It’s my favourite time of the year. No, not autumn, I don’t care about the leaves changing colours on the trees. If I wanted to watch something slowly turn orange and wither away, I’d tune into one of those Donald Trump rallies. Zing.
My favourite time of the year is the annual Stats Can release of the most popular baby names, and once again, the list released this week did not disappoint, by which I mean, it’s once again completely terrible.
The boys’ side is riddled with the usual tripe. Noah? Ugh, too biblical. Liam? Nope, too Oasis. Thomas, Benjamin, Theodore? Gross, too Declaration of Independence. The only good news on the boy side was the fact that James still came in at a respectable #11 on the list of most popular names. The classics stay classics for a reason.
The girls’ side was just as awful. Olivia topped the list for a staggering eighth year in a row, which is just bad news for any youth soccer coach about five years from now, when they’ve got nine different Olivias on the roster; yelling from the sideline, “pass to Olivia, no not that one, the other one, no, the other-other one.”
All the usual suspects remain on the girl list: (Emma, Charlotte, Ellie, Lily) which displays a stunning lack of creativity, especially when you realize that the same name is ostensibly on the top 20 list three different times (Sophia at #5, Sofia at #9, and Sophie at #18) which again, pity the soccer coach trying to run drills while shouting at seven different Sophies.
While reading and laughing at the baby names on the list provides a satisfying sense of catty snickering, the more interesting part is looking at the baby numbers.
According to Stats Can, last year Canada recorded its lowest-ever birth rate. At just 1.26 babies born per woman, it was the lowest birth rate since all the way back to one year earlier, which was the second lowest birth rate in history. Discounting the one-year blip in 2021 (when everyone was giving birth to their pandemic lockdown babies) birth rates in Canada have been in a steady decline since 2016. We now have one of the lowest birth rates on the planet.
We now have one of the lowest birth rates on the planet
Here in Niagara, the situation is even more dire. The most recent census data (2022) showed only 3,932 babies were born in Niagara Region, which means we are being out-birthed by quite a few places including Halifax, Regina, and even Kingston, and that place sucks.
Looking over the list, it doesn’t take a rocket surgeon to figure out what exactly separates Canadian cities with higher birth rates from those with lower ones: affordability.
You don’t have to just take my word for it though. Dr. Renée Hall, a clinical associate professor at the University of B.C. and a co-medical director at Willow Reproductive Centre, told CBC News that, yes, the affordability crisis is crushing the birth rate. Places like Niagara, where housing costs are skyrocketing, are experiencing much more depressed birth rates than places on the east coast, where buying a house is not a fairytale dream for young families.
Babies are very expensive. They were expensive before inflation and housing went crazy but now that a couple strawberries cost $9, babies are prohibitively expensive.
Do you know how many strawberries a toddler can eat? I do, because I have one, and sometimes I watch her eat a whole container of strawberries at breakfast and all I can think about is that I gotta go spend another $9 before she realizes we’re outta strawberries or I’m gonna be in trouble.
The cost of living and raising a baby is so high that it’s also forcing the women who do actually decide to have a baby to do so later and later in their life, which brings its own complications. The premature birth rate hit a 50-year high last year, which experts are chalking up to the fact that premature births are increasingly more likely as women get older. Back in 1993, only 10 per cent of babies were born to women over 35, but today that number has nearly tripled to 27 per cent.
Still, I suppose it could be worse. You could be one of the six unlucky boys who, according to Stats Can, were given the legal name of Zeus by their parents last year. I question the parenting skills of someone who would name their child after a man who slept with his own sister, his grandmother, his brother’s wife, and then condemned his friend to be eaten alive by a giant eagle.
James Culic once coached a girls soccer team that had three Ashleys and two Hannahs. Find out how to yell at him at the bottom of this page, or try to guess which Gilmore Girls character he named his daughter after and send it as a letter to the editor.
