Canada Faces a Childless Future

(Excerpted from The National Post (Canada))
In a future Canada, where senior citizens drastically outnumber babies, schools will be replaced by old-age homes, neighbourhoods of single-family dwellings will make way for smaller condos and townhouses, and playgrounds will become disused relics of the past.

The sound of children's chattering voices, once common, will be rarely heard.

[...] This is what a childless Canada would look like. But it is not the science-fiction vision of a far-off future. In less than a decade, seniors will outnumber children in Canada; in just 15 years, deaths may outnumber births.

[…] By the year 2015, for the first time in the history of Canadian population statistics, there will be more people over the age of 65 than under the age of 15. Even the normally staid national bureau of record-keeping, Statistics Canada, declared, "This would be an unprecedented situation in Canada," when it announced late last year the critical turning point in a population projections report.

These projections, which were shaped by various growth scenarios, predicted fertility rates ranging from a low of 1.3 babies per woman to a high of 1.7 babies per woman. That puts Canada in line with the growing roster of nations beset by declining fertility: France, 1.9; Australia, 1.7; Germany, 1.3; Italy and Spain, 1.2, Japan, 1.2; Korea, 1.1.

Only the United States is conspicuous among its industrialized neighbours for a fertility rate that continues to remain above what is known as replacement level, with 2.01 babies per woman. The main reason for this difference seems to be in the fertility rate among women aged 24-29, which has been cut almost in half in Canada and many of the other nations with declining fertility, but which remains virtually unchanged in the U.S., where more traditional values prevail, says demographer Alain Belanger, the demographer behind Statistics Canada's latest projections.

We always talk as if “declining fertility rates” means less women getting pregnant. To a certain degree that’s true, but how much of the decline in the birth rate is due to the increased death rate among the unborn resulting from abortion? If you include those killed before birth, I can’t help but suspect that the death rate passed the birth rate quite some time ago.

What's most interesting is that the most serious decline in fertility is affecting those whom the nation would most like to see as parents. The highest-paid, highest-educated women are forgetting about motherhood entirely or seriously reducing their number of desired offspring in what has been called a revolution in fertility.

[…] Margaret Somerville, founding director of the McGill Centre for Medicine, Ethics and Law, says the most profound impact of this decline in fertility may be in changing attitude. She sees the trend toward delaying or avoiding child-bearing as just another aspect of society's drift toward a culture of "intense individualism," where children are seen more as "a desirable thing to have, rather than as new individuals to repopulate the world."

[…] "Whenever we start talking about children and about families, we focus on the adults' rights to have children or to not have children -- we don't talk about our society and what it needs, whether it needs children."

But wasn’t that the whole point of the sexual and other revolutions of the sixties - the elevation of the autonomous individual over all cultural and societal constraints? The autonomous individual can choose between kids and convenience, moppets and money, offspring and opulence. Guess which wins.

[…] "There's always been this sense that we can fix this problem through immigration and avoid any population decline that way, but that isn't necessarily going to resolve it," says Prof. Beaujot, who teaches sociology at the University of Western Ontario.

[…] Just as significant in its implications for changes in society is the flip-side of this fertility crisis: Who is having babies in Canada? Nunavut's birth rate is projected to remain well above replacement level, at almost three babies per woman, and is consistently the highest in the country in a baby boom led largely by young, single aboriginal women; the visible minority population is projected to increase dramatically in the next decade, thanks largely to higher fertility levels among some groups of immigrants and to the younger age structure of these immigrant groups.

By the time Canada celebrates its 150th anniversary in 2017, one out of every five people will be a visible minority, the highest proportion since records have been kept.
According to ethno-cultural projections released by Statistics Canada last year, the country's visible minority population is projected to increase by between 56% and 111% between 2001 and 2017, while the rest of the population is only expected to increase by between 1% and 7% in the same period.

Immigration is fine, of course – the USA is based on immigration. But in the past, it was assumed that immigrants, whatever their race, color, or national origin, would take on the national culture. In these days of unquestioned multiculturalism, any nation that depends on immigration for maintaining its population will take on the culture of the dominant immigrants (who, in general, do not suffer from that same compulsive worship of multiculturalism). Goodbye Canada; hello Canadistan.