Will Canada face a pandemic baby bust?
Other western countries have seen birth rates drop, but experts suggest that if that’s happening here, it won’t last — probably
When the COVID-19 pandemic began, there were thoughts that the lockdown would spark a run on maternity ward beds.
But one year later, that predicted baby boom is more of a baby bust.
It seems that confining couples at home together, often with children, has not been conducive to procreation.
While there is a growing certainty that COVID-19 will produce a significant dearth in births over the coming months, experts differ widely on the depth and likely duration of that baby shortage — will it be a blip or sizable dip? — and on what the economic consequences might be.
“Definitely there will be a reverse of baby births because of the pandemic. We’re already seeing evidence in other advanced countries,” says economist Vik Singh of Ryerson University’s Ted Rogers School of Management. “And my speculation is that definitely we’re going to have the same thing in Canada.”
Evidence of a significant fertility drop is mounting across the globe.
Last month, Bloomberg reported that in 2020 France experienced its lowest birth rate since the Second World War and that China saw a 15 per cent drop in new baby registrations over 2019 levels.
Perhaps most tellingly, data from Italy showed that births across 15 cities there had plunged a staggering 22 per cent in December — nine months after the virus hit that country so remorselessly in March.
A Statistics Canada spokesperson says the agency won’t release this country’s 2020 birth data until September, though individual provinces may publish their own counts sooner.
Some early numbers from Quebec and British Columbia do show December birth declines in 2020 over the same month a year earlier, says Uni- versity of Manitoba economist Janice Compton.
And a United Nations report, which contains flatline projections through to 2100 in Canada, estimates the country’s birth rate declined by 0.73 per cent in 2020 to some 10.3 births for every 1,000 people.
Such drops could cause significant, long-term economic problems for a country that had already seen steady birth rate declines prior to the pandemic, Singh says.
“Does that have a short-term economic impact? Probably not,” he says.
“But definitely it will have a mediumand long-term impact, especially when we look at growth of the economy, pension funding, health care, which are all reliant on (future) taxpayers’ money
and we’re already seeing that shift toward lower birth rates.”
Others, however, downplay the demographic and economic scope of the problem.
While the pandemic will surely give Canadians many things to mourn in the months and years to come, the lost cries of babies won’t likely be one of them, they say.
“I would predict there would be a delay in (planned) pregnancies,” says Compton, an expert in household and family economics. “But then once things start to look up again … we’ll see a bump right after the pandemic ends.”
Birth rates are complex and fluid things, as are the longterm economic shifts born of their fluctuations. But even a severely low birth count one year could be made up by a glut of babies over the next few.
And any economic peril a pandemic baby bust could pose to the Canadian economy decades hence could be offset by birth rate rebounds and immigration increases in the post-COVID years.
In 2019, the last year for which there is national data, the country’s birth rate was about 10.4 infants for every 1,000 people.
If that declines dramatically, so could the young working population’s ability to fund the social welfare programs that would sustain older Canadians a couple of decades from now.
But University of Toronto economist Peter Dungan does not think this will happen.
“All in all, it doesn’t worry me at all, ” says Dungan of U of T’s Rotman School of Management.
“There’s every expectation that at least some of the babies who weren’t conceived during the pandemic period are going to be conceived in the next few years.”
At first blush, any birth rate drop in pandemic times may seem paradoxical, given that countless couples have been locked down together by COVID for months on end.
A contagion of domestic rancour could easily push birth rates down, Compton says.
“Yes, there is an increase in stress and that can reduce the conception rate and create problems for women in their first trimester,” she says, but in the next sentence adds there isn’t much else to do.
“It could go either way.” Indeed, Compton says there are many unknowns in the pandemic’s ultimate pregnancy picture, questions that may take many post-COVID months to gestate into bundled answers.
For example, what effect will COVID have had on surprise pregnancies, which account for about 40 per cent of total numbers, but are often born of the boozy, social encounters the virus has largely quashed?
Andrea O’Reilly, an author and professor in the School of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies at York University, says it’s too early to tell whether Canada’s birth rate has declined due to COVID.
While there’s good reason to think it has, there’s also little to indicate it will last long after the virus subsides.
“When the pandemic first came, there was this assumption and kind of a humour around, oh, you know, being at home, there’s going to be all this romance and intimacy and sex,” says O’Reilly, who copublished the book “Mothers, Mothering, and COVID-19: Dispatches from the Pandemic” in March
“Well, that doesn’t really happen under pandemic protocols.” she says.
O’Reilly says home-schooling, remote work and increased household chores would wear on parents and tend to tamp down their libidos.
Yet, she says, any understandable drop in Canadian fertility may well be temporary and unlikely to cause economic distress in the years or decades to come.
“Post pandemic, there might be a baby boom. That happened after the war, right,” she says.
“When we get over a crisis, it may be a time to celebrate life. People might think, ‘Well, we did this, we can do this, and let’s have another baby.’ ”
However, O’Reilly says the pandemic could cause economic distress in its immediate aftermath, with massive government borrowing and loans to businesses coming due. She says an economic baby bust could compound population problems in all western countries, which have seen birth rates below replacement levels for years.
“If this is more long term, we’re going to have fewer people (in the workforce) 20 years from now unless we resort to immigration,” says O’Reilly, who also heads Demeter Press, which publishes scholarly works on mothering, reproduction and family issues.
“But … we’ll know better in a year from now once this is behind us and people might revisit their lives and think, ‘Well, maybe it is time to have a baby.’ ”
Dungan thinks this is precisely what will happen.
“What we’ve tended to see with this kind of thing is a certain amount of postponement as opposed to ‘the babies are lost forever,’ ” he says.
Dungan points to a significant birth rate drop in the 1990s as many Canadian women postponed motherhood to concentrate on careers.
“And so lo and behold, although it hasn’t popped way, way back up, in the later 2000s what happened was the birth rate started to climb again,” he says.
“Well, those were the people who would have normally been expected to have had their babies in their teens or early- to mid-20s postponing it until their late 20s or their 30s.”
Dungan says societal crisis and harsh financial times, seen in spades during the current pandemic, have traditionally caused birth rate reductions, which typically climbed back with security levels and economic growth.
He says it’s more important for immigration to rebound post pandemic than the domestic birth rate, if social programs, including the Canada Pension Plan (CPP), for aging boomers are to be sustained.
But many boomers, the largest population cohort in Canadian history, will be dead by the time pandemic infants come of working age, he says.
U of T economist Elizabeth Dhuey, however, does not dismiss the repercussions of a pandemic baby bust so easily.
“There’s no reason to think Canada is going to be different than all the other western countries in terms of birth rates,” says Dhuey, an expert in education economics. “And there’s evidence of a pretty big decline, which is going to have large implications.”
She reiterates that Canada’s birth rate was already failing as a population replacement tool before COVID and that some 80 per cent of the country’s growth rate is due to immigration.
“The implication is, if we don’t (continue to) replace with immigrants you’re going to have a smaller workforce later on,” Dhuey says.
“That is going to affect economic productivity and it’s going to lower tax revenues and we have the problem of less younger workers per older workers for CPP.”
While Dhuey says the baby numbers may rebound post pandemic, she could also foresee a COVID crimp in the birth rate that lingers well into the future.
In particular, she says, women, who experienced far greater job losses and pressures to be home than men during the crisis, could well see their willingness to have children reduced permanently.
And childless professional women, watching their colleagues struggle with homeschooling and the like during the crisis, could well view motherhood as far less appealing after the pandemic.
“If I was 10 years younger it would probably have changed my opinion on parenthood,” says Dhuey, a mother of two young children.