The publicly-funded Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) has published an opinion piece arguing Canadians who have big families should be shamed, and that the country should be importing migrants instead.
The crown corporation, which is roughly analogous to Britain’s BBC, ran the article in response to Fixer Upper stars Chip and Joanna Gaines’s announcement that they were expecting a fifth child.
Kristen Pyszczyk, a Toronto-based writer whose interests include “feminism, mental health, addiction, pop culture, and digital media”, claimed that having a child was not just a personal choice, but “a choice that affects everyone who inhabits our planet”.
She argued that the social media backlash the Gaineses have received represents “a conversation we need to have in order to challenge our uncritical acceptance of the life-fulfillment-through-procreation story.”
The main thrust of Pyszczyk’s piece is that Westerners should not be having children because they are bad for the environment.
“Population control is a fraught topic,” she admits, alluding vaguely to “nasty historical events” — but claims that it is “not an exaggeration to say that the survival of our species depends on it.”
She does not go so far as to suggest one- or two-child policies of the sort which have led to baby girls being aborted or left in the street to die in Communist China, but suggests that public vilification of the traditional family could do the trick just as well.
“Shame is a powerful tool for changing behaviour,” she notes, suggesting that girls who are “groomed for motherhood from a very early age” should be subjected to “arguments for alternatives”.
However, she appears to contradict all of her arguments about climate change and individual carbon footprints at the conclusion of her article, in which the potential impact of falling Canadian birthrates is breezily dismissed with an appeal to mass migration.
“Procreation is becoming a global public health concern, rather than a personal decision. So when people do irresponsible things like having five children, we absolutely need to be calling them out,” she concludes.
“And if the birth rate in Canada declines, so what? As [U.S. President Donald Trump] cuts off aid to not-for-profits that educate on abortion, restricts immigration and stops sending money to countries that need it, we will have a steady supply of smart and talented immigrants.”
How simply replacing Canadian children with migrants would in any way mitigate people’s impact on the environment is never explained.