Baby boomlet?

A most curious choice of statistical baselines on the part of the Newfoundland and Labrador Centre for Health Information.

In a soon-to-be-much-touted press release from Tuesday afternoon — look, a PDF you can clip and copy! — the lede states, "The number of babies born in each year has been declining since the early 1990’s."

And Dr. Don MacDonald, Senior Director of Research and Evaluation says "Between 1999 and 2007, there was a 10 per cent decrease in the number of live births in Newfoundland and Labrador, accompanied by a gradual increase in the number of deaths."

(Dr. MacDonald also makes the curious editorial comment that, "This increase in the number of births is a positive step toward population growth for our province." But that's neither here nor there.)

Now both those statements are true. But they are not the whole truth — contrary to what the media outlets who swallowed the comparison whole might think.

The number of babies born in Newfoundland and Labrador each year has been declining since the early 1990s, just as it has been declining, year over year, almost every year since 1963. And yes, there was a decline in the number of births in 2007 as compared to 1999... just as there has been in every comparable eight-year year-pair span since 1965 compared to 1957.


[Data sources: Historical Statistics of Newfoundland and Labrador (up to 1948); CANSIM table 053-0001 from 1949 to 2007 inclusive; NLCHI press release for 2008. CANSIM data shown in light green are preliminary or otherwise incomplete figures.]