The Economist this week suggests that rich countries need to get out of the asylum business. Only a tiny fraction of those displaced by war and persecution ever make it to a rich country, where international convention requires them to be taken in. (This refers only to those people whose asylum claims are actually accepted as bona fide, not the millions who use the asylum system and its interminable appeals as a "Let me stay in your country free even if you don't want me and and my unproductive family" card. The Economist suggests that rich countries should instead assist people to be harboured in the first safe country they reach, which might be right next door to the conflict country, not 8000 miles away in rich countries with generous welfare states.
If we stopped doing asylum, we would be better able to assess newcomers who fetch up in international arrivals in YYZ and YVR. If they are likely to be useful to us, they can stay, maybe. If not, back they go to wherever they came from. They don't get to stay just because they have a sob story about being persecuted in some African hell-hole because they are bisexual or something. This is probably necessary for immigration to retain whatever popular support it still has. It has to be for our benefit to the labour pool and willingness to assimilate, not to the sole benefit of the asylum seeker.
I can't say what will happen. Maybe they'll stabilize... maybe they'll have mass immigration and radically alter their society. Maybe they'll be invaded by China and replaced.
I can say that Japan did restrict immigration and has not found a solution to their low birthrate.
I'll also say that there's no law of nature that says that societies and civilizations can't die. They have before. They can again. A certain set of choices may lead to such an outcome.
Japan's economy will likely falter if they don't start having young Japanese to do the work, making them an aging, depopulating, declining backwater that non-Japanese people will not want to move to, anyway....unless as colonizers to exploit its vast reserves of natural resources which are.....what?
Thank you, Jen, for writing about an issue that is not addressed and is indeed existential. It's not just about politics though. To me, it's also about a population having a deep commitment to the collective and not the individual. In Israel, as in other countries, every young person does 2-3 years of national service after high school. In times of peace, this means working with children, in food security, with seniors, in agriculture and other volunteer roles. This time together, in uniform, training, learning and living closely together fosters that sense of community. When you are in Israel, you see evidence of this cohesion everywhere. Families are also at the centre of Israeli culture. Most have at least three children -- it's just the norm. In Israel, you don't find people agonizing about whether to have a baby or rescue animal, they just do both and get on with it.
Deborah, you assert, "... it's also about a population having a deep commitment to the collective and not the individual ..."
Please allow me to (marginally) quibble with you. I believe that the choice my wife and I made to have children (and our kids' choice to provide us with grandchildren - yay!) is both an individual and a collective choice.
Put differently, my wife and I, as individuals, chose to have children but that choice required us to think collectively, i.e. to think of our kids first, our family next and ourselves subsequently. [Thinking back of the first day home from the hospital with a newborn and, oh, the weight of responsibility!] Now, as grandparents we think of ourselves much more frequently than we did when we were raising our children but we put our grandchildren's needs above our own.
Put differently, I do not know the meaning of life and, quite frankly, I really don't care about that conversation. What I do know is that my job is/was to raise my children in the best way that I know/knew; now that my children have their own children, my job is to assist them in doing their job. It is their job to raise their children (remember, we are assistants to them) but by us assisting it can make their job easier. Hopefully, they can return the favor by assisting their grandchildren - if they are so fortunate.
Bring back the baby bonus! Even the name of it included "Baby" in the vernacular. When I was a kid aka baby turning into a teenager, my mom gave me my baby bonus money to go and buy my own clothes. I learned how far a buck could go. Ah, the seventies...
Coop housing should be a big thing. Get the banks and insurance empires out of the way, somehow. Help municipalities give birth to radical co-op housing projects. If you want the deal, join the co-op and become part of a purposeful local community. Families with kids get in. The more kids give you a better rate. Remember, the residents share in the ownership and participate in the management and security. Win, win.
This alone could revive the fortunes of the NDP (sorry, that was a hallucination). But yes, co-op housing needs more support and promotion in the grand scheme of things. The cool thing about co-op housing is that each co-op can create its own brand, and target its ideal member, sort of like those radical people trying to make entirely separate religiously based communities, only on a much less radical scale.
Baby bonus as a govt program is a wrong approach. Instead, we should just treat children as people. Take the total family income, divide it among Mom and Dad and kids under 19, and have them pay tax individually. This would address the unfairness of 4 roommates sharing a house and making $200,000 among them paying far less tax than a family of 4 on the same income.
Glen, the "baby bonus" was previously known as Family Allowance. The Family Allowance is now long gone but has been replaced by the Canada Child Benefit which is available to "all" parents. Why the quotation marks around "all" you ask?
While the CCB is available to "all" parents, it is income tested which means that once family income is above a certain amount, the parent gets the bonus less a clawback so that actual amount received in many cases is - zero. But, but, but the parents did get the "appropriate" amount, even if it is zero.
For many other parents, however, that CCB is a truly welcome monthly payment. There are tax planning strategies about which I liked to tell my former clients (I am retired now) but most folks cannot use them as they need the CCB money to be able to buy food, diapers, etc.
As for co-op housing it still exists; CMHC has what they call the "Co-operative Housing Development Program [which] provides forgivable and low-interest repayable loans..." [quote courtesy of Mr. Google]
I've never collected the CCB but having the cut off lower than that for Old Age Security is an injustice to future generations. Stuff like.this will only be cleared up once the boomer generation is gone and the generational.sizes balance themselves.
Milo, the fact is that ever so many folks really, really need their OAS. Really need it. On the other hand, there are ever so many of us who are relatively comfortable. Do I need it? Yeah, somewhat. The truth, however is that for a lot of folks it simply funds not life but life style (emphasis on style).
