FIRST READING: Canadians would gladly be having millions more babies if they could

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“Women in Canada at the end of their reproductive years have about 0.5 fewer children than they desire, on average,” it read.

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The Cardus report found that while Canadians of virtually all demographic groups were uniform in their desire for two child families, the biggest gap in “fertility ideals” showed up among religious groups, with Protestants easily leading the charge in terms of desired family sizes.

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In the latest survey, Cardus found that the Canadian dream for two-child families was about as strong, but that fewer were coming close to reaching it.

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Among Canadians getting to the end of their childbearing years, a majority reported having fewer children than they would have liked. Of survey respondents between the ages of 40 and 44, 59 per cent of men and 53 per cent of women reported having a family that was smaller than desired.

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Canada’s plummeting fertility rate is often blamed on economic factors, particularly in the realm of housing affordability. A 2023 survey by Statistics Canada, for instance, found that 38 per cent of Canadians in their 20s “did not believe they could afford to have a child in the next three years.”

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But the Cardus results show that while money is a factor, it’s just one of a web of reasons as to why Canadians aren’t having children at the rate they would prefer.

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One of the more illuminating findings being that as Canadians got richer, their desire for children actually went down.

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Among women who lived in households earning between $50,000 and $100,000, the “ideal” number of children stood at an average of 2.32. But among women living in households earning more than $150,000, this dropped to 2.02.

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In fact, when women were asked what was stopping them from having their desired rate of children, the chief concern wasn’t financial, but “life-course factors” such as still being in school, wanting “to grow as a person” or not having a partner.

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Just 56 per cent of women cited “financial concerns” as getting in the way of their fertility desires, against 71 per cent who cited “life-course factors.”

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“While rates of marriage and family formation have declined in Canada, this is not because of some great divergence in family desires between women and men, as both sexes share similar fertility desires,” said the report.

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The new Cardus survey fits in with similar data from the United States.

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Although U.S. fertility rates have also been in a sustained plunge for much of the last 20 years, poll data has shown that Americans would gladly have millions more children, but increasingly lack the wherewithal to do so.

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A September poll by Gallup found that even with U.S. fertility rates dropping below 1.6 for the first time, Americans reported wanting families comprised of an average of 2.7 children — a desire that has remained effectively unchanged since the 1970s.

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“This suggests that the decline in births may be driven more by practical challenges that make it harder for people to have as many children as they want, rather than by changing attitudes about the ideal family size,” read an accompanying report.

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Cardus released its latest poll on Canadian fertility in the same month that they published a similar report focused on birth rates in Quebec, with the latter focusing more on the cultural consequences of “denatalisation.”

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The French report titled, “A Quebec without children,” which used survey data from Leger, found that a majority of Quebecers anticipated a future of cultural and linguistic loss as a result of demographics in which deaths were outnumbering births.

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“It would be false to claim that Quebecers are happy with the current situation or … that it is the project of their individual family planning decisions,” the report said in French.