Canada fading to grey, StatCan numbers show

Seniors outnumber children for first time in history, raising sustainability concerns

OTTAWA— For a young country, Canada’s getting pretty old.

For the first time in Canada’s history, there are more people aged 65 and older than children under the age of 15, Statistics Canada reported Tuesday. The federal agency reported that nearly one in six Canadians — approximately 5.78 million — were at least 65 years old on July 1, 2015. The population under the age of 15 came in at 5.75 million.

According to Statistics Canada’s projections, that gap between old and young is expected to widen over the next decades. Based on current estimates, seniors are expected to account for 20.1 per cent of the total population by 2024.

Aging populations is a widespread issue for industrialized nations. In fact, Canada remains younger than many of its G7 allies, with only the United States having a lower proportion of seniors (15 per cent).

But some research predicts Canada will feel the impact of an aging baby boom population more acutely than its neighbours. And with a rapidly aging population comes questions about everything from retirement security to the sustainability of Canada’s health-care system.

In 2011, the Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI) noted that Canada was expected to have 22 per cent of its population over the age of 65 within three decades. The same percentage was not expected to be seen in countries such as the U.K., France, Germany or the United States for at least 50 years.

And while Canada had a good ratio of working-age adults to seniors back in 2010 compared to other OECD countries — with 4.46 working-aged people for every senior — CIHI noted that ratio is expected to decline to 2.84 workers per senior by 2025.

“The needs of an older population are different than the needs of kids, so if you look at expenditure patterns at a national level you see that shift a little bit away from things that children consume to adults, health care being the one that we hear most about,” said Doug Norris, the chief demographer at Environics Analytics in Ottawa.

“The other change is a slowdown in the labour market growth . . .we get a slowdown in employment, which is really a demographically driven factor in part.”

Canada added 308,100 people in 2014-15 — a G7-leading increase of 0.9 per cent growth compared to the year before. Most of that growth, 60.8 per cent, was the result of im- migration rather than new births.

Julia Al Akaila, 21, says she understands why people from other countries are clamouring to come here. She arrived in Canada from Greece three and a half years ago.

She says she likes the multicultural feel of the city, but was a bit discouraged at first by what seemed like a propensity of people of different ethic backgrounds to mingle mainly within their own communities.

Statistics Canada also reported the number of non-permanent residents across Canada declined by 10,300 from July 1, 2014 to June 30, 2015, the largest annual decrease since the mid-1990s. With files from Donovan Vincent