Canada’s baby bump: highest rates of youth in Alberta, Quebec, Saskatchewan

TORONTO – Canada is welcoming an unprecedented wave of youth.

For the first time in 50 years, the nation has seen an increase in small children across every province and territory as the baby boomer generation are becoming grandparents.

Amidst concern about a drastically aging population, the number of children aged four and under increased by 11 per cent between 2006 and 2011. A growth this steep hasn’t been documented since the final years of the baby boom between 1956 and 1961.

These are the numbers coming out of Statistics Canada’s new census data released Tuesday that illustrate a nation of women carrying babies and young families running after toddlers.

Alberta, Saskatchewan and Quebec have all been singled out as the regions with protruding baby bumps.

While the national birth rate saw an increase from 1.59 in 2006 to 1.67 in 2009, the rates soared in these individual provinces.

In Alberta, the growth rate among kids four and under was 20.9 per cent; in Saskatchewan, 19.6 per cent; and in Quebec, 17.5 per cent.

David Foot, an economics professor at the University of Toronto and author of Boom, Bust & Echo: Profiting from the Demographic Shift in the 21st Century, tells Global News he isn’t surprised.

Baby boomers’ children, nicknamed the echo generation, were born primarily in the 1980s and are heading into their late 20s and early 30s – the ripe age for parenthood, Foot notes.

“It’s this inevitable wave of demographics getting to the age of settling down and having children,” he said.

Government initiatives and recent policies that accommodate new parents may have persuaded women to consider pregnancy.

Implemented by Ottawa, universal child care benefits hand parents $100 per month for every child under six.

In Quebec, $7 a day for daycare, a landmark policy in Canada, removes the costly burden of child care expenses from parents’ shoulders.

“It’s been very successful in growing the province’s population,” Foot says.

While Quebec’s policies were created to better society and foster the province’s population, Foot provides a different explanation for growth in Alberta and Saskatchewan.

In Alberta, a stronghold on natural resources and an economy peppered with job opportunities helped prepare citizens for home ownership and starting a family.

“It’s these good paying jobs and being able to afford to have children. Plus women in Alberta tend to have children a little younger – in their mid 20s – and when you have children earlier you tend to have more children. That’s tended to be the case in Alberta,” Foot told Global News.

Since Canada’s fastest-growing province is also among the youngest, policymakers have made inroads in assisting with child rearing. The Alberta government created about 20,000 new daycare spaces to align with the growing demand.

Migration, as other provinces turn to thriving Alberta for employment, also explains why the province is seeing a larger than average growth, Jim Struthers, a Canadian studies professor at Trent University says.

Alberta’s eastward neighbour Saskatchewan’s baby boom has more to do with the First Nations community, Foot says.

Overall, the group still averages 2.5 children per woman, compared to the national average of 1.7.

Struthers says that Saskatchewan’s smaller population also highlights distinct shifts in demographics.

Compared to Ontario’s population of 13 million, Saskatchewan has only one million residents, going on 1.05, “So you can achieve a much more dramatic percentage change if you have a quick turnaround in economic change,” he said.

– with files from the Canadian Press