The report says Canada has now joined the group of ‘lowest-low’ fertility countries … with 1.3 children per woman or less
British Columbia recorded its lowest birthrate on record last year, with an average of just one live birth per woman in 2023. It’s part of a national trend of declining births that started in 2017.
The rate of live births Canada-wide was also at a record low in 2023, at 1.26 children per woman, said Statistics Canada. The number represents how many children a woman is expected to have during her reproductive years.
Overall, the number of live births in Canada in 2023 was virtually unchanged from a year earlier, at 351,477. That’s after the number of births declined by five per cent from 2021 to 2022.
“While birth patterns have fluctuated from 2019 to 2022, the number of births has generally been declining in Canada since 2017,” said StatCan.
Yue Qian, an associate professor in the University of B.C.’s sociology department, said the skyrocketing cost of living is clearly a factor in declining birthrates here and across Canada.
Other reasons may include a shortage of affordable childcare — despite B.C.’s $10-a-day campaign, which Qian said has faced “many challenges on the ground” — and a lack of housing. “There is research showing that fertility rates are closely related to housing,” said Qian, with birthrates higher in cities with more available and more affordable homes.
People are also delaying having kids, Qian said, especially in B.C., where the average age of mothers when they give birth is the highest in the country. “Delaying childbearing could lead to forgoing childbearing, because people at later ages may decide to stick to a child-free life or they (may) become infertile.”
StatCan said the “fertility rate” — something of a misnomer since it’s about the actual numbers of births, not the ability to conceive — is based on “the average number of live births a woman can be expected to have in her reproductive life if she experienced, at each age, the fertility rates observed in a given year.”
That rate has been in decline for over 15 years. Though there were a similar number of births in 2022 and 2023, last year’s statistical drop reflects an increase in the number of women of childbearing age that year.
Record low birthrates were registered in 10 of Canada’s 13 provinces and territories.
Here is some other data from the report:
• Canada’s rate of premature births was the highest in half a century. Preterm infants have a higher risk of illness, hospitalization and death. That rate, measuring births after less than 37 weeks’ gestation, has been rising for 30 years. It was 7.1 per cent in 1993 and 8.3 per cent last year.
• Preterm births were more common in older mothers, who made up a higher proportion of women giving birth in 2023. The risk of premature birth increases as mothers age. Last year, 26.5 per cent of births were mothers 35 and older; they made up just 10.7 per cent in 1993.
• On the other end of the age spectrum, babies born to teenage mothers have an increasingly higher risk of a low birth weight. The share of babies born to moms 15 to 19 years of age has dropped over the past 30 years, from six per cent of mothers in 1993 to 1.3 per cent in 2023. But low birth weight (less than 2.5 kilograms or 5.5 pounds) was recorded in 9.6 per cent of babies born to that age group, up from 6.7 per cent in 1993.
• Statistics Canada also updated its baby name counts last week. Noah was the most popular name for boys in 2023 for the third straight year; Olivia stayed in the top spot among girls for the eighth year in a row.