OTTAWA-
More than a year after the Great Retreat occurred in the United States, Canada is grappling with its own grayer version: The Great Retreat.
Canada’s workforce grew in August but fell in the previous two months and remains smaller than it was before the summer as tens of thousands of people simply stopped working. Much of this can be attributed to more Canadians than ever retiring, Statistics Canada said.
It’s not just about the crowd of 65+ people packing up their offices and hanging up their tool belts. A record number of Canadians aged 55 to 64 now report retiring in the past 12 months, StatsCan data shows.
That is accelerating a mass exodus of Canada’s most skilled workers, leaving companies in a bind, helping to boost wages and threatening to further drag down the country’s productivity decline, economists say.
“We’ve known for a long time that this wave would come, that we would get to this point,” said Jimmy Jean, chief economist at Desjardins Group. “And it will only intensify in the next few years.”
“The risk that you have, and in some sectors you are already seeing it, is that people leave without there being enough young workers to take over. So there is a loss of human capital and knowledge.”
During the pandemic, pensions fell as many Canadians chose to stay in their jobs longer. Now that restrictions have been lifted, many are rushing to make up for lost time, choosing to travel and spend more time with family.
Their departures are reducing the workforce, which could weigh on economic growth at a time when the central bank is aggressively raising interest rates to counter rising inflation, stoking fears the economy could slide into recession.
Canada, which has increased immigration to help fuel economic growth, has the largest working-age population, as a percentage of the total population, in the G7, but at the same time its workforce has never been larger, according to StatsCan. One in five workers in Canada is 55 years of age or older.
There were 307,000 Canadians in August who had left their jobs to retire at some point last year, up 31.8% from the previous year and 12.5% more than in August 2019, before the start of the pandemic, it said. StatsCan.
To make matters worse, more than 620,000 Canadians entered the 65+ age category during the pandemic, a 9.7% increase in that population group. Despite three straight months of job losses, job openings and postings remain well above pre-pandemic levels.
NURSES AND TRUCKS
The retirement problem is particularly acute in specialized fields such as trades and nursing. Since May, Canada has lost 34,400 health care jobs, even as a record number of nurses reported working overtime.
Those weren’t job cuts, but people who retired, said Cathryn Hoy, president of the Ontario Nurses Association.
“It’s a big deal right now, because we’ve had so many unexpectedly retire,” he said, citing the pandemic, working conditions and a wage dispute with Canada’s largest province.
The trucking industry is also grappling with a severe shortage of workers, both from a frenzy for more goods fueled by the pandemic and from an aging workforce.
“More and more drivers are getting older and therefore retiring or contemplating a different lifestyle,” said Tony Reeder, owner of Trans-Canada College, a career college that trains haul truck drivers.
At the same time, demand is booming from trucking companies, many of which take student drivers for on-the-job training courses and then hire them as soon as they’re fully licensed, Reeder said.
“Without trucks and people to drive the trucks…goods will sit in ports and warehouses instead of reaching the destination where they can be consumed,” he said.