Boosting Quebec’s birth rate isn’t so easy
There’s no reason to think women will buy into the CAQ’s proposal
Over the weekend, Coalition Avenir Québec Leader François Legault announced that, if elected next year, his government would put more money into the wallets of parents wishing to have a second or third child. He argued that a baby boom is the key not only to stimulating the economy, but also to preserving Quebec’s identity, one based on a common language, culture and values. Where to begin?
Look, I get it. Quebec faces a demographic challenge. In 2015, Quebec’s population growth slowed as more people died, fewer babies were born and fewer immigrants settled in the province. People are also living longer. It’s generally agreed that a population needs a fertility rate of just over two children per woman to hit “replacement fertility” — the rate at which new births fill those spaces created by deaths.
There are two possible solutions to this predicament, according to Legault: either we accept more immigrants or we spur the birth rate. He prefers the latter option, which, I can only assume, requires women in particular, and prospective parents in general, to buy into the project.
Don’t count on it.
Fact is, there are a lot of moving parts to this demography business. Here are a few of them.
It takes a lot of money to raise a kid in Canada these days. A recent MoneySense article crunched the numbers and found that it costs the average family around $250,000 to raise a child to the age of 18. And that’s before they go off to university.
The figure for Quebec presumably would be less, given that parents elsewhere generally pay much more for child care than we do here, where the popular subsidized daycare program charges between $7 to $20 per day, per child. (For sake of comparison, while in Toronto for a year with our first child, we were paying $60 a day.)
Quebec also has a history of robust and generous family benefit programs. The current parental model — which includes the Quebec parental insurance plan (QPIP) and the reduced contribution childcare program — has been cited as one of the best in the world.
Full-time employees here are entitled to up to a year of paid parental leave. Mothers may take up to up to a year paid maternity leave and can take up to two years off work along with a guarantee that they will not lose their jobs. Parents may split parental leave between them for up to 32 weeks. If a mother opts to take the entire leave herself, fathers are still entitled to a paternity leave of up to five weeks.
Despite all this, Quebec’s birth rate is still declining.
Quebec is far from being the only jurisdiction grappling with these demographic trends. Incentive programs to boost birthrates are not unique to this province. In Sweden, where the fertility rate has been falling for decades, the municipality of Overtornea proposed to give its city workers paid sex breaks (the proposal was eventually rejected). Denmark introduced a series of cheeky Do it for Denmark, Do it for Mom ads. Italy, which has the lowest birthrate in the EU, has also proposed a series of baby bonus incentives, including a controversial “fertility day” campaign.
Fact: Some women simply don’t want kids. Those of us who do are choosing to have fewer of them or having them later in life as we seek out some balance between work and career in a landscape marked by eroding job security and precarious work, a lack of affordable housing and the rising cost of living. Welcome to modern life.
Legault’s comments about boosting the birth rate to preserve a national identity bring his position uncomfortably close to the pre-Quiet Revolution promotion of the revanche des berceaux.
It is not the job of women to reproduce the Quebec nation by having more babies. It’s 2017, for heaven’s sake.