My recent post titled "Canada must become a global superpower" has quickly become one of my most-read posts in the almost 12 years that I have been writing this daily blog. Within a few days, it quickly got to 11x the number of daily views that I typically get.
One of the points that I made was about Canada's population, and specifically the target set by the Century Initiative of 100 million Canadians by 2100. Today I'd like to expand on this point, because I'm seeing more people talk about it on the socials.
At the time of writing this post, Canada's official population clock from Statistics Canada was sitting at 41,591,151 people. So to reach 100 million in the next 75 years, it would mean we would need to grow our population by 58,408,861 people. At first glance, this seems like a big number. And to some, it has proven to be an unsettling proposition. But 75 years is a long time for compounding to work its magic.
For us to reach 100 million Canadians by 2100 it would mean that we would need to grow our population by a compounded annual growth rate of just 1.18% per year. On our current population base, that would mean about 490,000 new people next year. To put this into perspective, since Confederation in 1867, Canada's population growth rate has averaged around 1.2% per year.
So by arguing that we want to reach 100 million Canadians by 2100, we are, in a way, just saying "we should continue what we've been doing since 1867 and not change a whole lot." The status quo should inevitably lead us to 100 million people during this time period.
Of course, history isn't exactly the same. Canada's fertility rate was much higher in previous years. At the beginning of the 20th century it was nearly five children per woman. And in 1960, it was 3.81 births per woman, which placed us ahead of the US.
Today, we are 1.26 births per woman (2023), compared to 1.66 in the US (2022). We are now among the countries classified as having "lowest-low fertility." Meaning, we're sub 1.3. What this means is that we are now more dependent on immigration to maintain the same growth rate as before.
At the same time, it's not like we're unaccustomed to high immigration. Between 1901 and 1921, Canada's population increased by almost 3% a year on average. This was in large part because of immigrants from Europe, specifically the British Isles. And between 1901 and 1911, alone, Canada welcomed 1.2 million people. This is at a time when we had just over 5 million people in the entire country.
So in the end, 100 million Canadians by 2100 is probably not all that ambitious. A compound annual growth rate of 1.5% would, for example, have us grow to over 127 million people. That would be more of a stretch. There's also the important question of how quickly are we growing relative to other countries.
Whatever the exact target, I stand by what I said before. We should be aiming to lower the cost of living for Canadians, and in particular housing costs. We should make it easier for families to have more babies, should they choose to. And we should continue to attract the smartest and most ambitious people from around the world.
Cover photo by Kevin LEE on Unsplash
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