I am sorry, but I don’t understand something.
Why should it be inexpensive to have children? And I am not talking $$.
Is Quebec trying to boost its population?
Why should it be inexpensive to have children? And I am not talking $$.
Is Quebec trying to boost its population?
Population increases or reduction are more complex than simply a function of cost. They are also a function of time and quality of life. People in developed societies tend to have fewer children. I'd be inclined to believe that the absolute cost of raising a child in a developed country is orders of magnitude more than in an underdeveloped one. For instance. In general I will contend that we can support caregivers for altruistic reasons and yet not necessarily increase population growth. Depends.
https://medium.com/makingofamillionaire/rich-families-are-ha...
The source in that article doesn't show a complete reversal of the old trend yet but bear in mind that I think the level of privilege of parents compared to non-parents will be systematically underestimated because we're looking at income (which will both be reduced by having children, and I'm guessing being income-oriented correlates negatively with /wanting/ children so they've probably converted their privilege into other forms). They will also on average have all the forms of privilege which makes you an attractive partner with the time to have kids: looks, background of wealth, easy job.
I think we should very clearly distinguish things that benefit primarily children=everyone, and parents=the privileged.
For example, education directly benefits children and society but time off and tax breaks for parents is more of a benefit to them, the already privileged.
Someone will probably post a reply that we "need" children for pensions but that's kind of a misconception. You can run a pension system where each generation puts money into a pot and gets it back later, the truth is just that we've chosen not to. Basically if there's ever a pot of money government will find a way to spend it, so now we have this weird system where instead of each generation's pensions being self-contained they're offset by one generation. It's a political problem and bad choices rather than some rule of nature.
The money will have to be exchanged for goods (which usually don't store that long, so need to be produced fresh) and services (which don't store at all). If each generation wants to stop working the next generation needs to produces these things.
But a lot of the expenses each generation has are for example housing, food, cars. So sure, that method doesn't hedge against the price of services or fluctuations in whatever you invest the money in, but neither does the current system. Current system is exposed to inflation, FX etc too. It does at least hedge against [working vs retirement age] population which is one which definitely varies. Basically the current system is going to screw my generation (in the UK) because we're paying off our parent's triple-locked gold-plated pensions, which we are definitely not going to receive. So we'll be the one that pays for ending the offset.
(In a small country you could use the savings to import good from abroad of course)
There's a cultural aspect. IMO Quebecers are more feminist than people from other places I've lived or visited. This probably gives better political support to the program, although it is not the economic reason for its existence.
But it's not inexpensive, we do have taxes to pay for it! As a working age person, I not only contribute a significant share of my salary to taxes that fund this program and others for parents, I also have to save up funds for when I am myself a parent. Yes the program and others in this vein make life generally easier for the more at-risk share of the population, but single moms in Quebec still have it pretty hard and if you're middle class you still have quite a bit to lose by having children (especially more than one).
This is a lower rate than Canada, but a higher rate than in European contries. For example, france took 200,000 immigrants and has a population of 65 million.
I couldn't find stats on the percent of Quebec's population that are immigrants, but I expect it's higher than the european average.