Traditional family declining in Nunavut

In Nunavut, family values aren’t what they used to be.

Numbers released this week by Statistics Canada show that one out of every four families in Nunavut is headed by a single parent, 31.3 per cent of families are headed by couples living common-law, and that less than half of all families — 43 per cent — are headed by married couples.

The statistics are based on information that Statistics Canada census-takers gathered in 2001.

They show that in Nunavut, the traditional family — one man and one woman raising children within a union sanctioned by law or religion — may be weaker than in any other region of the country.

Jack Hicks, the head of Nunavut’s bureau of statistics, says these numbers may simply mirror what’s going on in the rest of the country, “to a different degree and at a different rate.”

For example, in Nunavut, less than half of all children are being raised in traditional families.

Nearly a quarter, or 22.3 per cent of children in Nunavut, are being raised by a single parent, and 30.8 per cent of children are being raised by common-law parents. Only 46.8 per cent of children in Nunavut are being raised by married parents.

In Canada, 18.8 per cent of children live with single parents, 12.8 per cent live with common-law parents, and 68.4 per cent live with married parents.

The proportion of married couples in Canada is dropping though. In 1981, 83 per cent of Canadian families were led by married couples, but now, the proportion of married couples has dropped to 70 per cent, while the proportion of common-law couples rose from six per cent to 14 per cent.

The other two northern territories, Yukon and the Northwest Territories, also have high numbers of common-law couples. But among Canadian provinces, census-takers found that only Quebec has a similar proportion — 25.2 per cent of all families.

In raw numbers, this means that in Nunavut, there were 1,630 single parents in Nunavut. That’s 25.6 per cent of the total.

Of those, 445 single-parent families, more than one in four, were led by men, while 1,190 were led by women.

In some communities, the number of single-parent families is almost as great, or greater, than the number of families led by married couples.

In Kugluktuk, for example, census-takers counted 335 families. Of those, 110 families, or 35.5 per cent of the total, are led by single parents. Only 105 families in Kugluktuk, or 33.9 per cent of the total, are led by married couples.

Another 90 Kugluktuk families, or 29 per cent of the total, are led by common-law couples.

In Cape Dorset, census-takers counted 255 families. Of those, 85 were led by single parents, 80 families were led by married couples, and 90 families were led by common-law couples.

Of Nunavut’s 6,355 families, only 2,735 are led by married couples. At only 43 per cent of the total, that gives it the lowest proportion of married couples in all territories and provinces.

The Kitikmeot region has the highest proportion of single-parent families — 29.2 per cent, nearly one in every three, and the lowest proportion of families led by married couples — 39. 4 per cent, about two of every five.

The Kivalliq region, on the other hand, has the highest proportion of married couples — 50.1 per cent of all families. But it also has a high proportion of single-parent families — 26.2 per cent.

The 2001 census also marks the first time that Statistics Canada attempted to count the number of Canadian families led by same-sex couples.

Census-takers counted 15 families in Nunavut led by same-sex couples, or 0.3 per cent of the total. In the Northwest Territories they counted 30 same-sex couples and 35 in the Yukon.

In Canada, Statistics Canada found 34,200 same sex families, or 0.5 per cent of the total number of families in Canada.