When Demographers Make Me Angry

Today was the first day of two days of the Ottawa Security and Defence Conference.  It is an annual event put on by the Conference of Defence Associations Institute, which is a think tank associated with a heap of veterans groups (the aforementioned defence associations).  They bring in a heap of interesting people including US generals and admirals (only one thus far this year and she canceled), experts from a variety of countries and a few random academics (not me).  It is great for networking, which is handy since I am building a network of Canadian Defence and Security folks (the CDSN!).  I also learn a lot, and, yes, sometimes, I get highly annoyed.

Today, I was highly annoyed by Darrell Bricker who was presenting a bunch of interesting information about both demographic statistics and surveys.  The funnest result: bloggers are far less respected than damn near everybody else, even lawyers and airport baggage handlers (sorry, messed up the photo, as bloggers were at the very bottom. Really!)


No, that didn't annoy me. What did was that the way he presented the core info: that women around the world are getting more education, which means delaying childbirth and having fewer children.  This then means two major punchlines for this audience: the ratio of workers to retired people is going to get quite bad, making it hard to pay for the retirement benefits of the old folks AND it will make recruiting hard because there will be fewer young people.  While I don't dispute the consequences, I had a real hard time with the whole "women getting more education is going to cause a lot of trouble" tone of the presentation for a few reasons.  First, keeping women down would be good?  No, no, no.  Second, there is a heap of social science that correlates women doing better with interstate peace, intrastate piece, and economic development (I can't seem to find any handy articles right now--a day of conferencing has undermined my google skills). Third, perhaps producing fewer people might be good when climate change bites real hard?  Fourth, the assertion that immigration is not a big deal since only 3% of the world's population lives somewhere else other than where they are born (yes, he said that) elides the reality that 3% of 7 billion or so is actually a pretty big number and the movement tends to in particular directions.

So, yeah, I should have asked a super-pesky question, like, should we stop educating women so they can birth some more babies.  But I didn't.  My bad.

On the bright side the rest of the panels were very informative and did not contain super-questionable assumptions about the place of women.  Indeed, one of the highlights was when a young woman, part of a student group, got up and asked a question that was more of a comment--that the presenters over the two days are hardly diverse--something like 21 out of 24 spots going to men.  She got a heap of applause after her statement. 

Overall, an interesting day, followed by a jaunt over to the War Museum for a reception for the Carleton Model NATO folks.  They are a bunch of undergrads from across Canada (seemed like many of them were from Western University--at least the ones I chatted with) simulating a NATO crisis this weekend.  Another smart group and much more diverse/representative--the future is mighty bright despite what one demographer suggested.

You Get What You Pay For

With much angst and anxiety already developing as the Canadian census numbers show a relative and even absolute decline in the numbers of folks residing in Quebec, we ought to consider for a second or two what these statistics might say about past public policy, not just the future power of Quebec.

The initial numbers include things like this:

In only five years, 2006-2011, Quebec experienced a net out-migration of 50,000. They weren’t all native French-speakers of course. But many were.

The question that Quebec politicians need to be asking themselves is why.  Why are more folks leaving than coming?  What makes Quebec less desirable than other parts of Canada?  As someone who is choosing to leave Quebec, I obviously have thought about this quite a bit.  For me, part of the issue is that living in Ottawa will offer different professional opportunities that Montreal cannot offer, given that one is the capital of the country and the other is not.*

*Indeed, if  Quebec were to secede, the capital would be Quebec City, not Montreal.

It has long been the case that wages are lower and taxes are higher in Quebec than in most of Canada.  Is this a product of imperialism?  Of Anglophone domination?  Or a relatively captive labor market--that folks get paid less because they are less mobile than folks in other provinces?  I am certainly moving in part because my wages will be better and my taxes will be lower.


I am also moving because I feel as if the tax dollars in Quebec are poured into giant black holes--since the quality of the roads and other public services are clearly inferior to those elsewhere.  I love Montreal, but Quebec drives me crazy--that the governance is so poor that the efforts to fix the roads linking the west part of the island to downtown will precede significant changes to the commuter train system rather than the other way around.

I worry about McGill's future, given that Quebec decides how it is funded.  Sure, Ontario is not looking that great these days with magical tuition rebates that gut the income the province needs to pay for higher education.  But that is just a bad campaign promise.  

For immigrants, the restrictions on their kids' education in the language of their choosing (with the PQ promising at times to extend such policies to CEGEP's) provides some impetus to moving onwards.

The sad thing about these demographic trends is that they happened during a time of relative provincial peace with no referenda during the time frame or in the near future.  If the rabble-rousers in the PQ have their way, we would see even more people flee Quebec due to its instability.

And, yes, part of the reason for the demographic decline is that folks in Quebec are not having babies at a high enough rate.  The irony is that Quebec has long envied Europe's social democracy and tried to imitate it (badly), but now Quebec is suffering from a challenge that Europe is encountering--declining fertility.  The answer to declining birth rates is ... immigration, but Quebec has a set of policies in place that encourage immigrants to come and then move on to the rest of Canada.  The numbers show that I am not alone in this path.

One last note--yes, Harper managed a majority without Quebec, but that is not a recipe for success in general.  Quebec will continue to have much political power in Canada for quite some time to come.  No need to push the panic button (or, at least, wait until I am firmly ensconced in Ottawa).