Canadian Fertility Transitions: Quebec and Ontario at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

Abstract

This article uses nominal data from the Canadian Families Project national sample to analyze and compare fertility in Canada’s two largest provinces at the turn of the twentieth century. The authors argue that material and cultural factors must be considered if similarities and differences in reproductive behavior between Quebec and Ontario are to be understood. They use regression models to identify the independent influence of factors such as religion, language, occupation, class, urban versus rural residence, and literacy on marital child-woman ratios in the two provinces. Fertility levels in Quebec were about 50 percent higher than those in Ontario, where a very conspicuous downward trend had begun by the 1870s. But Quebec fertility in this period was not as monolithically high as some authors—and much of the province’s popular culture—would suggest. Nor did Quebec fail entirely to “turn the contraceptive corner” in the decades after 1871.