By Pauline Tam
HAMILTON, Ontario (The Ottawa Citizen), February 2, 2008:
It's 2030 and Canada, with its population of 100-year-olds approaching 14,000, looks like a colder version of Florida.
Schools have given way to retirement communities. Condominiums and townhouses have edged out single-family homes. Falling birthrates have sapped the market for child-care workers, while rising life expectancy has pushed up demand for geriatricians.
And with the healthiest, wealthiest and most active generation of people who are older than 65 living on its own terms, Canada has become a nation of retirees seeking adventure travel, part-timers working into their 70s and silver-haired singles looking for love at the fitness club.
In one of the most anticipated structural shifts to the economy and society, Canada has begun to turn grey.
A longevity boom has transformed old age, allowing many more Canadians to discover a new stage of life. A century ago, a woman born in Canada could expect to live, on average, until the age of 50. Today, the average 50- year-old can expect to live another three decades. That means parents and children can now expect to share as much as half a century together, nearly double that of previous generations.
To some, the inexorable march toward a greyer Canada signals national decline. Yet that view obscures one of the most striking advances of the last century: In a triumph of medicine and public health, we have effectively postponed old age.
Nonetheless, an aging nation will add pressure to health care and the economy. It will demand that communities be reshaped to meet the needs of more seniors. And it will challenge the country to rethink its family policies.
Starting in 2011, when the first wave of baby boomers turns 65, Canadian families will have fewer children and more elderly -- and progressively fewer people to take care of them.
Where once there were five workers for every retiree, that ratio will fall to just 2:1 by 2030. By then, when the hardiest boomers reach their 80s, one in four Canadians will be over 65, compared to one in seven today. Meanwhile, children and youth will account for less than one in five people.
For the first time in this country's history, grandparents will outnumber grandchildren.
If the predictions by some economists are correct, an aging population could result in a shrinking workforce that fuels skills shortages. Living standards could drop as the economy grows more slowly. When the size of the workforce shrinks, the economy can only grow if productivity increases enough to compensate. And those increases would have to be substantial to offset the impact of aging.
Population aging could also slow the growth of government revenues, meaning federal payroll taxes could go up to subsidize health care and pension spending.
The flip side of the equation is that working Canadians, particularly those in high demand and highly skilled jobs, could benefit from a spike in wages. The premium placed on skills means more people would invest in education and lifelong learning. A more educated workforce would lead to greater productivity and prosperity -- or so the logic goes.
Among economists, the debate is over whether such gains will be enough to offset the increased burden of having fewer Canadians in the workforce.
Some commentators predict an age quake will trigger a fiscal gap that bankrupts Canada's public health care and pension system.
At the other end of the spectrum are experts who reject the doomsday rhetoric and maintain that this demographic shift, though dramatic, is entirely manageable.
While populations around the world are aging rapidly, few are prepared for the profound changes this demographic shift will bring about, says Dr. Robert Butler, founder of New York's International Longevity Center and a pioneering expert on aging.
No country has come close to training enough professionals to look after the frail elderly, notes Dr. Butler. And a cure for Alzheimer's disease, which afflicts one in three Canadians over 85, remains elusive.
Yet in other ways, this country is ahead of many others in preparing for the longevity boom, experts say. Canada is the only major industrialized nation with a public pension plan that's in solid financial shape.
That fact alone has allowed the country to dodge much of the apocalyptic rhetoric and divisive debate surrounding population aging, says Peter Hicks, a former assistant deputy minister and a federal expert on aging.
All this stands in stark contrast to the situation in many European countries, where populations are aging much faster and which have public pay-as-you-go pension programs. Such programs, which count on each working generation to pay the pension benefits of retirees, have come under strain as low birthrates and longer life expectancy have resulted in fewer workers financing more pensioners.
"To other countries, we look like the solution," says Mr. Hicks, who, for six years beginning in 1995, led a groundbreaking research project on population aging at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.
The difference between the Canadian and European experience suggests that, while population aging can't be stopped, the right policies and programs can blunt its worst effects, says Mr. Hicks.
"Demography isn't destiny. If you think that way, then you wind up with a defeatist attitude in designing policy."
© The Ottawa Citizen 2008