I firmly contend that the levels at which both the clawback starting points and elimination points should be considerably lower. If that catches me I guess that I will have to figure that out at that point but the fact is that we seniors really do get some benefits. Keep those benefits for those who desperately need them but reduce those benefits for the folks who don't need them; with luck, that will assist our children and grandchildren to get through the upcoming austerity that will be forced on them.
That's exactly what I'm referring to. Old Age Security should emphasize the income security part. For folks who already have a secure income it should be clawed back at the same rate as CCB, Daycare Benefit, etc. For the life of me, I don't understand how Canadians can afford Scandinavian level social benefits on Northern England level economic productivity. The lowest hanging fruit is OAS for those who make more than $70k a year
The first point is that Canada and Canadians CANNOT afford that level of social spending; the reason for it is the greed of people of my age and ignoring of economic reality and what THEY are doing to future generations.
Next, the clawback doesn't start at about 70,000 but through indexing it is now in the 80s, if I recall from doing my tax return a few months ago.
The clawback was too low at the 70 that you quote and it is far, far, far excessive now. Low hanging fruit indeed.
A corollary to that is that we, the Baby Boomers are greedy and politicians are afraid of us. Put differently, folks who have kids are busy with life (kids, job, just being able to survive, etc.) and don't always vote. By contrast, almost all Baby Boomers vote; it's what we old people do. Further, a lot of young voters simply don't understand the economics of it all whereas we Baby Boomers, as a class, do and we are greedy and will punish politicians who try to take our money. Truthfully, what we need are honest politicians who will speak truthfully and be brave politically.
Why cant we afford the spending? Who says we can't afford it? If we say we cannot afford it, why not? Why isn't it a priority? A national program that is easy to access? Isn't there bloated public service that does a poor job anyway. It's not just about finding the money, its about what this says about us.
The baby bonus only encouraged the lower classes to have more children, where the monthly amount ($6 iirc) actually meant something. Parents who were better off might have found the money useful, but it was never going to incent them to have a third child.
I disagree. One of the rewarding aspects of parenthood is proving that you can meet the challenge. Falling back on government programs feels like failure.
Funny how there was no guilt feelings associated with it. My folks weren't dependent on it. I imagine they felt like they were enjoying and sharing in the prosperity of the nation in the postwar era. Still, the money was put to good use, at least that's the way I remember it.
The most extreme want to homeschool etc.? That’s kind of like the staff Sargent saying traditional values are extreme. I believe in homeschooling and I am no where near extreme. I voted for Trudeau’s first mandate and Notley’s as well but when their extreme ideology threatens my kids and grandkids I opt out.
Also, you have misread Rod Drehr, he does not advocate separation from society, he says we need to strengthen and shore up our communities. People make that claim but over and over again he explains that is a misreading most recently in the Pints for Aquinas podcast
Interesting article. However, there's a dimension of this conversation that was absent from the article, and needs addressing, I believe. You talk about the simple math of population sustainability and, on the other side, demographic collapse. But there's also the simple math of having spent the past few hundred years exponentially filling a finite planet with ever more humans, rapidly chewing through the carrying capacity of that finite planet.
People will argue about how near or far we are away from exceeding that carrying capacity (and many will argue that it was exceeded long ago), but it's clear that there are hard limits to landmass, to ecological function, to the ability to grow food. And the problem with growing population isn't just that we run out of space at a certain point. It's also that our economies are highly polluting of the ecologies we ultimately depend on. So more people don't just take up more space, they pollute and strain planetary ecosystems. At least, if they participate in a normative 21st century economy.
So while, on the one hand, population decline dooms much of our global economic foundation, on the other hand, ongoing population increase, even modest, dooms the ability of a fragile and finite planet to continue to accommodate us all.
I'd love to hear some further thoughts on this angle.
The main thing to say about over-population is that Canada doesn't need to worry about that problem.
As Jen noted, our fertility rate is 1.33. Talking about dealing with the potential problems of a growing population is a conversation to have when our fertility rate hits 2.0. (Still below sustainable, but close enough to growth to have that conversation sensibly.)
I would really recommend the book "Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline". As a lover of nature, I think we need the world population to decline, (and I say that without any "anti-natalist" or anti-human feeling) but that book made me realize it needs to be gradual, managed, and desired. But in any case- the main thesis of the book is that global population decline is probably going to be here sooner than has been predicted.
As long as all the starving and local environmental degradation occurs in poor, densely populated countries, who aren't participating in a 21st century western economy, I would say that is not something we in the West need to worry about. We should worry only if those destitute people can swim the Atlantic or the Pacific, or get here in inflatable Zodiac boats. Unlikely in their weakened condition.
This kind of thinking equates "us" to "all humans on earth, now and in the future". The biggest difference between "right" and "left" today is whether you think anything smaller or more local is more "us". Both sides tend to think the other is deeply immoral, if not also plain dumb. Hence the anger levels in our politics.
Both left and right also think that more local is more "us".
A lefty Vancouverite still pays far more attention to a house fire that kills a family of five in Vancouver than they do to the same thing happening in Switzerland.
The issue of morality only comes in when one side perceives the other as having no care at all for some more distant "us" or actually having more care for the distant "us" than the local.
The seemingly underwhelming effect of economic interventions needs is counter-balanced by the fact that small differences matter (a lot). 'Sub-replacement' birthrates have dramatically different social consequences depending on how close to replacement rate it is. The US birthrate hovered around 2 for a couple decades before the great recession, which is a rate at which it would take something like 15 generations for the number of babies to half. That's a society that 'looks' much like a demographically stable one across one lifetime, and if anything has environmental benefits. Compare to something like Germany's birthrate (1.5-ish) where the same decline takes just a few generations and probably destroys the safety net without immigration. Both the cultural and technocratic questions look different from the perspective that the 'gap' is meaningfully filled by half of women having just one more child, not engineering another baby boom.
