Statistics Canada reported that Canada’s total fertility rate remained near its record low, at 1.26 children per woman in 2025.
asserted
rate → report → 2025
A total fertility rate represents millions of private decisions, and those decisions send an uncomfortable message: many young Canadians are starting families later because they can’t afford to start one sooner, and are having fewer children than they would otherwise want because the future feels too uncertain.
asserted
future → represent → children
According to a recent report from Statistics Canada, nearly 4-in-10 Canadians in their 20s do not believe they can afford to have a child within three years.
uncertain
they → accord → years
The reasons are familiar: rent and mortgages that absorb a large share of every paycheque, apartments too crowded or run-down to raise a child in, affordable child-care spaces that exist on paper but remain unavailable, and a job market that offers precarious work instead of stable careers.
asserted
that → absorb → work
Young Canadian adults have come of age in an era of back-to-back crises.
asserted
adults → come → crises
Many watched their parents weather the 2008 financial crisis, finished school over Zoom, and became adults as rents and housing prices soared.
asserted
rents → watch → Zoom
Now, they are starting careers amid fears that artificial intelligence will eliminate the entry-level jobs that gave earlier generations their start.
asserted
that → start → start
They are also the first generation to plan their lives against the backdrop of climate change, contending with wildfire smoke every summer, floods, and deadly heatwaves.
asserted
They → plan → smoke
Feels like a gamble
When the future feels beyond their control, having a child can feel like a gamble.
asserted
having → feel → gamble
In Canada, conversations about reproductive rights tend to focus on the freedom not to have children, including access to contraception and reproductive health care.
asserted
conversations → tend → contraception
Those freedoms must be protected.
asserted
freedoms → protect → ?
But reproductive freedom also includes the right to have children, and here Canada is falling short.
asserted
Canada → include → children
When young Canadians cannot afford to start a family, or must choose between parenthood and their careers, they are not exercising a choice.
asserted
they → afford → choice
They are yielding to structural barriers that keep them from having the children they want.
asserted
they → yield → children
If we are serious about reproductive freedom, then the right to have children deserves the same protection as the right not to.
asserted
right → deserve → right
Canadians are reasonable people who have met complex challenges like this one before.
asserted
who → meet → one
As a society, we have an obligation to help solve these problems through sound policy and lasting investment.
asserted
we → have → policy
We owe this obligation to two groups of young adults: those coming of age today and those who will come of age in the future.
asserted
who → owe → future
Today’s young adults deserve policies that make having children possible, if and when they choose to:
• This starts with treating housing as the foundation of family policy and building more family-sized homes near transit, schools and jobs.
asserted
This → deserve → transit
• It means making childcare both affordable and available, because a low fee means little to a parent stuck on a waiting list.
• It means designing parental leave that young parents can actually afford to take.
asserted
parents → mean → that
• And it means building workplaces where flexible schedules are the norm rather than a career penalty.
Future generations of young adults have a claim on us, too.
uncertain
generations → mean → us
birth rates stay this low, they will inherit a country grappling with the consequences of population aging.
asserted
they → stay → aging
Immigration is not a substitute
Immigration can ease some of these pressures, but it is not a substitute for helping Canadians have the families they want.
asserted
they → ease → families
Future generations deserve a workforce that can fund health care, keep pensions solvent, and power an economy that rewards effort and investment.
asserted
that → deserve → effort
Amid a shifting global order, much of our national conversation has, understandably, turned to sovereignty.
asserted
much → shift → sovereignty
But sovereignty is about more than protecting our borders.
asserted
sovereignty → protect → borders
At its core, it is about the freedom of Canadians to determine the course of their own lives, and few decisions matter more to that freedom than whether and when to have children.
asserted
decisions → determine → children
Yet this freedom is only as real as young Canadians’ ability to afford the families they want.
asserted
they → afford → families
Making family life affordable is therefore one way to build a sovereign and prosperous Canada: a country where young adults are free to chart their own futures and decide the shape of their own families.
asserted
adults → make → families
The question is whether we, as Canadians, will make the investments needed to build it.
asserted
we → make → it
Behind a total fertility rate of 1.26 per cent are many young Canadians who want children but find the future we are handing them too uncertain to start a family.
asserted
we → want → family
We still have time to offer them a brighter future: a prosperous Canada where they are free to raise the families they want.
asserted
they → have → families
The Aporia
