The birth rate is still falling in Canada and Quebec. Does this surprise you?
No, I’m not surprised. The decision to have a child or not, to a large extent, is made in a social and economic context. In Canada, we reached a birth rate of 1.3, while it is around 1.5 in Quebec. It remains very low.
The context of what is offered to parents in terms of government policies and the economy is not favorable. The conditions for having large families are not met.
What can explain the decline?
Historically, since the 1980s, when women in developed countries have the choice between having a career and having many children, they opt for the career. Even in Italy and Greece, countries traditionally associated with large families, fertility has fallen because women are not able to juggle everything.
In other countries, having a child is not the end of one’s career, and fertility does not fall as much. I am thinking of France, Sweden, and also Quebec, which is doing better than the rest of Canada. But the trend is also downward, because people see that there is a lack of places in early childhood centers (CPE), that often you have to go to private daycare… It’s important to have that, because the women no longer feel as much called by the idea of being a full-time mother.
This is even more visible in the rest of Canada, because with the pandemic, they did not have childcare services like us, no coordinated networks. So the fertility rate crashed in 2020. Parents no longer have ways to reconcile everything.
Also, we notice a gap between what couples say they want in surveys and what they end up doing in reality. In polls, they say they would like two or three children. But when they have one, they realize that it’s difficult, that their employer may not be as flexible or understanding as they thought, so they forget about it. If we tackled this, we could allow couples to have more children. Couples do not carry out their plans because they do not have the conditions to do so.
How to reverse the trend?
We have good bases in Quebec, but we cannot do what we would like to do. We have an excellent family policy, but we don’t apply it. It takes more CPEs, more adequately trained and adequately paid educators, with favorable working conditions, and it’s difficult, because the profession is not valued.
Quebec is the envy of Canada, but we are not excellent. We have excellent parental leave, we are among the best in the world. However, men should take benefits longer. More than 70% of fathers take them, while this rate is less than 20% elsewhere in Canada. But mothers leave for a year on average, while fathers leave for 5 to 10 weeks. It is not enough.
We must not forget that in 1988, we had an even lower birth rate than today in Quebec. The government wanted to reverse the trend and created the birth allowance, the famous “baby bonus” of Robert Bourassa’s government. Parents received $500 for the first child, $500 for the second and up to $8,000 for the third, in 1992 [cela représente 15 000 $ en dollars de 2023]. It worked, the births increased suddenly, but it didn’t last. Fertility then fell, because people only rushed their decision to have a child to receive the money.
Then, in 1997, Lucien Bouchard and Pauline Marois set up childcare services to help families and offered more generous parental leave. The idea was to give better conditions to mothers, but one of the effects is that fertility increased. We are in the process of crumbling this policy, when it should be strengthened.
The drop in fertility should give us a bit of a shock. The more policies allow women to pursue their careers while being mothers, the more they are willing to have more children.
Equality, fertility and maternity
The Presses of the University of Montreal