Canada’s working-age population is larger than ever, says StatsCan | CBC News

Laurent Martel, director of Statistics Canada’s center for demographics, called it a “date with demographic destiny.”

“Canada is in a very special place right now,” he said. “There are very big implications of this situation and it is certainly a factor in explaining the current labor shortage that Canada is experiencing.”

The Canadian population now has a higher proportion of 55-64 year olds than 15-24 year olds, the age at which people enter the workforce.

In 1966, there were 200 people aged 15 to 24 for every 100 Canadians aged 55 to 64, but now that has been reversed. In 2021, there were only 81 people aged 15-24 for every 100 Canadians in the 55-64 age group.

“There are challenges associated with a larger workforce, including knowledge transfer, retention of experienced employees, and workforce turnover,” the agency said in its report.

Statistics Canada says this trend can be curbed through immigration, but “an increase in immigration, even a large one, would not significantly curb this projected decline.”

The 2021 Census says that while declining fertility rates and increasing life expectancies are important factors, the most important driver of Canada’s aging population trend is the ongoing retirement of baby boomers. (Canadians born between 1946 and 1965), which began in 2011.

Despite this news, Statistics Canada says Canada still has one of the youngest working-age populations in the G7 after the US and UK, with people aged 15-64 making up 64.8 per cent. percent of the population; in Japan, that demographic makes up less than 60 percent of the population.

In the US, the slightly younger workforce is the result of a slightly higher fertility rate, while in the UK it is a combination of a higher fertility rate and a relatively smaller number of baby boomers, Statistics Canada said.

An aging population

It’s not just Canada’s workforce that is aging significantly, it’s the population as a whole, Statistics Canada said.

From 2016 to 2021, the number of Canadians over the age of 65 increased by 18.3% to seven million, the second largest increase in 75 years, after the recorded increase from 2011 to 2016, which was an increase of more than 20%. .

The seven million Canadians over the age of 65 make up 19 per cent of the population, up from 16.9 per cent at the time of the last census.

A closer look shows that the number of Canadians over the age of 85 is up nearly 12 per cent since the last census, while Canadians over the age of 100 are up more than 15 per cent.

“Over the next 30 years, the number of people aged 85 and over could triple from 861,000 to 2.7 million,” the agency said.

Population projections from Statistics Canada indicate that by 2051, almost a quarter of the population could be 65 years of age or older, totaling almost 12 million people.

Young and old in Canada

The age of Canada’s population is not just about the growing cohort of older people. It’s also the declining growth rate among younger Canadians, as the country’s fertility rate hit an all-time low of 1.4 children per woman, Statistics Canada said.

Between 2016 and 2021, the number of Canadians under the age of 15 grew six times slower than the number of people over the age of 65. The number of children under the age of 15 at the time of the 2021 census was six million, compared to seven million Canadians aged 65 and over.

The number of children under the age of five also fell from almost 1.9 million in 2016 to 1.83 million in 2021, a decrease of more than 3.6 percent.

The decline continues a trend first seen in the 2016 census when, for the first time, there were more Canadians over the age of 65 than children under the age of 15. The demographic gap has grown substantially, from just 96,000 then to just over a million by 2021.

Statistics Canada says that if current trends continue, by 2051 that gap will widen to 4.6 million, with 12 million Canadians over the age of 65 and just 7.4 million children under the age of 15.

regional differences

Demographics differ between regions: Prairie provinces and territories have younger populations, while Quebec and the Atlantic provinces have older populations on average.

In Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta, children under the age of 15 continue to outnumber Canadians aged 65 and over, largely due to a higher fertility rate.

Demographic projections for Manitoba and Alberta indicate that Canadians over 65 will not outnumber children under 15 until 2031. In Saskatchewan, which has the highest proportion of children under 15, older Canadians will not outnumber children under 15. number to children until 2036.

In the territories, Nunavut has the highest percentage of children under the age of 15 in the country at more than 32 percent, followed by the Northwest Territories at nearly 21 percent. The Yukon is slightly lower at 17 percent.

Newfoundland and Labrador has the lowest proportion of children in Canada at 13.4%, followed by Nova Scotia at 14.1% and New Brunswick and BC, which are tied at 14.3%.

gender questions

For the first time, this census included gender questions that allowed cisgender, transgender, and non-binary people to report their gender.

Statistics Canada says that Canada is the first country to collect and publish data on gender diversity in a national census.

Of the nearly 30.5 million people in Canada over the age of 15 living in private households as of May 2021, Statistics Canada says that 59,460 identified as transgender and 41,355 identified as non-binary, accounting for 0, 33% of the population in this age group.

Other 2021 Census Highlights

• The COVID-19 pandemic slowed population growth in all age groups, but did not significantly affect population ageing.
• Small and large urban centers have younger populations on average, with Canadians over the age of 65 making up 18.2% of the urban population, compared to rural areas, where older Canadians make up 23.2% of the population. population on average.
• Not all urban centers are the same. In Trois-Rivières, 25.7% of the population is 65 years of age or older; in Calgary, it’s 13.5 percent.
• People of working age (ages 15-64) make up three-quarters of the population in inner-city areas, compared to the national average of 64.8 percent.
• The number of apartments in high-rise buildings increased at more than double the rate of the total number of private homes between 2016 and 2021: 14.7 percent, compared to 6.4 percent for all private homes.
• In British Columbia, the number of high-rise apartments grew more than five times faster (24.8%) than the number of single-family homes, which grew by 4.3%.