Canada, the emerging population superpower
We think of ourselves as a “small” country, notwithstanding our enormous physical size -- a function of our myopic fixation on our neighbours to the south, the third most populous nation on Earth. But we’re not a small country now -- in fact we’re 36th out of more than 230 sovereign states recognized by the United Nations -- and we’re about to become a much larger one, if not absolutely, then certainly in relative terms.
On the surface, that might seem to read too much into the latest census figures. To be sure, our population growth over the last five years, at just over 1% per annum, was a marked acceleration over the 1996-2001 period, when it slowed to just 0.8%. But it’s still the third-lowest growth rate recorded in any post-war census period. Our current growth feels rapid by comparison to the recent past. But we grew more than two-and-a-half times as fast in the late 1950s, to say nothing of the massive influx during the “Laurier boom” in the early years of the last century.
But historic benchmarks are not the only ones worth noting. Of greater relevance, perhaps, is how Canada stands relative to other nations. We’re now growing faster than any other major developed country: faster than the United States, nearly twice as fast as Italy or France, three times as fast as Britain. Japan and Germany, meanwhile, are barely growing at all, while Russia’s population is actually declining.
Those trends are only going to become more pronounced in the decades to come. Statistics Canada projects that by the year 2050, Canada’s population, now about 33 million (the latest census estimate is 31.6 million, but these are routinely revised upwards) will have grown to about 43 million. By contrast, the UN’s “medium variant” projection puts France’s population, now 61 million, at just 68 million in the same year. Britain, with roughly the same population, is projected to grow at a similar pace, while Germany, Italy, and Japan are all projected to shrink: to 74 million, 55 million and 103 million, respectively. Of the G7, only the United States is projected to grow as fast as Canada, from just over 300 million people to just over 400 million.
That’s on the basis of current trends. But supposing Canada were to take steps to increase its population? It’s often noted, as if it were cause for concern, that with the birth rate down to just 1.5 children per woman, Canada now depends almost entirely on immigration even to maintain its population, let alone increase it. But that also means that we control our own destiny. It’s not easy to induce people to have more babies, as Quebec has discovered. By comparison, immigration is mostly a matter of opening or closing the tap.
Well, it’s not quite as easy as that: with population stagnant or declining in many of the rich countries, the competition to attract skilled labour is likely to intensify. But the increasing numbers of immigrants coming to Canada in recent years suggests we are once again being viewed as a destination of choice.
A modest, but sustained, increase in population growth would be sufficient for Canada to overtake its European competitors in the next fifty years. By mid-century, Canada could be the third-largest country in the G7, by population -- and quite possibly the second-largest by total GDP. (Of course, whether the G7 will still be the G7 then is very much in doubt: not only China and India, but even Brazil could have joined the club in the interim. But let that pass.)
How rapid an increase would that require? Maybe we don’t want to grow quite as fast as the 2.5%-plus annual rates typical of the 1950s, a time when the birth rate was more than twice its current level. So let’s split the difference: from the current 1% or so, we raise our growth rate to 1.75% per year. By 2050, Canada’s population would have crested 70 million -- past Italy, Britain and France, and within hailing distance of Germany. Push growth up to 2%, and we overtake even the Germans.
At current levels of fertility, a 1.75% growth in population overall would require something on the order of 1.5% net immigration per annum, or roughly twice current levels. Where we now take in about 240,000 per year, we would instead aim for about 500,000. To put that in perspective, we took in 400,000 immigrants in 1913, when our population was barely 7 million.
But then, in those days people not only welcomed population growth, they expected it. “Growing, growing, growing,” Leacock described the young country, “with a march that will make us ten millions tomorrow, twenty millions in our children's time and a hundred millions ere the century runs out.”
Laurier’s famous “twentieth century” speech echoed the same sentiment. "For the next seventy-five years, nay the next hundred years, Canada shall be the star towards which all men who love progress and freedom shall come," Laurier told his listeners in 1904. "We are a nation of six million people already; we expect soon to be twenty-five, yes, forty millions. There are men living in this audience ... who before they die, if they live to old age, will see this country with at least sixty millions of people."
Don’t you see? We were going to be the next big thing. We were going to push aside Britain at the head of the empire, muscle past the Americans in prosperity and influence. That’s what people thought.
Does it matter that we fell so far short of their hopes? Does population matter? I think so. It isn’t that our economy would somehow collapse without immigration: a country’s standard of living is not a simple function of how many people it has in it. But I can’t help thinking that the ambition and optimism of the Laurier years, that sense of impending greatness, was connected to the arrival of so many ambitious, optimistic people on our shores.
More than that, numbers do count in this world. Bigger countries, as a rule, are more exciting, diverse, consequential places than smaller. France is more interesting than Liechtenstein. Japan has more impact on the world than Bermuda. Bigger countries not only have a greater chance, statistically, of producing those truly extraordinary individuals, an Einstein or a Bill Gates, they also attract more talented people, in the same way and for the same reason that people move to the big city from smaller centres. They allow people to live larger lives, both individually and, in the clout they wield in the world, collectively.
Perhaps if we had one-fifth the United States’ population, rather than a tenth, we would look upon our neighbours with less defensiveness, less envy disguised as disdain. Perhaps we might begin to treat them less as big brothers, and more as rivals, for indeed we would then be theirs. Perhaps the twenty-first century might belong to Canada, where the twentieth passed us by.
3/14/2007