If anything, there's also a cultural question to whether we'll have faith a society can and should sustain itself (without simply replacing the population with seemingly no eye toward cultural stability) in the long run even with temporary periods of moderate population decline. The idea that populations only grow and grow and grow and otherwise will not (or should not) exist is a fairly recent one -- it just used to take a lot more to stave off rapid decline. Not allowing the population to decline even a little undercuts some obvious ways (like cheaper housing and more opportunity) that things might rebalance, but those are long-term bets because actual population decline lags fertility by decades.
I guess, but you can square the circle for the materialist by the gap between # of kids people want, and the # of kids people have. Its surprisingly huge
Nicely argued for a resurgence in child-bearing, but how to incentivize it? Nothing seems to work, not in a way that scales. Family values broadly construed are really important.
Second-wave feminism in the 1970s caught boomer women entering their child-bearing years at the full flood of also entering their peak career-development years. Trying to do both is really hard. My "Greatest Generation" mother abandoned her wartime and early post-war career to raise us, then went back when we entered high school. By going back I mean she earned a degree (two, eventually) that she needed by then to re-enter her career essentially at square one. Did the hiatus blight her lifetime earnings? Absolutely. Were we worth it? She says we were.
But here's the thing. During the time we were small and our parents were trying to pay off mortgages, feed us, and find some spare money for piano lessons, there was only one income bidding up the price of those things, not two. The dirty little secret is that women's work produces less wealth for each dollar of salary than men's does. My mother was a schoolteacher. No matter the influence she had on young minds, she didn't generate the wealth that my father did making and selling things that people wanted to buy with their own money. A lot of women's work today consists of women working in government bureaucracies creating pay equity and harassment regulations that other women working in corporate HR bureaucracies document compliance with. None of this generates any wealth at all. No one would purchase this work with his own money. (Women want taxpayers and the firms to do this work on their behalf, but they won't purchase it.)
So to all the extent that women work in careers that are nice to have (social work, teaching, civil service, HR, nursing, family medicine, NGOs) they don't create wealth. Female engineers and financial experts, you're off the hook. Many are financed entirely through taxes as part of the welfare state. Yet they draw salaries....and nowadays those salaries must, by law, be equivalent to the salaries that wealth-producing men get. What this means is that women's work is inflationary. The reason it seems to take two incomes for a family to stay afloat, but it mostly didn't in the 1950s, is that women's wages drive up prices without producing as many tradeable goods. And having children while working is just really damn hard. So even if the one family is better off with both working, the society is worse off, and makes the trade-off not to have children in order to prosper seem rational.
This leads obviously to a modest proposal that, since nothing else works, working mothers need to go out of fashion if we hope to kick-start fertility. In the short-term families will be materially worse off (although day care is really really expensive, sensible only if you really love your career) but over time, there will be less money chasing the tradeable goods that men (mostly) make, and single-income prosperity will return.
Of course this is just a talking suggestion. I'm sure there are lots of holes in it.
Careers that are nice to have? They are necessary in a decent society. And make for a better life for all of us. Life is not a financial balance sheet and neither is a caring society.
Perhaps you don't like financial balance sheets but even in a decent, compassionate, and caring society someone has to pay the wages and salaries of those decent, compassionate carers who produce no wealth. Unless you think those compassionate souls will be willing to work for nothing (to reflect the wealth they don't create.) But they won't. Like all the rest of us, they feel entitled to every dollar they can screw out of the economy.
Why not have 10 times the number of nurses, family doctors, social workers, DEI commissars, gender advocates, addiction workers, and public school teachers as we do now? We could, if we raised their wages enough to make those jobs *really* attractive to high school students contemplating careers. People who consume the free services these workers provide would love the increased "access" their greater numbers would allow. But if these workers don't produce any wealth, which they don't, their salaries have to be paid with paper dollars that depreciate in value as too many dollars chase too few goods. Result is inflation (= need two incomes to buy the same basket of goods that one used to buy, because there is still only one basket of goods produced despite all those wages being paid to the non-productive), which is the point I was making.
Because these non-productive jobs are disproportionately done by women. reducing their numbers will dis-employ not many men but a lot of women, sending them back home to have the babies we so desperately need. (If you dis-employ men, they become bums and pot-heads sponging off their wives.) The reason they are disproportionately women's work is that they are "family-friendly", being more indulgent of women's greater need for work-life balance. Employers know that a man at work is not thinking about his kids. He knows someone is looking after them. A woman at work is always thinking at least a little about her kids because even if someone else is looking after them, it's still her responsibility if the daycare calls and wants to send the kid home with a fever. This translates into a less valuable job if a woman is doing it. Most women would think her husband less manly if he agreed that the children would be his primary responsibility, and would earn less as a result. She might say otherwise but in her heart she would hold him in contempt and eventually would divorce him.
Did you know that anesthesiologists in many hospitals in the U.S. (maybe Canada, too, I don't know) are now allowed to leave an operation if it runs after 5 p.m. and have a second anesthesiologist take over who doesn't know the patient? Surgical anesthesia is considered women's work (to accommodate daycare pickups, and because nursing -- heavily female -- is organized the same way: a nurse finishes her shift and goes home, no matter how sick the patient is at shift change) even if men are doing it. Surgery is men's work, even if women are doing it. No way would a surgeon of either sex ever leave the OR halfway through a long operation and let a colleague scrub in and take over to finish it. Everyone: society, the hospital, the patient, would say: Get someone else to pick up the kids. You're here till the work is done. Same is true of a factory worker or a meat packer: if the worker leaves the line, fewer widgets or sausages get made that shift. Women doing those jobs will grouse and complain that the boss was unsympathetic to their "need" to look after a sick child and will demand that the state impose "better" work rules on him.
