Canada’s fertility decline has moved from a statistical trend to a political flashpoint. New official data from Statistics Canada show the country’s total fertility rate fell to 1.25 children per woman in 2024, the lowest ever recorded nationally and far below the 2.1 replacement level typically associated with long-run population stability without migration.

The pressure is not just demographic—it is economic and cultural. In its latest long-range projections, Statistics Canada warns that under most scenarios the share of children in the population declines further while population aging deepens, a shift that raises the dependency burden on working-age Canadians and public systems.

This has fueled a combustible national argument over responsibility. One camp says Canada needs aggressive pronatal policies—major childcare expansion, housing affordability interventions, and tax support for young families. Another argues that no incentive package can reverse deeper structural forces: delayed family formation, unstable work trajectories, urban housing costs, and changing expectations around partnership and parenthood. OECD country comparisons reinforce the wider pattern: Canada is part of a broader low-fertility landscape across advanced economies, not an isolated outlier.

But timing matters. Canada’s population growth has recently slowed as immigration policy tightens from prior peaks, making low fertility more politically salient than before in debates over labour supply, productivity, and long-term fiscal sustainability.

The fiercest question now is not whether births are falling—it is whether the country can build a social model where younger adults feel family life is financially and professionally possible. If governments frame this only as a “values” issue while costs keep rising, critics warn policy will fail. If they treat it as an affordability-and-security challenge, Canada may still stabilize the trend.

For now, the outrage reflects a hard reality: the future of the “traditional family” in Canada is being decided less by ideology than by rent, wages, childcare access, and the perceived risk of committing to parenthood in an expensive, uncertain economy.