It will no doubt fascinate future historians when they come to examine us. They'll see how the whole western world in our generation walked serenely into a social calamity of unprecedented dimensions, unheeding, unthinking and uncaring.
We can't say we weren't warned. In news story after news story, we're warned every day. But we ignore the warnings because there's nothing we can do about them without "setting the clock back."
Of course, that's what you do with clocks that run too fast. Societies that change too fast are much tougher to set right..
What brought this on, you ask? It could be any one of a number of things, such as:
- The fact that we do not know how to educate boys and are consequently producing a generation of social dropouts who join gangs and become very unpleasant.
- The fact we have a social security net that we cannot possibly keep paying for.
- The fact that we are rapidly losing the ability to sustain marriages, to raise obstreperous children without drugging them into vegetables, to go without luxuries, and to stay out of debt.
We are repeatedly being warned about all of these perils and do little if anything about them.
Last week, however, we received a jim-dandy.
The Canadian birth rate, we were told, is now at its lowest in history. It has sunk to 10.5 births per thousand population, against 14.3 in 1991, and 28.5 in 1954.
Alberta with 13.0 has the highest rate in the country. Newfoundland, where thousands of young people have been driven out because they couldn't find work, has the lowest at 9.1
The situation is in fact worse than these statistics make it appear. I remember some 15 years ago interviewing a population statistician at the University of Alberta where they assess populations on the average number of children per woman of child-bearing age.
This professor told me that to sustain zero population growth that number must stand at 2.1 - i.e., because males do not bear any children and some female children will die before they reach child-bearing age themselves.
During the baby boom of the '50s, the Canadian figure stood at something over 4.0. When I did the interview, it stood at about 1.8. "If it ever gets below 1.7, said the professor, "we will have a serious problem." It now stands at 1.5.
I suggested to him that the deficiency could perhaps be relieved by immigration. "Perhaps be relieved!" he said. "It must be relieved." He explained that if our population ever began a serious decline, it would certainly bring on an economic disaster. "We have no choice," he said. "We must maintain an open-door policy, and that's why we're doing it."
But the real problem, he said, is this: How can we sustain a culture, and cultural values, if the inheritors of that culture are increasingly swamped by peoples, many of whom have very different ideas on how a society should run? It's impossible.
"Luckily for our future economic and fiscal well-being," says our national guru, the Globe and Mail, "Canada is well-positioned to counter the declining population trend by continuing to encourage the immigration of talented people to this country from overcrowded parts of the world where too many of the young and ambitious are chasing too few opportunities."
Maybe somebody should tell them:
1. We don't have this open-door policy because we're "lucky," nor because of our ultra-liberal views. We have it because we must.
2. The higher the proportion of New Canadians to Old Canadians, the more difficult it becomes to sustain those liberal values so cherished by the Globe and Mail.
3. The Toronto Police Department is having an increasingly difficult time maintaining law and order in the immigrant ghettoes because too many of these "talented people" are turning out to have the wrong kind of talents.
4. Among those who do have desirable talents -- and they are far from a few -- too many are using Canada as a temporary stepping stone into the U.S., which is where they wanted to go to begin with.
So the bottom line is this: Unless Canadian-born women start having more kids and sooner, in a very few years this country won't be recognizable.
That's this week's bad news.
___________________________
There you go again....
(graphic courtesy of MeekOneGOP from over on this thread
"Did I forget to post the full article again? D'OH!!"
FReegards,
ConservativeStLouisGuy