MONTREAL - Laurie Partington coos to her daughter, five-month-old Clare, as she folds laundry in the family room of her suburban Montreal home. Her older daughter, Amy, is at day care.
Partington and her husband, Mark, were thrilled with the births of their daughters and so was the Quebec government.
The Partingtons are part of a mini-baby boom in la belle province, one that officials worked hard to help along and are desperate to sustain.
The birthrate in Quebec has been slowly increasing for the past five years but it jumped eight per cent in 2006 when 82,500 children were born.
"We hope it's not a temporary increase,'' said Norman Thibault of the province's statistics institute.
Census data released Tuesday by Statistics Canada showed Quebec's population grew 4.3 per cent between 2001 and 2006, the second biggest increase since the end of the baby boom in the 1960s. But most of the growth was attributed to immigration.
The province's birthing bonanza last year came too late to have much impact on the May 16 census enumeration, said Statistics Canada analyst Laurent Martel. The boom affected only four of the 60 months in the census period.
More significantly, the province benefited from an end to the traditional interprovincial bleeding that has been siphoning off Quebecers for years.
"Interprovincial migration in Quebec is historically negative,'' said Martel. "During 2001 to 2006, net interprovincial migration was nearly zero. That's a huge improvement.''
Yet even with 4.3 per cent growth, Quebec lagged behind the Canadian average of 5.4 per cent and saw its share of the country's total population slip to 23.9 per cent, continuing a 40-year downward trend.
Like just about every region of the western world, Quebec's birthrate has plummeted since the baby boom of the 1960s.
Family dynamics have changed across Canada but nowhere more rapidly than in Quebec.
In a little more than a decade, from 1959 to 1971, Quebec went from having the highest birthrate in Canada to the lowest.
And like just about every region of the world, Quebec is growing increasingly alarmed about the demographic crisis that awaits as baby boomers grow older.
"We have a significant demographic problem in Quebec, like in many industrial societies,'' said Carole Theberge, the provincial minister for families. "So, we absolutely have to work hard to create a favourable environment for young families to want to have children.''
Since taking office in 2003, the Quebec Liberal government has put in place three major initiatives to try to get ahead of the aging curve.
First, it continued the Parti Quebecois' affordable day-care program, raising the fee to $7 from $5 a day but creating 35,000 new spots.
Then in January of 2005, the government instituted a new child benefit, a monthly non-taxable amount paid to families. Parents receive $2,100 a year for the first child and $1,045 for the second and third child and $1,600 for a fourth, to a maximum of $5,700.
And in another innovation just a year ago, Quebec opted out of the federal government's employment insurance plan for parental leave and implemented its own more generous provincial plan. In its first year, nearly 98,000 new mothers and fathers took advantage of the plan, which, unlike Ottawa's applies to self-employed parents.
"That's been an extraordinary success,'' said Theberge.
Partington is currently on maternity leave from her job in marketing for a high-tech company, and her husband plans to take his five-week paternity leave this summer. Also unlike the federal program, that time will not be subtracted from Partington's leave.
Maternity benefits have also improved. Partington received more money, for longer, under the provincial plan than from employment insurance.
Barb Brown, 35, has opted to stay home with her three boys: four-year-old Avery, two-year-old Mackenzie and nine-month-old Morgan.
"I stayed home because we couldn't get into $7-a-day day care,'' said Brown, who lives in the Montreal suburb of Pointe-Claire with her husband Mark.
"We were paying $30 a day and we couldn't afford to. And I just wanted to stay home, anyway.''
Brown said the subsidized day care is definitely geared to getting new moms back in the work force as soon as possible.
"It's totally promoted here to go back to work,'' she said.
The child allowance from the province means more money for the now single-income family.
"But I've got more diapers and more everything,'' Brown said. "There's more money coming in but there's definitely more coming out. So, in the long run it's not like we're making more money.''
Last year was the fourth consecutive year of growth in the number of births in Quebec: from 72,500 in 2002 to 73,900 in 2003, 74,000 in 2004 and 76,250 in 2005.
While the eight per cent jump in 2006 was the highest in nearly a century, it's not yet a real baby boom, Thibault warned.
"Before talking about a baby boom, we have to be sure the birth rate remains high over several years,'' he said. "At this point, there's been an increase in births.''
The parental insurance plan, which kicked in on Jan. 1, 2006, may have contributed to a spike.
If the provincial programs have worked, they haven't come cheap.
The parental leave program cost the Quebec government $817 million in its first year and the province pays out nearly $550 million annually in child benefits.
It costs $1.6 billion a year to subsidize day care and there is still up to a two-year waiting list.
Partington started hunting for a $7-a-day centre when she was five months pregnant and Amy was more than two before they got a call.
And while Partington is now on maternity leave, three-year-old Amy still goes to day care a few days a week.
"In order to keep her place, she's got to keep going,'' Partington said.
Premier Jean Charest has promised another 20,000 day-care spots, if re-elected on March 26.
Theberge said the cost is worth it.
"We've seen a significant increase in the birth rate,'' Theberge said. "Now we have to work to make it last.''
Immigration is another key part to addressing the coming demographic crisis, she said.
"We need a lot of people,'' Theberge said.
Partington doesn't believe any of the programs are a deciding factor in whether people have children.
"That's sort of a life choice that you're going to do or you're not going to do, whether there's the money for it or not,'' she said. "It may create a boom for a couple of years because people who were putting it off may.''
These programs haven't convinced her to have any more than the two they planned.
"Not unless they come in the mail,'' she said with a laugh.
