This may sound silly but in light of Canada's aging workforce, record low birth rates, and seemingly inability to attract AND keep immigrants, might the gov't have to consider some extreme measures of keeping our population, and our economy growing? My suggestion, while maybe sounding a little too conservative, is to force Canadians to start having more children by outlawing abortion (with some exceptions) and making contraceptives more difficult to attain. This might sound like a crazy act of social engineering, but "encouraging" people to have children through tax incentives and flexable labour laws seems to be having little to no effect. Meanwhile, we're coming closer to a demographic time bomb where about 1/3 of our working population will be nearing rettirement age. Immigration was once hailed as the solution to our problem however there's an increase in the amount of stories documenting a rising number of reverse immigration, especially to places like China and India. So perhaps bringing people here so they can get a subsidized education and then take that knowledge back overseas wasn't such a great idea. Is it time Canada, and maybe Europe, take more decisive action to prevent economic and social disaster by passing legislation, essentially, forcing us to grow our population? Its easy to see how you could make the case that this would be bad, especially for child poverty levels and teen pregnancy, but I believe it to be a choice between bad or worse. China, for example, employed the reverse of this tactic with their One Child Only policy to prevent over population.

Any thoughts?

It will never work.....my wife would kill me

Abortion as a mere form of convenient birth control should be outlawed anyway.

There, go play with that can of worms.

You should never "force" people to have children. You can encourage them by maybe add a tax-cut or a bag of money for each child, but force women to keep their babies?

The rapists will thank you... A free ride, and some offspring...

Canada need not *force* people to have children.

Canada needs to address the reasons why people aren't having children.

(Draconian Measures Disclaimer)

People are not having children because children are expensive and because women anymore do not stay home to raise their children - a conundrum that makes children even more expensive as people have to seek out daycare for their offspring whilst mommy is at work.

People are also not having children because due to the wonderful efforts of the leftist social deconstructionists sex is now a recreational pastime and no longer an act of intimacy between married heterosexual partners.

So....if you want to now encourage nuclear families (which are the best way to promote fertility) you have to restructure society to more closely resemble what it was prior to World War Two.

Women must be prohibited from most workplaces.

This will have the effect of almost halving the workforce and significantly increasing the value of the remaining workers (men) so that couples can once again support their families on one income. To explain, when women entered the workforce the economy adjusted to absorb the extra supply of labor and the value of labor was effectively reduced.

Next, birth control and abortion must again be prohibited for prophylactic reasons.

Then government welfare programs to support able bodied individuals - including single mothers - must be ended. This will have the effect of making families once again more dependent on each other than on government and the divorce rate will necessarily decline as fewer and fewer women opt to seek divorce as a way to escape bad marriages.

Net results: more live births.

More suicides, more broken homes, more abandoned families...but more children.


You could also recreate the German model of putting 10,000 more or less healthy young women into camps with 1,000 very happy young men and you'll have a baby farm.

You won't produce well-adjusted citizens this way, but you will have more citizens.

What would encourage families to have more children? Stop taxing the shit out of us.

- Allow income splitting for married couples to encourage more parents to stay home with their children.
- Recognise all forms of child care, not just government licensed day care facilities, and allow the same level of tax deductions for all of them.
- Control the cost of post secondary education. (I can’t believe I just said that one)

That would be a good start.

BartSimpson BartSimpson:

You could also recreate the German model of putting 10,000 more or less healthy young women into camps with 1,000 very happy young men and you'll have a baby farm.

That's kind of my thought. They can't force me, but if they drop off a few willing women of child bearing age every few days, I'll do my best for Queen and country.

Diminishing population growth is the curse of affluent societies, it seems.

DrCaleb DrCaleb:

BartSimpson BartSimpson:

You could also recreate the German model of putting 10,000 more or less healthy young women into camps with 1,000 very happy young men and you'll have a baby farm.

That's kind of my thought. They can't force me, but if they drop off a few willing women of child bearing age every few days, I'll do my best for Queen and country.

I always said you were a true patriot!

Off subject but perhaps relevant.

I have always found that Quebec's "quiet revolution" resulted a province of huge families morphing into Canada's LOWEST birth rate.