Sure, some women's work is important to a decent society, especially work that men won't do anyway. That wasn't my point because that work doesn't compete with family-making and is wasteful only to the extent that unions strike for higher wages or higher head counts just to make more union dues. The work that women have flooded into since the 1970s is a career for a career's sake. They do it either less productively than men do, because they work with less diligence or even fewer hours when they can control their hours as professionals can, or they create jobs, like sexual harassment investigator, or "well-woman medical specialist" that exist only because there are large number of women in the workforce looking for something to do. Those are the jobs we could do without. The money not paid for those wages would lower both prices and taxes and make those then single-income families better off than they are now.
Leslie, you are being provocative today (well, yesterday now)!
You may even mean it; I don't know. What I do know is that by your words you are of an age somewhat similar to me. What I further know is that I have used similar concepts about many occupations not being productive to an economy. Be of no doubt, there are some occupations that absolutely do not lead directly to productivity but are truly important, nay, essential, in indirectly leading to productivity. Teachers, say. Medical folk, say.
My point is that many of the types of occupations that you list - and many others, as well - exist to take wealth out of the economy not to add wealth to the economy. Some such jobs are truly important as they make the explicitly wealth producing jobs possible. Other of those jobs, not so much.
I'd rather say that the unproductive professions you mention (and many others, beginning with anything related to studies of social issues), as well as the bureaucracy that they feed, is what it must go. Working mothers in STEM or trades are always welcome.
Really? So no hospitals with nurses, doctors, and all of the needed ancillary professions, schools without teachers and so on. You advocate for a dog eat dog , outrageously unequal society.
Surely you are not serious but are being deliberately provocative ?
I consider medicine to be part of STEM, so I have already included nurses and doctors. I missed many other professions like teachers and lawyers, but it wasn't on purpose, just didn't intend to make an exhaustive list. Where I draw the line are in careers like gender or race studies, just to mention a couple of examples. I don't think I am advocating an unequal society, but in any case don't take me too seriously 🙂
Insightful article. Well done. I have told my child disdaining brother in law many times that evolution will automatically reduce the number of people with his attitude.
As a new parent and talking to other parents, I have come to a new understanding of the cheap childcare laws. What is happening is Mom's no longer have any monetary excuse to stay at home with the child, no more "at least I'm saving $1000 per month". Children, from early infancy, are largely being raised in state (under) funded institutions
- I am using "Mom" in the deeply archetypical sense - dads can be "Mom"s too
- The solution isn't more funding, but letting stay at home parents get the same funding for childcare should be an option. The economics of scale should let daycare's come out ahead, and if it doesn't (e.g. 1 worker / 3 children + overhead) maybe this isn't what we should be funding
Callum, I understand your point and I make no comment on it, either pro or con. I simply note that to do what you suggest would take a LOT of money and that would necessitate MUCH higher taxes. Carrying on with your idea, would non-parents object to that increased level of taxation when they are not obviously benefitting? Currently, only the foolish object to public funding of schools but under your idea? I wonder.
Further, if "you" were paid to procreate and have children, might the state then impose "duties" on "you"?
exactly this. $10/day daycare all but shoves a potential stay-at-home parent into a workforce that may provide very little satisfaction compared to making meaningful connections to their child, their community, and life beyond a paycheck.
for every mom or dad that keeps their satisfying, executive position - there's tenfold who are walmart greeters, cashiers, bus drivers, or the like. we're building a society where children are an obstacle to overcome.
While the evidence suggests that pro-natalist policies and programs largely fail to reverse declining birth rates, appreciate your nuanced and informative discussion,.
Never easy to write about these topics, but I think you have achieved a great balance. Bravo Jen, articles like this make me proud of being a subscriber. And the thoughtful comments are the ice in the cake.
We obviously need to diversify our trading partners across the globe, so far better to bring in people who will have first-generation Canadian children with ties to those future trading partners. Because in a chaotic trade environment with two-party deals are the norm, diversity of backgrounds is Canada's greatest advantage. Also, raising kids is too expensive in our current lopsided-wealth economy — the Americans only do better by keeping their people relatively uneducated/miseducated and hence more pliable.
I think liberalism, rightly defined, is a form of social organization created to prevent institutions (family, church, corporation, and, most importantly, the State) from oppressing the individual and groups by keeping these institutions restrained.
What normal person would argue with that?
The problem is is that when *liberalism* is not restrained it goes beyond its purpose and tends to view social institutions themselves as inherently oppressive.
So now we find ourselves in a time when people cannot turn to traditional sources of meaning like God and family and unapologetic love of country, they’re turning to frothing political tribes and rapacious gurus of pseudo religions.
Radical, ahistorical autonomy has replaced a more bounded and socially-anchored conception of personal liberty.
Having children is - in fact - one good way to “grow as a person”
The best way.
Indeed. It was one of the things my wife and I talked about before having kids, almost in those exact words.
If we tightly restrict immigration, we will, of necessity, find a solution over time.
If we don't tightly restrict immigration, "we" will simply cease to exist, and be replaced by another culture entirely.
The real question for each of us is whether "we", across generations, has any meaning at all.
