Jack Knox:
JACK KNOX / TIMES COLONIST
AUGUST 3, 2017 06:00 AM
Want another reason for the housing crisis? It’s simple math: We need more homes because more of us are living alone. In fact, single-occupant households (28 per cent of the total) across Canada now outnumber those with parents and children (26.5). Photograph By BRUCE STOTESBURY, Times Colonist
Want another reason for the housing crisis? It’s simple math: We need more homes because more of us are living alone.Related
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In fact, single-occupant households (28 per cent of the total) across Canada now outnumber those with parents and children (26.5).
The trend is even more pronounced in the capital region, where one-third of our dwellings have just one resident.
It was Number Nerds heaven Wednesday, Statistics Canada releasing a gold mine of information — including the nugget about single-occupant homes — gleaned from the 2016 census.
The focus was on families, households, marital status and language. The figures revealed not just demographic shifts within Canada, but ways in which Greater Victoria differs from the rest of the country.
Among the findings:
• The decline in traditional parents-and-kids households (that 26.5 per cent figure was down from 31.5 in 2001) is even more pronounced in the capital region, where such households make up just 22 per cent of the total.
• Across Canada, 51 per cent of couples have at least one child at home. Not the capital region. We have far more couples in households without kids (53,540) than with (37,410). Maybe that’s because we have a lot of Baby Boomer empty-nesters, or maybe it’s because our young people can’t afford to have children.
• Remember dancing the gotta-pee polka while fighting your siblings for bathroom access? No more. Fewer than 6,000 capital region households include three or more children.
• Just under 35 per cent of Canadians ages 20 to 34 are living with mom and/or dad, up from 30.6 per cent in 2001. (No, they’re not thrilled about it, either.) The percentage of young people with families of their own has dropped to 42 per cent from 49.
• Compared to Canada as a whole, where a new high of 19.4 per cent reported using more than one language at home, the capital region, where just 9.6 per cent of us did so, is overwhelmingly unilingual. (Oh, Victoria, where nobody blinks at a Yorkshire accent, yet French is treated as foreign.)
When asked what language they most often speak at home, 346,395 in the capital region replied “English.” Fewer than 22,000 listed something else.
Here are the most common at-home languages among the latter group:
More than 7,340 listed a Chinese language, including 4,035 who put down Mandarin and 2,860 who said Cantonese.
Of the 2,610 who listed an Indian language, 2,075 said Punjabi.
Next came French, 1,915; Tagalog (or Filipino, the fastest-growing language in Canada) 1,410; Spanish 1,150; Korean 1,030; Arabic 655; and German, 580.
• Just 35 people in the capital region speak an Indigenous language as their first language at home.
Note, however, that the number who speak an Indigenous language regularly — 395 — is larger than the 255 who list one as their mother tongue.
That reflects a national trend in which an increasing number of Indigenous people are learning an Aboriginal language as a second language.
• Across Canada, French-English bilingualism is at an all-time high.
• The number of multi-generation households — that is, at least three generations under one roof — has jumped by more than a third, with more than two million people living that way.
• Traditional marriage still leads but common-law relationships account for 21.3 per cent of all unions (19.5 in Victoria), up from 6.3 in 1981.
And on and on the numbers go: The 73,000 same-sex couples in 2016 represented a 61 per cent increase in a decade. One in five children live in a single-parent home. The percentage of female seniors living alone dropped from to 33 per cent from 38.3 in 2001, an indication that men are closing the longevity gap.
The numbers can make eyes glaze over, but they matter. They show developers whether to build condos or mansions, tell rec centres whether to program kindergym or pickle ball. They show a people who are aging, less likely to have children, less likely to marry — and offer a glimpse of the Canada to come.
© Copyright Times Colonist
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