Oh baby, what a year in Quebec

BY MARC LALONDE

marc.lalonde@transcontinental.ca

Call it Baby Boom 2006.

Four decades after the real baby boom in Quebec, the province reported a mini-boom after Quebec births climbed for the third straight year, provincial statistics show, and a provincial minister said the rise could be in part to Quebec’s new parental-leave program, launched last year.

“It’s too early for the government to say whether the rise in births is directly related to the (parental-leave) program, but it allows us to be optimistic,” Quebec Employment and Social Solidarity Minister Michelle Courchesne stated.

The number of Quebec births jumped to 82,500 in 2006, up from 76,520 in 2005 — an eight-per-cent increase from the year before and the highest such rise since 1909.

In 2004, Quebec mothers had 74,200 births.

The birth rate, defined as the number of children women between 15 and 49 years old can be expected to have in their lifetime, climbed to 1.6 — ahead of the Canadian average — and is slightly ahead of the average of 1.5 the province settled into in the ‘80s.

The highest-ever birth rate in Quebec was 4.0, last reached at the height of the last ‘baby boom,’ in the 1960s.

At the Lakeshore General Hospital, spokesman Louis-Pascal Cyr reported 1,128 births in 2006, down from 1,156 births in 2005.

“That was the number in 2006, including the first baby in Canada in 2006,” he told The Chronicle last week.

Pointe Claire resident Nancy Gizas, who gave birth to daughter Alexandra in the middle of last year, said Quebec’s parental-leave plan was a big motivation for her and her husband.

“The Quebec plan was definitely a large part of it, for sure,” she said, adding she has been working a day a week in transition for her full-time return in “June or July.”

The baby boom is no surprise for Gizas, who said a “good number,” of peer-group members are having new babies.

“Everywhere you go, everywhere you look, people are having babies. I go to the mall, and I see all the new moms with their new babies. It’s definitely a trend,” she said.

“All the people in my circle of friends seem to be having them,” she added.

Is there another baby on the horizon for Gizas and her husband?

“Maybe, after I’ve gone back to work for a year or so. I think I’d like to have another one,” she said.