The Economist this week suggests that rich countries need to get out of the asylum business. Only a tiny fraction of those displaced by war and persecution ever make it to a rich country, where international convention requires them to be taken in. (This refers only to those people whose asylum claims are actually accepted as bona fide, not the millions who use the asylum system and its interminable appeals as a "Let me stay in your country free even if you don't want me and and my unproductive family" card. The Economist suggests that rich countries should instead assist people to be harboured in the first safe country they reach, which might be right next door to the conflict country, not 8000 miles away in rich countries with generous welfare states.
If we stopped doing asylum, we would be better able to assess newcomers who fetch up in international arrivals in YYZ and YVR. If they are likely to be useful to us, they can stay, maybe. If not, back they go to wherever they came from. They don't get to stay just because they have a sob story about being persecuted in some African hell-hole because they are bisexual or something. This is probably necessary for immigration to retain whatever popular support it still has. It has to be for our benefit to the labour pool and willingness to assimilate, not to the sole benefit of the asylum seeker.
> If we tightly restrict immigration, we will, of necessity, find a solution over time.
Japan did that and hasn't.
Yet. Do you think their population will drop to zero? Or just low enough that other, non-Japanese people move in? Which is to say, mass immigration?
I can't say what will happen. Maybe they'll stabilize... maybe they'll have mass immigration and radically alter their society. Maybe they'll be invaded by China and replaced.
I can say that Japan did restrict immigration and has not found a solution to their low birthrate.
I'll also say that there's no law of nature that says that societies and civilizations can't die. They have before. They can again. A certain set of choices may lead to such an outcome.
Japan's economy will likely falter if they don't start having young Japanese to do the work, making them an aging, depopulating, declining backwater that non-Japanese people will not want to move to, anyway....unless as colonizers to exploit its vast reserves of natural resources which are.....what?
The Japanese may well prefer a faltering economy to ceasing to exist as a nation or a culture.
Thank you, Jen, for writing about an issue that is not addressed and is indeed existential. It's not just about politics though. To me, it's also about a population having a deep commitment to the collective and not the individual. In Israel, as in other countries, every young person does 2-3 years of national service after high school. In times of peace, this means working with children, in food security, with seniors, in agriculture and other volunteer roles. This time together, in uniform, training, learning and living closely together fosters that sense of community. When you are in Israel, you see evidence of this cohesion everywhere. Families are also at the centre of Israeli culture. Most have at least three children -- it's just the norm. In Israel, you don't find people agonizing about whether to have a baby or rescue animal, they just do both and get on with it.
Deborah, you assert, "... it's also about a population having a deep commitment to the collective and not the individual ..."
Please allow me to (marginally) quibble with you. I believe that the choice my wife and I made to have children (and our kids' choice to provide us with grandchildren - yay!) is both an individual and a collective choice.
Put differently, my wife and I, as individuals, chose to have children but that choice required us to think collectively, i.e. to think of our kids first, our family next and ourselves subsequently. [Thinking back of the first day home from the hospital with a newborn and, oh, the weight of responsibility!] Now, as grandparents we think of ourselves much more frequently than we did when we were raising our children but we put our grandchildren's needs above our own.
Put differently, I do not know the meaning of life and, quite frankly, I really don't care about that conversation. What I do know is that my job is/was to raise my children in the best way that I know/knew; now that my children have their own children, my job is to assist them in doing their job. It is their job to raise their children (remember, we are assistants to them) but by us assisting it can make their job easier. Hopefully, they can return the favor by assisting their grandchildren - if they are so fortunate.
Very timely topic. Thank-you.
Bring back the baby bonus! Even the name of it included "Baby" in the vernacular. When I was a kid aka baby turning into a teenager, my mom gave me my baby bonus money to go and buy my own clothes. I learned how far a buck could go. Ah, the seventies...
Coop housing should be a big thing. Get the banks and insurance empires out of the way, somehow. Help municipalities give birth to radical co-op housing projects. If you want the deal, join the co-op and become part of a purposeful local community. Families with kids get in. The more kids give you a better rate. Remember, the residents share in the ownership and participate in the management and security. Win, win.
This alone could revive the fortunes of the NDP (sorry, that was a hallucination). But yes, co-op housing needs more support and promotion in the grand scheme of things. The cool thing about co-op housing is that each co-op can create its own brand, and target its ideal member, sort of like those radical people trying to make entirely separate religiously based communities, only on a much less radical scale.
Baby bonus as a govt program is a wrong approach. Instead, we should just treat children as people. Take the total family income, divide it among Mom and Dad and kids under 19, and have them pay tax individually. This would address the unfairness of 4 roommates sharing a house and making $200,000 among them paying far less tax than a family of 4 on the same income.
Without a govt handout to families.
My mum raised 4 children in the 1970s and relied on that money as a single mum.
Glen, the "baby bonus" was previously known as Family Allowance. The Family Allowance is now long gone but has been replaced by the Canada Child Benefit which is available to "all" parents. Why the quotation marks around "all" you ask?
While the CCB is available to "all" parents, it is income tested which means that once family income is above a certain amount, the parent gets the bonus less a clawback so that actual amount received in many cases is - zero. But, but, but the parents did get the "appropriate" amount, even if it is zero.
For many other parents, however, that CCB is a truly welcome monthly payment. There are tax planning strategies about which I liked to tell my former clients (I am retired now) but most folks cannot use them as they need the CCB money to be able to buy food, diapers, etc.
As for co-op housing it still exists; CMHC has what they call the "Co-operative Housing Development Program [which] provides forgivable and low-interest repayable loans..." [quote courtesy of Mr. Google]
I've never collected the CCB but having the cut off lower than that for Old Age Security is an injustice to future generations. Stuff like.this will only be cleared up once the boomer generation is gone and the generational.sizes balance themselves.
