This forum loves outliers. I guess if we simply move 90% of Canada to rural areas, our fertility crisis will be solved. Easy peasy. Mao Cultural Revolution style. Just march em all out of the cities.
I actually don't even think in rural Canada most people would choose to have 4 kids on $95k per year. They may end up in that situation by accident or say events (job loss). But I seriously doubt it's that common. If you have 4 kids on $95k, you are barely keeping a roof on their heads and feeding them. You're basically raising the next generation of the impoverished at that point. Or fodder for the fentanyl crisis.
Respectfully, I think your perspective here is a bit skewed by what you look around you and see each day, and that in turn is impacted by your social and financial status.
Every CAF officer is, objectively, relatively high income compared to their Canadian age cohort. So that this doesn’t come across as a ‘me vs you’ thing I’ll put myself in there too; as a cop in my late 30s I’m making comparable income, and my wife’s not far behind me. We built a house early and started having kids late.
I’ve found, and maybe you have too, that as my income has grown, lifestyle has too, kinda subtly but keeping pace. I have increased how much I set aside monthly for my own investments and lying down the mortgage, but otherwise despite an objectively high income, I’m not sitting on some big windfall each payday. Driving to work, I’m not sharing a bus with obviously large families. The school bus stop outside my house is families economically like mine. I do my groceries at a big suburban store with a lot full of SUVs, not a cramped grocery store in Vanier or Overbrook where mom does groceries with three or, yes, four kids in tow. So for me it’s hard to imagine living off 40% of my family income and getting by.
Going back a few years, when I was still young and keen and riding a cruiser to calls, work by its nature took me to where people and their problems are, and I was seeing the families. And yeah - four kids might not be common, but I did see it. Or even five. Lots of families with three. And they sure as hell weren’t making $95k or even close to it. What they did make was probably from working multiple jobs.
So there are a lot of people doing it, you and I just don’t see them much because our paths tend not to cross in settings where family size is obvious. They’ve grown up with that being a norm.
Anecdotally/observationally? I think a lot are generationally recent immigrant families. They haven’t grown up in a norm of one bedroom per kid or all the other luxuries we have. Food is scratch cooked. The family car is a best up Toyota Sienna that just refused to die. They don’t see dad much because of work. But they get by. And sure as hell for them that CCB kicks in and makes a difference.
It would interesting to see Canadian fertility data that drills down beyond just live births per woman, but also gave granular stats for things like ethnicity, whether they’re immigrants or first generation, and also the mean age at first, second, and subsequent births. I suspect even our domestic birth rate is boosted by immigration.
