this post was submitted on 13 Dec 2023
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This is what Canada will look like in 20 years โ€“ are we ready for an aging population? (www.ctvnews.ca)
submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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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.

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[โ€“] [email protected] -4 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Immigration is not a long term solution, even if its switched over to useful people. Its just a band aid on a serious problem.

[โ€“] xmunk 9 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Nah, it's a serious long-term solution - at least until we see some major shifts in global economies. I've got several African-born coworkers and they're all awesome at their jobs.

[โ€“] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago (2 children)

And I want my children to have the opportunity to have kids of their own. In my experience, when young people feel financially secure and are not working themselves to death, they tend to start families. I want our kids' generation to have that opportunity.

[โ€“] [email protected] 9 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (2 children)

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?

[โ€“] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Basically, the โ€œno immigrationโ€ 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.

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

That's...incredibly well-put. I'm stealing this.

[โ€“] xmunk 6 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Welp, speaking as a millennial, you might want to start supporting national pharma care, phasing out fossil fuels, and maybe even ubi. A world on the brink doesn't really get my horny juices flowing.

[โ€“] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I'm also an early millenial / late GenX and broadly support the things you mention.

At the same time, how do you explain that earlier generations were happy to start families well before national pharma care, etc.? Before people were concerned with the climate crisis they were terrified of a population explosion (hence China's one-child policy), nuclear war, etc.

My intuition is that the difference is that they were more financially stable and they were able to maintain a family with a single income, which provided them with both the money and the time that raising children require. So, maybe we should focus on that instead.

[โ€“] xmunk 4 points 10 months ago

In earlier decades there was inherently more financial security because corporations were shamed more for being greedy assholes - now we praise greed and shame "inefficiently generous" corporations... that change means that we need programs like pharma-care and ubi to achieve the same security.

For fossil fuels... well, we're fucking boned. I'm fine, I'm a millennial so I'll probably be dead before it gets really bad but Gen Alpha is absolutely fucked. I'm not going to subject a child to the utter devastation our political incompetence has pretty much guaranteed.