Milo, the fact is that ever so many folks really, really need their OAS. Really need it. On the other hand, there are ever so many of us who are relatively comfortable. Do I need it? Yeah, somewhat. The truth, however is that for a lot of folks it simply funds not life but life style (emphasis on style).
I firmly contend that the levels at which both the clawback starting points and elimination points should be considerably lower. If that catches me I guess that I will have to figure that out at that point but the fact is that we seniors really do get some benefits. Keep those benefits for those who desperately need them but reduce those benefits for the folks who don't need them; with luck, that will assist our children and grandchildren to get through the upcoming austerity that will be forced on them.
That's exactly what I'm referring to. Old Age Security should emphasize the income security part. For folks who already have a secure income it should be clawed back at the same rate as CCB, Daycare Benefit, etc. For the life of me, I don't understand how Canadians can afford Scandinavian level social benefits on Northern England level economic productivity. The lowest hanging fruit is OAS for those who make more than $70k a year
The first point is that Canada and Canadians CANNOT afford that level of social spending; the reason for it is the greed of people of my age and ignoring of economic reality and what THEY are doing to future generations.
Next, the clawback doesn't start at about 70,000 but through indexing it is now in the 80s, if I recall from doing my tax return a few months ago.
The clawback was too low at the 70 that you quote and it is far, far, far excessive now. Low hanging fruit indeed.
A corollary to that is that we, the Baby Boomers are greedy and politicians are afraid of us. Put differently, folks who have kids are busy with life (kids, job, just being able to survive, etc.) and don't always vote. By contrast, almost all Baby Boomers vote; it's what we old people do. Further, a lot of young voters simply don't understand the economics of it all whereas we Baby Boomers, as a class, do and we are greedy and will punish politicians who try to take our money. Truthfully, what we need are honest politicians who will speak truthfully and be brave politically.
Why cant we afford the spending? Who says we can't afford it? If we say we cannot afford it, why not? Why isn't it a priority? A national program that is easy to access? Isn't there bloated public service that does a poor job anyway. It's not just about finding the money, its about what this says about us.
The baby bonus only encouraged the lower classes to have more children, where the monthly amount ($6 iirc) actually meant something. Parents who were better off might have found the money useful, but it was never going to incent them to have a third child.
I disagree. One of the rewarding aspects of parenthood is proving that you can meet the challenge. Falling back on government programs feels like failure.
Christ almighty Doug, that is a horrendously callous, cruel, and dismal moral judgment.
No, it is a personal view that applies to my life
Oh thank god
Funny how there was no guilt feelings associated with it. My folks weren't dependent on it. I imagine they felt like they were enjoying and sharing in the prosperity of the nation in the postwar era. Still, the money was put to good use, at least that's the way I remember it.
The most extreme want to homeschool etc.? That’s kind of like the staff Sargent saying traditional values are extreme. I believe in homeschooling and I am no where near extreme. I voted for Trudeau’s first mandate and Notley’s as well but when their extreme ideology threatens my kids and grandkids I opt out.
Also, you have misread Rod Drehr, he does not advocate separation from society, he says we need to strengthen and shore up our communities. People make that claim but over and over again he explains that is a misreading most recently in the Pints for Aquinas podcast
Interesting article. However, there's a dimension of this conversation that was absent from the article, and needs addressing, I believe. You talk about the simple math of population sustainability and, on the other side, demographic collapse. But there's also the simple math of having spent the past few hundred years exponentially filling a finite planet with ever more humans, rapidly chewing through the carrying capacity of that finite planet.
People will argue about how near or far we are away from exceeding that carrying capacity (and many will argue that it was exceeded long ago), but it's clear that there are hard limits to landmass, to ecological function, to the ability to grow food. And the problem with growing population isn't just that we run out of space at a certain point. It's also that our economies are highly polluting of the ecologies we ultimately depend on. So more people don't just take up more space, they pollute and strain planetary ecosystems. At least, if they participate in a normative 21st century economy.
So while, on the one hand, population decline dooms much of our global economic foundation, on the other hand, ongoing population increase, even modest, dooms the ability of a fragile and finite planet to continue to accommodate us all.
I'd love to hear some further thoughts on this angle.
The main thing to say about over-population is that Canada doesn't need to worry about that problem.
As Jen noted, our fertility rate is 1.33. Talking about dealing with the potential problems of a growing population is a conversation to have when our fertility rate hits 2.0. (Still below sustainable, but close enough to growth to have that conversation sensibly.)
I would really recommend the book "Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline". As a lover of nature, I think we need the world population to decline, (and I say that without any "anti-natalist" or anti-human feeling) but that book made me realize it needs to be gradual, managed, and desired. But in any case- the main thesis of the book is that global population decline is probably going to be here sooner than has been predicted.
As long as all the starving and local environmental degradation occurs in poor, densely populated countries, who aren't participating in a 21st century western economy, I would say that is not something we in the West need to worry about. We should worry only if those destitute people can swim the Atlantic or the Pacific, or get here in inflatable Zodiac boats. Unlikely in their weakened condition.
This kind of thinking equates "us" to "all humans on earth, now and in the future". The biggest difference between "right" and "left" today is whether you think anything smaller or more local is more "us". Both sides tend to think the other is deeply immoral, if not also plain dumb. Hence the anger levels in our politics.
Both left and right also think that more local is more "us".
A lefty Vancouverite still pays far more attention to a house fire that kills a family of five in Vancouver than they do to the same thing happening in Switzerland.
The issue of morality only comes in when one side perceives the other as having no care at all for some more distant "us" or actually having more care for the distant "us" than the local.
