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It’s a curiosity because the birth rate in Canada is not going up — it’s actually declined slightly to 1.61 children per woman of childbearing years in 2011 from 1.68 in 2008.

These are baby boomers’ babies making babies, she said — people born from 1971 to 1991 becoming parents. The trend has moved toward people having their firstborns later in life, she said, but 23-year-olds are having babies too, making the cohort especially large. The difference from the post-war boom, she said, is people aren’t having large families.

“What’s happening is a bunch of them are having births within a 20-year period so that’s why there are more babies. It’s the same family size but more of them are having babies at the same time,” she said. Immigration and intra-migration patterns, such as moving from province to province to find work, play a huge role too.

Maybe governments rely too much on birth-rate numbers to make policy decisions, Prof. McDaniel said. They could fret less about “whether the labour force is going to shrink in the future,” she said, because it’s not going to happen. There will be a convergence of those having children early in their childbearing years and late in them too — those on the earlier side will grow up and enter the labour force as most of the boomers retire.

“Demography’s always much more complicated than birth rates and death,” she said. “No one’s paying attention to the younger side.”

When one thinks about the aging population in Canada, a look east to the Maritimes is inevitable. But Claire LaBelle has seen two trends lately at the Greater Moncton Family Resource Centre she now runs and has worked at for 17 years: More and more families moving to bilingual Moncton to find work, and the age gap between younger parents and those in their 30s getting wider. Saint John has also seen a boost in its 0-4 set.