OTTAWA, ON. (NEWS 1130) – It seems more and more Canadians are living alone. Statistics Canada has released its latest census data and it shows a huge shift in how people are living day-to-day.
The data shows for the first time in our country’s history one-person households are the most common at 28 per cent.
Couples with children came in at 26 per cent and there are several reasons for the increased single lifestyle. The agency says there are more empty nesters, divorce rates are rising, and more people live longer so the number of widows is also on the rise.
Canada is skewing older, with fewer children and less affinity for marriage — forcing legislators to adjust and adapt their policies and programs to fit a rapidly evolving reality.
“These dynamics are really important to understand because of the implications for our social and economic development are significant,” says Nora Spinks, CEO of the Vanier Institute of the Family. “The family, in all of its complexity and all of its diversity, is the most adaptive, adaptable and adapting institution in our society. It takes public policy some lag time to catch up.”
The country’s 35.15 million people are also getting older; there are now more seniors than children under the age of 14. Immigration contributed two-thirds of the country’s population growth between 2011 and 2016, and that diversity has also added complexity to the Canadian family portrait.
Childless couples grew in number at a faster rate over the last five years than couples with at least one child, leaving the latter group at 51.1 per cent of the population, the lowest level ever recorded.
“The big shift has been a shift away from families with children to empty nest couples or younger people deciding not to have children,” explains Doug Norris, chief demographer at Environics Analytics. “They’re not living in the traditional ‘Leave it to Beaver’ family.”
Sometimes, it’s out of necessity, said Spinks. Other times, it’s choice. The numbers also show an increase in children who won’t move out of their parents’ house. One-in-three adults between the ages of 20 and 34 still live with mom and dad.
“They’re saying, ‘Hey, this is working really well, we’ve worked out the kinks, we’ve got the space, we’ve got the two-car garage, we’ve got the satellite dish, we’ve got it all sorted out, so why mess with it?'” says Spinks. “Others are circumstantial — can’t afford to move out, Grandma is providing child care or the teenager is providing grandparent care, or, ‘Our finances are so intertwined that it’s hard to disentangle, so let’s just keep the status quo.'”
There is also a 60 per cent boost to the number of identified same sex couples over the last decade.
On top of all this, we are becoming more linguistically diverse. The rate of English-French bilingualism is at its highest point ever, and since 2011 there has been a big increase in the number of people whose mother tongue is neither official language.