Canada, and so many nations worldwide, are overtly neglecting God’s call to “be fruitful and multiply" (Genesis 1:28).

More than 110 of the 204 countries and territories identified by the Global Burden of Disease (GBD) have a total fertility rate (TFR) below the population replacement level of 2.1 births per woman.

Last year Canada’s 1.26 TFR led the United Nations to declare it as a “lowest-low” fertility country, a designation reserved for nations that slip beneath the 1.3 threshold. If this trend goes unchecked, Canada is poised to experience a diminished working-age populace, serious pressures on the social welfare system from an aging population and significant barriers to economic growth and societal improvement.

More urgent mainstream discourse about the issue is appreciated by experts in this realm. Ross McKitrick, a senior fellow with the Macdonald-Laurier Institute (MLI), has gone even further.

The professor of economics at the University of Guelph unveiled a paper this month called Canada at a Crossroads – Volume 2: Baby Steps, How to reverse Canada’s falling fertility rates. Various experts associated with the MLI are authoring papers for this Canada at a Crossroads series, which aims to offer sweeping, course-correcting solutions for some of this nation’s most dire issues.

McKitrick lamented to The Catholic Register how “there is a real lack of understanding at this point about this issue” as for many years “most of the academic literature on fertility was focused on how to convince people to not have children, especially in low-income countries.”

Finding a blueprint to reverse the slide is a tricky proposition. McKitrick’s paper seeks to identify some of the cost-of-living barriers to dismantle, thus potentially paving the way for a couple to have two kids instead of one, three instead of two, etc.

His action plan to boost fertility includes reducing housing and transport expenses and enacting “marginal income tax rates, improving per-child benefits and allowing more income-sharing,” improving income replacement schemes under Employment Insurance and boosting the availability of private (including home-based) child-care services. Additionally, he declared Canada needs a national public awareness campaign that shifts attitudes about parenthood.

Peter Jon Mitchell, the family program director for the Cardus Institute, said he “resonates" with nearly all of McKitrick’s recommendations. He said “families operate as an economic unit, and we should have a tax system that recognizes that” and endorsed the need to shift attitudes about parenthood he too has uncovered in his research.

“When we asked women under 30 who said they wanted to have more children but didn’t think they would in the next two years, a lot of their answers are on things like, ‘I want to grow as a person,' ‘I believe kids require intense care' or ‘I’d like to focus on my career for now,’ ” said Mitchell. “Some of the messaging that maybe we need to be giving is maybe less on giving parents that to-do list and maybe a more focused on like message of empowerment and confidence.

“I think of myself before having kids. It was really hard for me not to describe to my pre-child self what is it like to be a parent. It's not actually that limiting. It actually opens up a whole new world.”

McKitrick articulated in his paper that there is also “a great need at present to understand what men perceive to be the main barriers to marriage and family formation.” He alluded to research that suggests women view “lack of a suitable partner more highly as a deterrent to having a child than child-care costs, housing costs, the state of the economy, hours of work and the lack of paid leave.”

One of the measures McKitrick advises to shift social norms is for the country’s leaders to champion parenthood with awards for women who have three or more children. He also suggested the federal government advocate for content producers to make more programs portraying marriage and parenthood in a more positive light.

Examining McKitrick’s economic recommendations more closely, two that stand out are a call for partial income splitting for families with one or two children that would be upgraded to full income splitting for families with four or more children. He also urges “increasing the tax credit for dependents and applying an increasing scale so that it is higher per child for families with three or more children.”

McKitrick rejects any premise that all the population replacement required in Canada can be solved with immigration.

“When people immigrate to Canada from countries with high birth rates, they get here and then they stop having children,” said McKittrick. “So, this is a domestic problem that ultimately we can't fix the barriers to people having children in Canada by bringing in more people who will also run up against those same barriers.”

He also argued against the mass immigration strategy by citing research published in the Annual Review of Sociology and the Annual Review of Political Science that suggests there is a considerable “breakdown in the social trust” when you suddenly change the demographics of a neighbourhood, community and country too quickly.

“I'm aware of people, including in the economics profession, that really just see Canada as a kind of a hostel for international workers and it doesn't matter where they come from,” said McKitrick. “Just bring them in, send them into the factories and that's all I need to worry about. But if you have a larger vision of what it means to have a society, you want this to be a place where people feel able to settle, form families and have children.”

Read McKitrick’s study online.