My Wife Wants to Be a Grandma. Canada's Population Decline Real Estate Story Has Other Plans.

By Matt Paisley | The Welcome Matt | July 2026

Est. reading time: 6-7 minutes

This last weekend my kids came over for dinner. Both adults, both doing their thing, both reasonably tolerant of their father's habit of turning every conversation into an accidental real estate blog.

What started as a dinner conversation led me straight to the Statistics Canada data on Canada's population decline and what it means for Chilliwack real estate in 2026.

My wife has been talking with friends lately about wanting to be a grandmother someday. It comes up the way these things do, casually, over coffee, and then it sits in the room. Our kids heard a version of that conversation and the response was honest and not particularly surprising. It is not that they do not want families (i hope). It is that the financial math of raising children in BC feels genuinely out of reach right now and they are not willing to bring kids into a situation where economic stress is the defining feature of their early years.

I have heard this before. Not just from my own kids. I have been coaching youth sports ,and in particular football, in Chilliwack for 32 years and I run into former players around town all the time. Young men in their mid to late twenties who I watched grow up on that field. When the conversation turns to life plans, the same theme comes up over and over. The feeling that you have to choose between living the life you want and struggling through the financial reality of raising a family in this economy. That is not one kid's opinion. That is a pattern I have been watching develop for years.

I thought about that conversation on the drive to work this morning, which is when I made the mistake of looking at the Statistics Canada data. And now I am writing a real estate blog about death rates because apparently that is the kind of person I am.

My wife remains patient with me. Mostly.

The Number That Stopped Me in My Tracks

For the first time since Confederation in 1867, Canada recorded an annual population decline in 2025. Not a slowdown in growth. An actual decline. Statistics Canada placed the estimated number of Canadian residents at 41,472,081 on January 1, 2026, a drop of just over 102,000 people from January 1, 2025.

The decline continued into 2026. Canada's population dropped by about 55,000 people in the first three months of this year alone, with Statistics Canada estimating the population as of April 1 at 41,417,056.

To understand why this matters for real estate, you need to understand what has been driving Canadian housing demand for the past decade. The answer, simplified, is people. More people need more housing. More demand with constrained supply pushes prices up. That equation has been the backbone of the Canadian housing market story since roughly 2015. When the number of people starts going the other direction, the equation changes.

There were about 20 percent fewer permanent immigrants in Canada in the first quarter of 2026 compared to the same period in 2025, dropping to 83,149 from 104,210. No political opinion on that policy change. Just the math on what fewer people arriving means for housing demand.

The Birth Rate Story and Why My Dinner Table Is a Data Point

Here is where it gets closer to home. Literally.

The immigration slowdown is a policy decision that can be reversed. The birth rate story is a longer, slower, more structural problem and it is the one that keeps the people at census Canada up at night.

Canada's total fertility rate hit an all-time record low of 1.25 children per woman in 2024. The replacement level needed to maintain a stable population without immigration is 2.1. Canada is 0.85 below that threshold. In Q4 2025, deaths outnumbered births in Canada for the first time in a quarterly period on record, a natural decrease of 781 people. Small number. Enormous symbolic weight.

In the first quarter of 2026, Canada registered 90,173 births and 90,328 deaths, a natural population decline of 155 people. The gap is still small. The trend is not.

And then there is BC specifically. British Columbia has the lowest total fertility rate of any province in the country at 1.02 children per woman. Not 1.25 like the national average. 1.02. That is less than half the replacement rate. That is the province we live in.

My kids are not anomalies. The young men I have coached over the years are not anomalies either. They are data points in a trend that has been building since 2009 and accelerating for the past three years. 51.5 percent of Canadian women aged 20 to 49 have no children. That last statistic was bananas to me. Over half of child bearing aged women are not having kids! The average age of first-time mothers in Canada is now 31.8 years, a record high.

The conversation I keep having around town with former players is remarkably consistent. It is not that young people do not want families. Most of them do. It is that they feel they are being asked to choose between a life they can actually enjoy and the financial grind of raising children in an economy where housing costs have consumed the margin that previous generations used to build families on. That is a deeply human problem dressed up in demographic data. And it has real consequences for the housing market that nobody in real estate is talking about honestly.

