Fertility Rate Drops to Record Low in Canada

A mother holds her newborn baby at a hospital, in a file photo. Lopolo/Shutterstock

Canada’s fertility rate reached a record low of 1.25 children per woman last year, according to new data from Statistics Canada.

The new low represents a 1.6 percent decline from 2024, which was a slower rate of decline compared to the last two years, 6.9 percent in 2022 and 5.2 percent in 2023, Statistics Canada said in a Sept. 24 release. However, fertility has been declining in Canada since 2009, the national statistical agency said.

Canada has been considered to have “ultra-low fertility” since its fertility rate fell below 1.30 children per woman in 2023, when it dropped to 1.27. Other countries also considered to have “ultra-low fertility” include Switzerland, Luxembourg, Finland, Italy, Japan, Singapore, and South Korea.

Nine out of Canada’s 13 provinces and territories had record-low fertility rates in 2024, including Nova Scotia at 1.08, Prince Edward Island at 1.10, Ontario at 1.21, Quebec at 1.34, the Northwest Territories at 1.39, Alberta at 1.41, Manitoba at 1.50, Saskatchewan at 1.58, and Nunavut at 2.34. British Columbia had the lowest fertility rate in Canada, at 1.02, though this was slightly increased from its record low of 1.00 in 2023.

Meanwhile, the average age of childbearing has been increasing in Canada for nearly 50 years. The average childbearing age reached a record high of 31.8 years in 2024. It was 26.7 years in 1976.

StatCan describes total fertility rate as the estimated average number of children a woman is expected to give birth to in her lifetime, based on age-specific fertility rates for a particular year.

Canada’s fertility rate has generally been declining for decades, down from the peak of almost four (3.94) children per woman in the 1959, according to a 2024 StatCan report. One of the sharpest declines in fertility rate occurred in the mid-1960s and early 1970s following introduction of the hormonal birth control pill in 1960, at the time to regulate menstrual cycles, and then later the decriminalization of the pill as a form of contraception in 1969, along with decriminalization of abortion that year, the report indicates.

The fertility rate dropped below the “cohort replacement level” of 2.1 children per woman for the first time in 1972, meaning the birth rate is no longer high enough to replace the population.

Fertility Crisis

A report published by the Macdonald-Laurier Institute (MLI) in March said Canada’s decline in fertility is “a major public policy challenge requiring immediate federal action.” The report said surveys indicated that Canadian women would like to have more children than they are able to.

Factors such as income levels, cost of living, and housing availability affect fertility rate, the report said. It suggested reducing the cost of living, lowering marginal income tax rates, improving income replacement schemes, increasing the availability of private child-care services, and shifting social norms in favour of parenthood for both women and men to increase domestic fertility.

“There seem to be obstacles in the way of people achieving a very important life goal, namely, having a family and having children,” Ross McKitrick, an economics professor at the University of Guelph and author of the report, told The Epoch Times in an interview at the time.

McKitrick said most of the academic literature on fertility in recent decades has focused on how to reduce fertility in poor countries, not on how to increase it in wealthy ones.

“There has been a great deal of effort directed at preventing unwanted pregnancies,” he wrote in the MLI report. “But there has been very little attention paid to preventing the other unwanted outcome: reaching the end of one’s fertility without having had as many children as one had hoped for.”

Carolina Avendano contributed to this report.