Two cheers for population decline?

Should we shame people who have lots of children? A writer named Kristen Pyszczyk is getting static this week for answering with a frank “Yes” in a CBC editorial pegged to the birth of some TV couple’s fifth child. “As a feminist,” Pyszczyk wrote, “I tend to oppose any cultural conversation that involves telling a woman what to do with her body. But ...”

I had thought feminism was a matter of principle rather than a mere tendency, but, anyway, Pyszczyk points out that women in the democratic West are “groomed” intensely for motherhood, that people who live (after necessarily being born) in the West inevitably have enormous environmental footprints, and that maybe we should consider a little frank babyshaming, since “Shame is a powerful tool for changing behaviour: it’s how we introduce new and existing social conventions.”

There’s no arguing, factually, with that part in quotation marks. Indeed, most of these premises seem sort of uncontroversial, though they may have weaknesses or exceptions Pyszczyk is ignoring. Her argument has found no enthusiastic takers that I am aware of, and is kind of an indefensible mess overall (with its sci- fi elements and puzzling cameo by Prince), but I have to admire its banzai spirit. Damn the torpedoes: there is no stopping short of ultimate logical consequences here!

If rapid population growth led by large families ( and that’s how it happens) is in some sense undesirable, that must mean applying some political, moral or social penalty to enthusiastic breeders. If you don’t want these penalties to include “shaming” — which might just mean a mix of mild heckling and soft prejudice — then what do you propose? A tax on childbirth? Streams of infertility propaganda from the Anti- Sex League?

Ms. Pyszczyk really has one very sharp point, and it is not that we should definitely make fun of celebrities who have five kids. It is that our ultimate ideas about demographics are confused and somewhat contradictory.

I am sure people who have actually had large- ish families will tell me that they already get the stinkeye on airplanes or in hotel lobbies, and I am one-thousand-percent certain that this is true. Any child past the second one, assuming they didn’t arrive in obvious pairs or trebles, is a countercultural signal. Having many children is a sort of advertisement for a personal set of values that privilege domestic pleasure over careerism and ecological accounting.

It is a modest way of dropping back from the productivity peloton. It indicates a determination to live as one’s ancestors did, which is bound to be taken, by some, as a deliberate challenge — perhaps even a matter for political suspicion. ( What other “oldfashioned” views might those weirdos have?)

What you notice as a childless person is, of course, how pro- fertility our public policies are. We subsidize daycare, and lavishly subsidize a public education system that is about 50 per cent daycare. We offer tax credits, increasing ones, for procreation. Every infrastructure expense that underwrites a suburbanized world of large houses, minivans and spacious backyards is a baby subsidy in disguise.

There are medium- term economic justifications for all this that are more or less convincing: the retirement of the baby boomers shows the harm and hassle that demographic discontinuities can create. But even economists rarely, if ever, discuss the wider question of “What is the right number of residents of Canada?” The answer “More, more, more” is presumed, never investigated.

There is, I think, an unexamined fog of ideas behind this presumption. There’s the vague notion that fertility is a sign of social health — which, if true, does not imply that positively encouraging population growth, as a matter of gaming an economic endpoint, is itself healthy. There is also a very loose, unexpressed instinct that national greatness or prestige requires the existing Canadian population stock to more or less replace itself, as an alternative to a demented open-borders free-for-all. We want future Canada to consist, mostly, of our own children.

Any politician who explicitly said otherwise — who embraced the replacement of the Canadian population, which Pyszczyk, in passing, does — would be inviting annihilation. But, then again, many early-1970s environmentalists were in favour of both zero population growth in industrialized countries and tight immigration controls to discourage Third Worlders from expanding their eco-footprints.

This is an unheard-of position now — the view that a rich, cold country like Canada, one which we would now say imposes structural per- capita environmental costs on mommy Earth, should happily consider going into managed population decline through natural decrease and shuttered borders.

Would individual Canadians be worse off if Canada were a country of five million people? Of two million? Of half a million, mostly bunched up in a few cities? I do not see any economic reason to think so. And the spectacle is worth imagining, if only because we still have the overall shape of a resource-extraction colony, and resource extraction is getting less labour-intensive at a terrifying pace.

If we care about national greatness, small countries can be great. If we care about utilitarian factors, about vaguely quantified happiness, then our policy choices can be judged on their own merits, irrespective of what numerical size they lead our country towards. As a matter of brute, oversimplified math, we would certainly have more to “invest in future generations,” as the politicians like to say, if those generations were a lot smaller.