On May 25, Pope Leo XIV addressed members of the European Parliament’s Intergroup on Demography at the Vatican with a warning that they risk becoming “the old continent”—not because of its ancient history, but because of its advancing age. Declining birthrates and population aging, according to the Holy Father, are “an urgent challenge with practical implications for millions of people and their families.”
The share of babies born to migrant parents reached 40pc for the first time last year, new figures show.
Latest Office for National Statistics figures showed the number of newborns with at least one parent born abroad had risen from 39.5pc in 2024 to a record high of 40.2pc last year. It was 30.1pc in 2008.
That equates to more than 235,000 of the 585,396 births last year.
Montreal’s population is on the decline due to lower immigration and the ever-aging population, according to a recent report by the Observatoire Grand Montréal.
Its projections indicate the trend could prevent the city from “experiencing population growth in the coming years.”
This contradicts patterns in other large cities, like Toronto and Vancouver, which are expected to see their populations increase by 2050.
Lucky Montreal!
Canada’s birth rate is now among the lowest in the world, reflecting not only economic strain but a deeper shift in how young people think about family, work and the future. More Canadians are choosing not to have children or to have fewer than they once expected.
This conversation asks whether the decision to have fewer children is a necessary adaptation to an uncertain world or a choice with long-term consequences.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — The majority of Canadian and American women under age 40 do not yet have children, signalling a broad shift in when and whether people are choosing to have families.
Both countries now face a deepening fertility crisis. For Canada, it’s stark, with the country hitting a record-low fertility rate of 1.25 children per woman in 2024, putting it on the ultra-low fertility list — below 1.30 — alongside Japan, Singapore and Spain.
It is well known that socialism is an ideology that ignores the individual and focuses all its attention on the collective. Marx, the preeminent socialist economic theoretician, divided individuals into classes based on the function they have in producing economic value; Lenin, Mao, and others have iterated their own versions of Marxist class theory.
Wherever socialists have carried their ideology to its completion, the result has been the same in terms of the people: in Mao’s China and Stalin’s Soviet, tens of millions of people were starved to death or otherwise killed by the regime; in Pol Pot’s Cambodia, one-quarter of the country’s 8 million people were annihilated in the name of the state’s ideology.
A filmmaker and data analyst warned that the falling birth rate crisis across the globe couldn’t be “any worse.”
Stephen Shaw, who interviewed people around the world to investigate plummeting birthrates for his documentary Birthgap, recently told podcaster Brendan O’Neill that population collapse is a uniquely dangerous problem. This is because unlike the dangers of, say, nuclear proliferation and environmental issues, there are no known solutions to declining birth rates, according to Shaw.
Whenever we speak on our podcast about the falling fertility rate, inevitably we hear from viewers saying that the cause is simple: people are choosing to have fewer kids. They point out that countries all over the world are dealing with this collapse, and there is no solution. It’s a nice, tidy explanation that takes away the need for action. If people are choosing fewer kids, that must be their preference, and we can’t do anything about it.
We don’t think it’s that simple.
As Eric Lombardi recently argued, young Canadians are living through what he called a “milestone recession,” as traditional markers of adulthood, such as stable careers, homeownership, and family formation, are delayed—if ever reached at all.
Nearly half of the most productive Canadians have fled to America.
While third world migrants make up 98% of Canada's own population growth.
Population replacement at warp speed. pic.twitter.com/auIO5GVW1M
— Peter St Onge, Ph.D. (@profstonge) April 14, 2026
Environmentalists used to warn that there are ‘too many people on the planet’. In The Population Bomb (1968), the late Paul Ehrlich warned that ‘overpopulation’ would lead to mass starvation by the 1970s, to US life expectancy plummeting to just 42 by the 1980s, and by the year 2000, England would cease to exist. We now know that the world faces the precise opposite challenge – of unprecedented demographic collapse in the face of falling birth rates.
There has been a growing shift in the kind of clients Dr. Kim Garbedian, a reproductive endocrinologist, has been seeing at Pollin Fertility clinic in Toronto recently: younger couples in their twenties, looking to make sure their reproductive health allows them to have children later in life.
“Fertility awareness has increased a lot. We’re specifically seeing young women coming in their twenties and early thirties, who know they want to have children and desire to have them but they’re not really right there, right now,” said Dr. Garbedian in an interview with CTV News Saturday.
“But they’re coming in, whether it’s just testing or freezing their eggs.”
Newly released Statistics Canada data suggests that in 2024, over half of Canadians without biological children “planned to have children” (58 per cent), a higher figure than in 2021 (52 per cent.)
The biggest jump in these numbers was recorded among Canadians aged 15 to 24.
Who was surveyed is a mystery.
Nestled below street-level and hidden behind a dense wall of emerald shrubbery, Michelangelo Playground feels like a small miracle. Standing in the San Francisco park on a good day, when the weather is just right, you can see wild parrots visit from Telegraph Hill and lemons that hang like jewels from trees – even hear the sound of sea lions barking from down by the marina.
It’s quarter past 11 on a Sunday morning, and the park is eerily empty. It’s that time of the weekend when kids have been cooped up for too long, and parents are desperate to get them outside, to do something, anything. Yet, all four of the slides on this morning sit unused. The tire swing hangs perfectly still. There are no children shouting or shrieking or singing nonsense, no thumping of a basketball against the lifeless court. There’s only silence.
It’s a beautiful day in a beautiful playground. But where are all the children?
As we know in Canada importing the 3rd World is not a solution to demographic decline just a worse problem.
Maxime Bernier, the leader of the People’s Party of Canada (PPC), said to combat low fertility rates, Canada must begin to promote “motherhood” from within the population and stop allowing so many immigrants into the nation unchecked.
“We must fix the conditions that prevent Canadians from having children,” wrote Bernier in a recent X post.
“We must promote motherhood.”
Every major city across Canada has seen a drop in fertility rates over the past five years – with many cities falling to record new lows – according to data obtained by The Globe and Mail.
While Canada’s fertility rate has been declining for more than six decades, it’s fallen especially steeply over the past decade, earning Canada entry in 2023 into the club of “lowest-low” fertility countries, alongside South Korea, Italy and Japan. The Globe and Mail requested data from Statistics Canada on fertility rates for major urban areas between 2020 to 2024, in order to understand how this has played out in our largest cities.
“Church in west London engulfed in flames. Another fire that broke out near a church in Northamptonshire is a suspected arson attack.”
Two English churches set on fire at night within 24 hours must be a coincidence.
As it must be a coincidence that, during the same hours, a church in Germany was also set ablaze.
