Divorce Statistics and Studies Blog

Divorce, marriage down in Canada; projected lifetime divorce rate around 40%

Divorce Rates in Canada on Decline: But So Are Marriage Rates  -- The Smart Divorce® Weblog

This is based on reports of divorce cases from several provinces covering 66% of the population. Original source: "Divorce cases in civil court, 2010/2011" By Mary Bess Kelly, Statistics Canada. The Statistics Canada web page includes many other findings about divorce litigation, and long historical graphs of divorce and marriage rates.

It also includes projections, which are uncertain and subjective but are also the most intuitively understandable kinds of rates - they answer the question that's most often on people's minds but which there's rarely an answer for: What is a couple's chance of getting divorced? A chart shows this rising from 36.1% in 1996 to a peak of 41.9 in 2006, then declining to 40.7 in 2008. But it varies greatly by province, from 59.7 in the Yukon Territory to 25.0 in Newfoundland and Labrador. This projection is actually the "30-year divorce rate", described as:

"The 30-year total divorce rate (TDR-30) represents the proportion of married couples who are expected to divorce before their 30th wedding anniversary. For example, a TDR-30 of 40.7 per 100 marriages for Canada in 2008 indicates that 40.7% of marriages are expected to end in divorce before the 30th year of marriage (if the duration-specific divorce rates calculated for 2008 remain stable)."

 

Divorce costs employers $8K each, communities 30K, couples 19K - studies

A divorce hurts the couple and the community financially. The couple will have about a $19,000 loss and the community another $30,000 per divorce. According to Dr. John Curtis, author of "Happily Un-Married," an average employee making $20 per hour would cost the company more than $8,000. One survey, "The effect of marital dissolution on the labor supply of males and females," for the Journal of Socio-Economics (Mueller, 2005) found that employees lost an average of more than 168 hours of work time, equivalent to being fully absent for four weeks in one calendar year.

From "Healthy marriages key to employee health" by John Phillips of Community Marriage Builders, via Deborah Moskovitch at Huffington Post.   [The other numbers quoted may be from the two sources mentioned above or from another book cited in the article, The Case for Marriage, by Maggie Gallagher and Linda Waite.]