FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

27 May, 2026

As Canada’s fertility rate continues to reach historic lows, a new Cardus report is shedding more light on the reasons Canadian parents and would-be parents are having fewer children, and how that affects their life satisfaction.

Home Alone: Why Most Canadians Have Fewer Children Than They Want underscores the different factors – economic, cultural, social, and even political – that have placed Canada among the ‘lowest-low’ fertility countries of the world, with a shrinking 1.25 children per Canadian woman.

“The data suggests that for many Canadian women and men, achieving the family life they desire remains a challenge,” said Lyman Stone, the report’s author, who is a Senior Fellow with Cardus Family and a PhD candidate at McGill University. “Certainly, affordability issues are a factor to reckon with, and policies that address housing and economic growth may help, but these relationships are not always straightforward, as the growth of childcare worries despite more childcare subsidies makes clear.”

This 2025 paper, a follow up to a 2023 paper, examines new data on the fertility preferences, expectations, and outcomes of 3,000 Canadian women and men aged 18 to 44, including a diverse mix of Anglophone, Francophone, and foreign-born adults.

Some data points have remained relatively constant in between the two reports, such as women seeking an ideal family size (how many children they would like to have) of 1.97 children and an intended family size (how many children they intend to have) of 1.54, even as actual birth rates are falling well short of these figures, around 1.25 births per woman. Among those surveyed, 59% of men and 53% of women said their family was currently below their desired family size.

Among the changes since the 2022 survey: Canadians reported growing concerns about childcare cost or access despite the federal government’s expansion of public support for childcare (34% of women, up five percent from 2022, and 37% of men).

Additionally, Canadians who voted for left-of-centre parties in the 2025 federal election were more likely to cite domestic politics as a factor in delaying fertility in 2025 as compared to 2022 (21% of women, up five percent, and 18% of men).

“Policymakers should be concerned about the risk that low fertility poses to the sustainability of the social safety net, economic productivity and equality, and labour force capacity,” added Stone. “But we should also be concerned about how living in a low-fertility society influences Canadians’ well-being and even their sense of happiness. When individuals struggle to achieve the family life they desire, life is worse for everyone.”

MEDIA INQUIRIES

Lyman Stone
media@cardus.ca

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Cardus is a non-partisan think tank dedicated to clarifying and strengthening, through research and dialogue, the ways in which society’s institutions can work together for the common good.