New data reveals Canada’s senior population is expected to exceed 11 million people by 2043. This rapid rise in the number of older Canadians will have wide-reaching implications on sectors such as health care and employment, with experts sounding the alarm that Canada is not prepared to handle an aging population.

  • Pxtl@lemmy.ca
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    7 months ago

    The problem is that 70 years ago a massive baby-boom happened and there aren’t enough people in Canada to keep the economy and healthcare system running properly as those people all become systemic burdens. Immigration is the only thing that keeps our demographic system from being as upside-down as every other 1st-world country.

    4 example demographic pyramids

    And student-immigration is actually the best kind, because they’re young and healthy and already finished the expensive free-education-schooling-years and are ready to go right into the workforce after they dump a crapload of money into the educational economy.

    The problem, of course, is that in order to make this work, you have to make sure there’s enough housing. And instead, we stopped building government-funded housing 30 years ago, and we let municipalities declare new housing basically illegal (well, it’s legal if you Know A Guy, which is why all the builders are mobsters now). And also we don’t have enough people to build as much as we need.

    So yeah, the Fed has some good ideas and a reasonable top-level economic plan but they’ve screwed up the details catastrophically.

    Basically, the “no immigration” path is either Logan’s Run or every young person gets taxed to the gills as we try to support an elder-heavy country on an increasingly anemic economy. How much “opportunity” does that sound like for your kids?

    • frostbiker@lemmy.ca
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      7 months ago

      Basically, the “no immigration” path i

      That is a strawman of your own creation. All I said is that I want my children to have the opportunity to have kids of their own if they wish to, which currently seems unlikely because our government does not prioritize fostering the conditions under which young people choose to start families.

      I would prefer Canada to grow primarily through its own means rather than relying so heavily on immigration to avoid economic collapse.

      If you prefer not having kids or grandchildren, that’s fine by me, but don’t assume we all want the same things.