Full disclosure: I’m married to an immigrant.
That doesn’t mean I’m free of bias or even bigotry. But like most Canadians, my views are mostly positive when it comes to newcomers to our country.
Which is good, because we accept a lot of them. In 2018, over 320,000 immigrants arrived, the second most since 1913. Over one hundred years ago, if you can imagine, more than 400,000 immigrants arrived in one year – increasing Canada’s population by 6% in one fell swoop. That would be like accepting over two million immigrants today!
Still, 320,000 newcomers is nothing to sneeze at. It’s three times the rate per capita as the United States and more than any other G7 country. Currently, twenty percent of Canada’s population was not born in Canada because of our open-door policy.
Why does it matter? Because if it weren’t for immigrants, our population would be in decline. Like almost all developed countries, our fertility rate is below the magic replacement rate of 2.1 children per woman. Anything lower than this leads to a smaller, older population, as we already see in many parts of Europe and Asia.
Even populous China will soon be in decline – historically, due to government’s disastrous one-child policy, but today due to economic growth and urbanization. If the worst comes to pass, its population will be reduced to just over 600 million people by 2100, less than half of its population today.
Much of Europe, Japan, and Korea are already in the thralls of a population bust, where government authorities are doing all they can to encourage more babies.
The problem is, women (and their significant others) aren’t listening. According to Darrell Bricker and John Ibbitson’s book, Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline, this is a natural outcome as nations become more and more urbanized. Children in urban areas, whether in the slums of Calcutta or the high rises of Manhattan, are costly, providing a declining marginal benefit with each additional child.
Along with better education and the empowerment of women, declining fertility rates are a trend worldwide.
As a consequence, Bricker and Ibbitson hypothesize that the world's population will peak at around 8.5 million people by 2050, and then start to decline, rapidly. “So rapidly that by the end of the century the planetary population would be back down to around 7 billion, where it is right now.”
To be fair, this is the UN’s “low variant” population forecast. The UN’s medium variant scenario, one that UN demographers feel is more likely, sees world population peaking at around 11 billion by 2100, then going into decline.
The authors contest this scenario, suggesting the UN is not incorporating the precipitous decline in birth rates that are already occurring. In China, for example, the UN predicts that fertility rates will actually increase. Yet typically, once fertility rates go down, they rarely go back up.
Like Japan, whose population will decline by 25% in the next 35 years, almost all countries will eventually face an older, smaller population, thereby limiting growth and influence.
Unless they can attract newcomers.
On this front, Canada is uniquely ahead of the curve.
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