Do you remember the forecasts issued at the beginning of the COVID lockdowns that we’d see a baby boom within a year? Well, it didn’t happen.
StatsCan has just released a report on fertility rates. This is the measure of babies coming into our population and we’ve hit a record low nationally.
These data have big business implications for the long-term because this is one source of workers and consumers for future generations and we’ve seen these numbers decline for decades now.
The average age of mothers is rising and we are not producing enough babies to sustain our population. And that is why Canada, like so many industrialized countries, is ramping up immigration to fill the gap.
Here in Saskatchewan, though, the story is a bit different. StatsCan says data to the end of 2022 showed we had the highest fertility rate of all the provinces. A big contributor is the fact that the birth rate among those declaring as Indigenous is 2.2 children per woman compared to 1.5 children for the remainder of the population.