The seemingly underwhelming effect of economic interventions needs is counter-balanced by the fact that small differences matter (a lot). 'Sub-replacement' birthrates have dramatically different social consequences depending on how close to replacement rate it is. The US birthrate hovered around 2 for a couple decades before the great recession, which is a rate at which it would take something like 15 generations for the number of babies to half. That's a society that 'looks' much like a demographically stable one across one lifetime, and if anything has environmental benefits. Compare to something like Germany's birthrate (1.5-ish) where the same decline takes just a few generations and probably destroys the safety net without immigration. Both the cultural and technocratic questions look different from the perspective that the 'gap' is meaningfully filled by half of women having just one more child, not engineering another baby boom.
If anything, there's also a cultural question to whether we'll have faith a society can and should sustain itself (without simply replacing the population with seemingly no eye toward cultural stability) in the long run even with temporary periods of moderate population decline. The idea that populations only grow and grow and grow and otherwise will not (or should not) exist is a fairly recent one -- it just used to take a lot more to stave off rapid decline. Not allowing the population to decline even a little undercuts some obvious ways (like cheaper housing and more opportunity) that things might rebalance, but those are long-term bets because actual population decline lags fertility by decades.
I think this is a really important point. Huge policy implications for a pop that is hovering at 1.9 vs one hitting 1.2. JG
I guess, but you can square the circle for the materialist by the gap between # of kids people want, and the # of kids people have. Its surprisingly huge
Nicely argued for a resurgence in child-bearing, but how to incentivize it? Nothing seems to work, not in a way that scales. Family values broadly construed are really important.
Second-wave feminism in the 1970s caught boomer women entering their child-bearing years at the full flood of also entering their peak career-development years. Trying to do both is really hard. My "Greatest Generation" mother abandoned her wartime and early post-war career to raise us, then went back when we entered high school. By going back I mean she earned a degree (two, eventually) that she needed by then to re-enter her career essentially at square one. Did the hiatus blight her lifetime earnings? Absolutely. Were we worth it? She says we were.
But here's the thing. During the time we were small and our parents were trying to pay off mortgages, feed us, and find some spare money for piano lessons, there was only one income bidding up the price of those things, not two. The dirty little secret is that women's work produces less wealth for each dollar of salary than men's does. My mother was a schoolteacher. No matter the influence she had on young minds, she didn't generate the wealth that my father did making and selling things that people wanted to buy with their own money. A lot of women's work today consists of women working in government bureaucracies creating pay equity and harassment regulations that other women working in corporate HR bureaucracies document compliance with. None of this generates any wealth at all. No one would purchase this work with his own money. (Women want taxpayers and the firms to do this work on their behalf, but they won't purchase it.)
So to all the extent that women work in careers that are nice to have (social work, teaching, civil service, HR, nursing, family medicine, NGOs) they don't create wealth. Female engineers and financial experts, you're off the hook. Many are financed entirely through taxes as part of the welfare state. Yet they draw salaries....and nowadays those salaries must, by law, be equivalent to the salaries that wealth-producing men get. What this means is that women's work is inflationary. The reason it seems to take two incomes for a family to stay afloat, but it mostly didn't in the 1950s, is that women's wages drive up prices without producing as many tradeable goods. And having children while working is just really damn hard. So even if the one family is better off with both working, the society is worse off, and makes the trade-off not to have children in order to prosper seem rational.
This leads obviously to a modest proposal that, since nothing else works, working mothers need to go out of fashion if we hope to kick-start fertility. In the short-term families will be materially worse off (although day care is really really expensive, sensible only if you really love your career) but over time, there will be less money chasing the tradeable goods that men (mostly) make, and single-income prosperity will return.
Of course this is just a talking suggestion. I'm sure there are lots of holes in it.
Careers that are nice to have? They are necessary in a decent society. And make for a better life for all of us. Life is not a financial balance sheet and neither is a caring society.
Perhaps you don't like financial balance sheets but even in a decent, compassionate, and caring society someone has to pay the wages and salaries of those decent, compassionate carers who produce no wealth. Unless you think those compassionate souls will be willing to work for nothing (to reflect the wealth they don't create.) But they won't. Like all the rest of us, they feel entitled to every dollar they can screw out of the economy.
Why not have 10 times the number of nurses, family doctors, social workers, DEI commissars, gender advocates, addiction workers, and public school teachers as we do now? We could, if we raised their wages enough to make those jobs *really* attractive to high school students contemplating careers. People who consume the free services these workers provide would love the increased "access" their greater numbers would allow. But if these workers don't produce any wealth, which they don't, their salaries have to be paid with paper dollars that depreciate in value as too many dollars chase too few goods. Result is inflation (= need two incomes to buy the same basket of goods that one used to buy, because there is still only one basket of goods produced despite all those wages being paid to the non-productive), which is the point I was making.
Because these non-productive jobs are disproportionately done by women. reducing their numbers will dis-employ not many men but a lot of women, sending them back home to have the babies we so desperately need. (If you dis-employ men, they become bums and pot-heads sponging off their wives.) The reason they are disproportionately women's work is that they are "family-friendly", being more indulgent of women's greater need for work-life balance. Employers know that a man at work is not thinking about his kids. He knows someone is looking after them. A woman at work is always thinking at least a little about her kids because even if someone else is looking after them, it's still her responsibility if the daycare calls and wants to send the kid home with a fever. This translates into a less valuable job if a woman is doing it. Most women would think her husband less manly if he agreed that the children would be his primary responsibility, and would earn less as a result. She might say otherwise but in her heart she would hold him in contempt and eventually would divorce him.
