Foresight: Family Trends - Canada (1996, 2001 and 2006)

Statistics Canada has pulled together trend data related to the Canadian family - from the 1996, 2001 and 2006 censuses:

http://www12.statcan.ca/english/census06/data/trends/Table_1.cfm?T=PR&PRCODE=01&GEOCODE=01&GEOLVL=PR

Statistics Canada produced the following highlights regarding family from the 2006 census:

in 2006 there were 8,896,800 census families in Canada
married couples constituted the largest group (68.6%), althought their proportion has been steadily decreasing for the past 20 years
the number of common-law couple families increased 18.9% between 2001 and 2006, more than five times the 3.5% gain for married couple families and more than twice the growth of 7.8% for lone-parent families
lone-parent famiilies headed by men increased 14.6% during the five years prior to 2006, more than twice the growth of lone-parent families headed by women (6.3%)
for the first time there were more census families comprised of couples without children (42.7%) than with children (41.4%)
there was a signficant growth in the number of same-sex couples - a 32.6% increase from 34,200 in 2001 to 45,300 in 2006; this growth was more than 5 times the growth observed for opposite-sex couples
households have been declining in size over the past century; in 2006, there were more than three times as many one-person households (26.8%) as those consisting of five or more people (8.7%)
two-thirds (65.7%) of Canada's total of 5.6 million children aged 14 and under lived with married parents in 2006, a decline from 81.2% in 1986
a growing proportion of children aged 4 and under had a mother in her forties as more and more women delay childbearing. In 2001. 7.8% of children aged 4 and under had a mother who was between the ages of 40 and 49, by 2006 this propotion had increased to 9.4%
the proportion of young adults aged 20 to 29 who lived in their parental home continued to increase, following a 20 year upward trend. In 2006; 43.5% of young adults lived at home, up substantially from 32.1% two decades earlier.