two editions of the study. The proportion of babies born to mothers aged 35 to 39 or 40 or older has increased.