Did you know that anesthesiologists in many hospitals in the U.S. (maybe Canada, too, I don't know) are now allowed to leave an operation if it runs after 5 p.m. and have a second anesthesiologist take over who doesn't know the patient? Surgical anesthesia is considered women's work (to accommodate daycare pickups, and because nursing -- heavily female -- is organized the same way: a nurse finishes her shift and goes home, no matter how sick the patient is at shift change) even if men are doing it. Surgery is men's work, even if women are doing it. No way would a surgeon of either sex ever leave the OR halfway through a long operation and let a colleague scrub in and take over to finish it. Everyone: society, the hospital, the patient, would say: Get someone else to pick up the kids. You're here till the work is done. Same is true of a factory worker or a meat packer: if the worker leaves the line, fewer widgets or sausages get made that shift. Women doing those jobs will grouse and complain that the boss was unsympathetic to their "need" to look after a sick child and will demand that the state impose "better" work rules on him.
Sure, some women's work is important to a decent society, especially work that men won't do anyway. That wasn't my point because that work doesn't compete with family-making and is wasteful only to the extent that unions strike for higher wages or higher head counts just to make more union dues. The work that women have flooded into since the 1970s is a career for a career's sake. They do it either less productively than men do, because they work with less diligence or even fewer hours when they can control their hours as professionals can, or they create jobs, like sexual harassment investigator, or "well-woman medical specialist" that exist only because there are large number of women in the workforce looking for something to do. Those are the jobs we could do without. The money not paid for those wages would lower both prices and taxes and make those then single-income families better off than they are now.
Leslie, you are being provocative today (well, yesterday now)!
You may even mean it; I don't know. What I do know is that by your words you are of an age somewhat similar to me. What I further know is that I have used similar concepts about many occupations not being productive to an economy. Be of no doubt, there are some occupations that absolutely do not lead directly to productivity but are truly important, nay, essential, in indirectly leading to productivity. Teachers, say. Medical folk, say.
My point is that many of the types of occupations that you list - and many others, as well - exist to take wealth out of the economy not to add wealth to the economy. Some such jobs are truly important as they make the explicitly wealth producing jobs possible. Other of those jobs, not so much.
I'd rather say that the unproductive professions you mention (and many others, beginning with anything related to studies of social issues), as well as the bureaucracy that they feed, is what it must go. Working mothers in STEM or trades are always welcome.
Really? So no hospitals with nurses, doctors, and all of the needed ancillary professions, schools without teachers and so on. You advocate for a dog eat dog , outrageously unequal society.
Surely you are not serious but are being deliberately provocative ?
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I consider medicine to be part of STEM, so I have already included nurses and doctors. I missed many other professions like teachers and lawyers, but it wasn't on purpose, just didn't intend to make an exhaustive list. Where I draw the line are in careers like gender or race studies, just to mention a couple of examples. I don't think I am advocating an unequal society, but in any case don't take me too seriously 🙂
Insightful article. Well done. I have told my child disdaining brother in law many times that evolution will automatically reduce the number of people with his attitude.
And, in his case, he will be "evolved" out of existence within a few decades.
As a new parent and talking to other parents, I have come to a new understanding of the cheap childcare laws. What is happening is Mom's no longer have any monetary excuse to stay at home with the child, no more "at least I'm saving $1000 per month". Children, from early infancy, are largely being raised in state (under) funded institutions
- I am using "Mom" in the deeply archetypical sense - dads can be "Mom"s too
- The solution isn't more funding, but letting stay at home parents get the same funding for childcare should be an option. The economics of scale should let daycare's come out ahead, and if it doesn't (e.g. 1 worker / 3 children + overhead) maybe this isn't what we should be funding
Callum, I understand your point and I make no comment on it, either pro or con. I simply note that to do what you suggest would take a LOT of money and that would necessitate MUCH higher taxes. Carrying on with your idea, would non-parents object to that increased level of taxation when they are not obviously benefitting? Currently, only the foolish object to public funding of schools but under your idea? I wonder.
Further, if "you" were paid to procreate and have children, might the state then impose "duties" on "you"?
Thing to consider.
exactly this. $10/day daycare all but shoves a potential stay-at-home parent into a workforce that may provide very little satisfaction compared to making meaningful connections to their child, their community, and life beyond a paycheck.
for every mom or dad that keeps their satisfying, executive position - there's tenfold who are walmart greeters, cashiers, bus drivers, or the like. we're building a society where children are an obstacle to overcome.
While the evidence suggests that pro-natalist policies and programs largely fail to reverse declining birth rates, appreciate your nuanced and informative discussion,.
I’ve never understood why affluent families don’t have more kids.
Then again, I’ve also never understood the assigning value to a career beyond what it paid me.
Never easy to write about these topics, but I think you have achieved a great balance. Bravo Jen, articles like this make me proud of being a subscriber. And the thoughtful comments are the ice in the cake.
We obviously need to diversify our trading partners across the globe, so far better to bring in people who will have first-generation Canadian children with ties to those future trading partners. Because in a chaotic trade environment with two-party deals are the norm, diversity of backgrounds is Canada's greatest advantage. Also, raising kids is too expensive in our current lopsided-wealth economy — the Americans only do better by keeping their people relatively uneducated/miseducated and hence more pliable.
I think liberalism, rightly defined, is a form of social organization created to prevent institutions (family, church, corporation, and, most importantly, the State) from oppressing the individual and groups by keeping these institutions restrained.
What normal person would argue with that?
The problem is is that when *liberalism* is not restrained it goes beyond its purpose and tends to view social institutions themselves as inherently oppressive.
So now we find ourselves in a time when people cannot turn to traditional sources of meaning like God and family and unapologetic love of country, they’re turning to frothing political tribes and rapacious gurus of pseudo religions.
Radical, ahistorical autonomy has replaced a more bounded and socially-anchored conception of personal liberty.