There is something genuinely uncomfortable about writing that sentence as a Realtor. But it is true and pretending otherwise does not help anyone.

What This Means for Housing Demand in Canada and the Fraser Valley

Housing demand is a function of population, household formation, and income. All three of those inputs are shifting at the same time right now and not in the direction that has historically supported Canadian real estate prices.

CREA's July 15 forecast revision now points to 463,336 sales for 2026, a 1.4 percent downgrade tied largely to a shrinking population base. That is your national real estate association explicitly connecting population decline to lower sales volumes. That is not a fringe view. That is the mainstream forecast.

CMHC sees slow economic growth, weak housing demand, declining home prices, lower housing starts and easing rental markets for the rest of 2026. Add a shrinking population to that list and the picture comes into sharper focus.

For the Fraser Valley specifically, the demographic story has a local layer worth understanding. Chilliwack and the surrounding communities have historically absorbed population overflow from Metro Vancouver. People who could not afford Vancouver moved east. That pipeline depends on people actually existing to move through it. Fewer permanent immigrants arriving in Canada means fewer people settling in Metro Vancouver. Fewer people in Metro Vancouver means less overflow pressure pushing buyers into the Fraser Valley.

That is not a catastrophic statement. It is a mechanical one. The tap that has been running at full pressure for a decade has been turned down. The water still flows. Just not as fast.

The Affordability Silver Lining Nobody Is Talking About

Here is the part of this story that is genuinely good news, especially for young people who have been feeling priced out.

A typical Canadian home now costs approximately 4.24 times the median dual income, down from 5.95 times at the February 2022 peak and sitting close to 2019 levels, with real inflation-adjusted prices roughly 26 percent below their high.

Read that again. Affordability has improved more in the last four years than at any point in the previous decade. Not because incomes skyrocketed. Because prices came down and stayed down while incomes gradually grew.

For a young Chilliwack couple who has been watching the market since 2021 and feeling like ownership was permanently out of reach, the current affordability ratio is the most accessible it has been since before the pandemic. That is not a marketing line. It is a Statistics Canada calculation.

The cruel irony is that the same demographic forces making housing more affordable are also reducing the number of young people who will be around to take advantage of it. The people who could now afford to buy are the same people choosing not to have families because of what housing costs used to be and what it still costs to raise children in BC.

When I think about the guys I have coached who told me they are choosing lifestyle over family because the economics do not work, I wonder how many of them know that the affordability picture has quietly shifted in their favour over the last three years. My guess is most of them are still making decisions based on the market they watched in 2021 and 2022, not the one they are actually living in today. I do my best to educate but the damage from bad policy is already done.

What This Means for Chilliwack Real Estate Right Now

In the short term, the population decline story is not going to crater the Chilliwack market. We are already in a buyer's market with a 14.6 percent absorption rate across all residential categories as I wrote about last week. The demand softness is already priced into current conditions.

What the demographic data does is change the medium to long term narrative that most real estate optimism is built on. The assumption that Canadian housing always recovers because Canada always grows is no longer a given. The growth has to come from somewhere and right now it is coming from significantly fewer places than it was three years ago.

For sellers in Chilliwack, this is one more reason that pricing for the market you are actually in matters more than it ever has. Waiting for population-driven demand to rescue an overpriced listing is a strategy built on assumptions that the data no longer supports.

For buyers, particularly younger buyers who have been waiting for conditions to improve, the combination of improved affordability and reduced competition from the demographic slowdown is as close to a window as this market has offered in years. Whether that window stays open depends on policy decisions being made in Ottawa right now that none of us control.

And for my kids, who will absolutely read this blog and immediately text me to point out that I just wrote about our dinner conversation on the internet: you are welcome. The data is on your side for once. It might be worth a conversation.

My wife still wants to be a grandmother. I did not tell her I would write a blog about it. Wish me luck.

Matt Paisley | The Welcome Matt Fraser Valley Real Estate | Chilliwack, Abbotsford, Langley, Mission, Hope and Agassiz 📱 [604-991-5028] 🌐 thewelcomematt.ca

Market data referenced in this post reflects Chilliwack and District Real Estate Board statistics for May & June 2026. This post is intended for general informational purposes only and does not constitute financial or real estate advice specific to your situation.