National Affairs Rory Leishman

Day by day, it is becoming more evident that legalized abortion in Canada threatens both our future economic prosperity and national security. In an attempt to cover up these looming perils to our national well-being, advocates of abortion on demand have taken to obscuring the relevant statistics on abortion rates. Statistics Canada no longer publishes complete, reliable information on the annual number of babies killed by abortion in Canada (British Columbia, for example, does not report any numbers).

By extrapolating from provincial data that still remains publicly available, Campaign Life Coalition estimates that almost 120,000 abortions are committed annually in Canada. By any reckoning, that is an appalling number. According to Statistics Canada, there were only 367,864 live births in all of Canada in 2007. In that same year, Canada’s total fertility rate –the average number of births to a woman of child-bearing age –was just 1.66. That’s far below the replacement level of 2.1.

If 100,000 of the aborted Canadian babies in 2007 had been born alive, Canada would have had a total fertility rate of more than 2.1. Canada’s ever worsening crisis of depopulation would have disappeared.

As it is, the collapse of Canadian birth rates over the past 40 years has resulted in rapid growing and ever worsening aging of the Canadian population. Many Canadians fondly hope that immigration will eventually solve the problem. But that, plainly, is a delusion.

Canada already has one of the highest rates of immigration per population in the industrialized world, but still does not take in nearly enough young immigrants to offset the impact of low fertility on population aging. Robin Banerjee and William Robson of the C. D. Howe Institute estimate that if current trends persist, there could be scarcely two Canadians of working age for every elderly Canadian within the next 50 years, down from a ratio of close to seven to one in the 1970s.

On this basis, Canada’s medicare and old-age security systems are unsustainable. For the proportionally ever smaller cohort of younger Canadians, the rapidly increasing costs of these public services will be simply unaffordable.

Meanwhile, working Canadians will also have to bear most of the huge annual costs of integrating new immigrants to Canada – a challenge that is especially difficult in the case of the tens of thousands of Muslims who emigrate to Canada every year. In a recent report, Projections of the Diversity of the Canadian Population, Statistics Canada projects that by 2031, Canada will have anywhere from 2.5 to 3.3 million Muslims, up from 884,000 in 2006. Within Toronto alone, the projected Muslim population ranges from 1.1 to 1.5 million in 2031, up from 393,000 in 2006.

Of course, the majority of Canadian Muslims are peaceful. It is the not insignificant minority of violent jihadists who are the prime cause for concern. In 2007, the Environics Research Group found that 10 per cent of a representative national sample of Canadian Muslims admitted to believing that a cell of Islamist terrorists in Toronto had been at least somewhat justified in planning to set off three huge bombs that would have resulted in the worst, mass slaughter of civilians in Canadian history.

Can Canada’s immigration officials be counted upon to screen out the Islamist radicals who apply to immigrate to Canada? Alas, no. James Bissett, former executive director of the Canadian Immigration Service, explains that Canada takes in so many Muslim immigrants every year that our overwhelmed visa officers can interview no more than a small minority. He says, “we have not the slightest idea if the Muslim we are inviting into our country is an extremist or a moderate or something in between.”

Such are the security and economic threats brought on by the collapse in Canadian fertility rates. While legalized abortion is not the only, it is surely a prime, cause of these impending national disasters.

What, one wonders, will it finally take to awaken the majority of our fellow Canadians to the obvious truth that curtailing abortion is essential not just to recovering our moral health as a nation, but also to the very survival of Canada as a free, prosperous and democratic country?