Woke up this morning with a small hand tugging at my pyjamas.
“It’s Mother’s Day,” the child said. “What shall we make her for breakfast? Bacon and eggs? No, she doesn’t eat bacon. How about pancakes?”
I opened one bleary eye, saw a boy of about eight: “Who are you?”
“I’m Bob, your temporary foreign child,” the boy replied.
“Pardon?”
“You are the Tremblays, are you not?” he asked, frowning at a clipboard. “Don’t tell me I came to the wrong house. Gosh, that’s embarrassing. Sorry, I’m new to the country.”
“Where are your parents?” I demanded.
“The Tremblays are my new parents,” he beamed. “At least, they are for the next two years. Then — poof — I get shipped back to my dusty village when Canada is done with me.”
“So you’re an immigrant?”
“Oh no, immigrants get to stay. I’m just here under the Temporary Foreign Child Program, filling a critical need when no qualified Canadian citizen or permanent resident is available.”
“Really?”
“Canada’s Economic Action Plan, working for you,” he replied hastily. It sounded memorized.
I had to admit, there was a certain logic to this temporary-child notion, though. Canada has had a shortage of children for years, much more pronounced than any lack of skilled workers.
They say a country needs a fertility rate — the average number of children per woman — of 2.1 to maintain a stable population without bolstering it through immigration. Canada hasn’t hit that level since 1971. For the past four decades, we have been burying more than we birth, a trend that gives nervous economists kittens (though not babies).
Canada’s fertility rate peaked at 3.94 in 1959, bottomed out at 1.51 in 2002, inched up slightly after that, but then began nosing down again in 2008.
As of 2011, it was languishing around 1.61, with B.C.’s rate of 1.42 trailing every other province and territory in Canada. That’s lower than Roberto Luongo’s goals-against average.
Evidence of our near-childless society is everywhere. The demographic teeter-totter has tilted in favour of the grey-haired: the 2011 census showed seniors now outnumber minors in the capital region. The Greater Victoria School District has seen enrolment fall from a high of 32,000 around 1970 to 18,700 today, even as the overall population has grown.
The shift is particularly evident up-Island, magnified over the last generation by the collapse of the resource industries. When the mills closed and the fisheries dried up, families moved out, their homes often snapped up by empty-nest retirees and seasonal residents.
Up in Tahsis, just 36 students roam a school built for 400. In Woss, seven kids echo around one that used to have 200. Places like Echo Bay, Youbou, Union Bay and Quatsino are hollowed out, no school at all.
The remaining small-town kids lose out. Play dates require three days of travel. School bands become quartets. Sports groups fall short of players. For a while, Gold River’s high school had to drop its basketball team, go with three-on-three tourneys instead, though the program has since rebounded (as it were).
So, yes, you can see the attraction of bringing in temporary foreign children on short-term contracts to fill the holes left by the dearth of native-born youngsters.
“We have many advantages,” Bob said, as though reading my mind.
“We can fill out the bench on the hockey teams, play the tuba (nobody wants to play the tuba) in music class, sell Girl Guide cookies, give adults an excuse to buy fireworks on Halloween.
You know all those Gulf Islanders who complain they have been cut off from their grandchildren by high ferry fares? Bob would be happy to go from house to house, collecting cookies and loose pocket change.
“Best of all, you can boot us out when we’re no longer cute. We’re like puppies you can return to the store when they get too big. No worry about eye-rolling insolence as the children age. No teenage pregnancies. No expensive weddings to pay for.”
Well, yes, but it really did seem like a one-sided arrangement, tossing out people when we’re done with them — just as we do with temporary foreign workers.
I shrugged. “We’ll have pancakes,” I told Bob. “And don’t forget to call your mother back home.”
