Canada's terrible, horrible, no good, very bad decade. The numbers prove it

Calgary Herald

24-04-2025

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The recruitment crisis is so acute that up to half of the ships, aircraft and vehicles in Canadian military fleets cannot be used because there is no one around to fix them. As one example, as of last count, only 45.7 per cent of the Royal Canadian Navy fleet was considered 'serviceable to meet training and readiness requirements in support of concurrent operations.'
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Immigration intake has been wildly high
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When the Liberals took power, the population of Canada was about 35.8 million. As of this writing, it's 41.6 million. That's 5.8 million new people over the course of 10 years, or 580,000 new Canadians per year.
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For context, the population of all four Atlantic provinces is just 2.6 million. The population of Alberta is five million. The population of the entire Halifax metropolitan area is 530,000, not even a year's worth of new immigrants.
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Canada has been a high-immigration country throughout its history, but the rate of sustained population growth seen under the Liberals is unlike anything witnessed in the last 100 years.
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It also helps to explain why shortages of everything from housing to doctors have become so acute, so quickly. In that same 10-year period, the number of housing starts recorded by the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation was just 2.3 million, with more than half of that being taken up by apartment units.
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Going all the way back to the 19 th century, Canada has typically had a population that is about 10 per cent of the United States' — a ratio that has stayed constant, given that both countries have maintained similar growth rates.
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The birthrate has cratered
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Canada now has one of the lowest birthrates on the planet. As of 2023, it had dropped to 1.26 children per woman, a rate matched only by four other 'lowest low' countries: South Korea, Spain, Italy and Japan.
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When the Liberals came to power in 2015, the birthrate was unsustainably low at 1.6 children per woman, but not catastrophically so.
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Life expectancy has gone down
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These last figures may be the most stark — we are dying sooner.
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When the Liberals took power, Canadian life expectancy at birth was 81.9 years. As of last count, in 2023, it was 81.5
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That's not a huge decline, but it's basically the first time anything like this has happened. For at least the last 100 years, Canadian lifespans have been getting longer with each passing calendar year (except for the COVID pandemic years).
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As to why the trend has ground to a halt during the last 10 years, one explanation is that tens of thousands of Canadians are dying from drug overdoses.
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