‘It was way too much’: Experts weigh in on Canada’s fluctuating population growth

Crowds attend the Canadian Tulip Festival at Commissioners Park in Ottawa, on Saturday, May 13, 2023. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Justin Tang

Canada’s rate of population growth is expected to be flat in 2026 for the second straight year, according to the federal parliamentary budget officer (PBO), a far cry from the record growth seen in the three years prior.

The drop is due mainly to the shifting immigration strategy of Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Liberal government, paired with an increasingly small natural growth rate to Canada’s population, a trend experts say isn’t likely to reverse anytime soon.

“In the 1950s, the average fertility rate was 5.6 children per woman, and now it’s 1.3,” Michael Haan, professor and director of the Statistics Canada Research Data Centre at Western University, told CTVNews.ca in an interview on Thursday.

“One of the reasons for that is the child that would have been raised in the 1950s was so much cheaper than the child we want to raise today,” he added.

Haan’s comments came after the PBO released a report earlier in the day detailing the “demographic implications” of the federal Immigration Levels Plan between now and 2028.

The report noted that recent population growth in Canada has been driven “almost entirely” by immigration, while the “natural” population increase, calculated as births minus deaths, “has made only a small – and shrinking – contribution due to low fertility rates and an aging population.”

Earlier this year, Statistics Canada (StatCan) reported that Canada’s fertility rate hit a record low in 2024, due in part to a number of socioeconomic and cultural changes to Canadian society in recent decades.

“Increased educational levels, greater participation in the labour market, changing social norms and the widespread use of contraception have contributed to diversifying life paths, notably in terms of childbearing,” StatCan said.

‘Need young bodies’

Even as the federal government attempts to rein in immigration levels to help ease the pressure on Canada’s public services and the overall supply of housing, it’s not likely to make a significant difference when it comes addressing slowing natural population growth, said Haan.

“I think it’s unlikely given how much it costs to raise kids now. I think that for the foreseeable future, our primary source of population growth, maybe our sole source population growth, is going to be by admitting people from outside of Canada,” he argued.

Canada’s current fertility rate of around 1.3 children per woman would have to nearly double, Haan said, to reach the replacement-level birthrate of 2.1 children per woman, which would only ensure broadly stable population figures, not real growth.

“If you want to see population growth, you’ve got to go above 2.1 and I just don’t see it coming,” said Haan.

Considering the declining fertility rates seen in recent years, immigration became an essential part of Canada’s economic growth strategy, which relies on young workers to fill vacancies as the rest of the population ages, said Haan.

Without a sufficient number of newcomers, he argued, the Canadian economy would have seen additional strain in recent years.

“What I think would have happened is we would have continued to see acute labour shortages, because employers, they need young bodies to do the work,” Haan explained, noting that the average age of Canada’s population would have risen more sharply.

“And then there would also be all kinds of unexpected and unintended consequences about the lack of new young people to do work, things like individuals to care for older Canadians.”

‘Way too much’

Despite the economic need for immigration, Haan said he agreed with the frequent critique of former prime minister Justin Trudeau’s administration – that immigration levels were unsustainably high for several years under his leadership.

“The Trudeau government kind of supercharged our immigrant admission program,” he said. “I think it was just too high … you just can’t open a tap from zero to wide open right away; it was way too much.”

Going forward, the ongoing reduction of immigration targets towards levels seen before the COVID-19 pandemic will, in theory, allow for social services to catch up to previous population growth, said immigration expert Andrew Griffith in an interview with CTVNews.ca on Thursday.

“That’s probably sort of the main effect in the short term, it should provide some breathing space, as well as probably also some political breathing space,” he said.

“I think what we’ve learned over the past period is that there are practical limits to how fast you can increase the number of people arriving in the country.”

The challenge for the federal government will be to strike the proper balance, said Griffith.

“More moderate growth is really something that allows the society to adapt to the growth and to, quite frankly, ensure that the quality of public services and the quality of life are good for both the people who are already here and the people who are arriving,” he said.

But Griffith also noted that Canada isn’t the only developed country dealing with natural population growth challenges. Switzerland, Luxembourg, Finland, Italy, Japan, Singapore and South Korea have comparable or even lower fertility rates than Canada.

With that in mind, there is likely to be greater competition in the future among countries with falling birth rates both to retain their own skilled workers and to attract other ones from elsewhere through immigration, Griffith said.

“Canada may become relatively less attractive than they were before, because people who we would like to immigrate (here) may have better opportunities in their own country or elsewhere,” he explained.

“We’re going to be in a slower growth mode and we’re going to be facing greater competition for talent. How do we as a society adapt to that in a way that basically maintains as high a standard of living for the population as possible?”