Millennials outnumber baby boomers in Canada as immigration slows population aging

Nojoud Al Mallees, The Canadian Press

Statistics Canada says there are now more millennials than baby boomers in the country, ending the 65-year reign of the post-Second World War generation as the largest cohort in the population.

The federal agency noted the change in its newly released population estimate for July 1, 2023, broken down by age and gender.

The baby boomer generation became the largest in Canada in 1958 — seven years before the last baby boomer was even born. They accounted for 40 per cent of the population from the mid-1960s to the early 1970s.

Many countries are grappling with the reality of an aging population as baby boomers retire. These changing demographics are expected to affect health care needs and governments' tax bases.

Here in Canada, the Liberal government has pitched higher immigration as part of the solution to problems created by aging demographics. 

Statistics Canada's report, released on Wednesday, shows federal policies are already having an impact as higher immigration through both permanent and temporary streams in 2022 and 2023 helped slow population aging.

"However, the effect of receiving a high number of immigrants in 2022 and 2023 on the decline of the average and median ages is temporary, as population aging is unavoidable," the report says. 

The average age in Canada — 41.6 — dropped slightly, by a tenth of a percentage point, between July 1, 2022 and July 1, 2023. It was the first decline since 1958. 

Meanwhile, the number and proportion of people aged 65 years and older have continued to rise.

The federal agency says the share of millennials and generation Z is increasing, while the reverse is true for baby boomers and generation X. 

Those trends have helped widen the share of the working-age population, which increased in 2023 after steadily declining over the previous 15 years.

"This change may benefit Canadian society by increasing the size of the working-age population, possibly helping to alleviate the pressures of sectoral labour shortages," the report says. 

"However, the high number of new working age Canadians may also put pressure on the delivery of services to the population, housing, transportation and infrastructure."

Statistics Canada estimates generation Z could overtake millennials in numbers sometime between 2038 and 2053. 

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Feb. 21, 2024.

 

Automotive expert says immigration can help address labour shortages in EV manufacturing

Daniel Johnson , BNN Bloomberg

One automotive expert says that Canada’s immigration policy will help in addressing labour shortages in Canada’s EV industry. 

Bill Newman, an industry executive advisor at SAP North America, said in an interview with BNN Bloomberg Tuesday that automotive manufacturing requires a skilled workforce and workers in other industries can’t easily transition into the sector. 

“Right now, Canada has an advantage because the Canadian policies around immigration are very proactive and so I think that is a net plus,” he said. 

Newman also highlighted that building EVs requires fewer automotive parts and more software content when compared to traditional automotive manufacturing. 

“So the talent and the skills that you need in order to build a vehicle platform today are significantly different than what previous generations used to build vehicles of those of those times,” he said. 

Immigration surge fuels male population boom in Canada

Randy Thanthong-Knight, Bloomberg News

An influx of new immigrants is shifting Canada’s gender ratio, as a higher share of male newcomers helps squeeze the female majority to its smallest margin in decades.

The population of adult men grew 3.4 per cent over the past year, while women rose 2.9 per cent, making the spread between the growth of the two groups the widest in nearly 50 years of records, according to an analysis by Doug Porter, chief economist at Bank of Montreal.

The gap is even larger in the 25-to-44 age group, in which men have seen a 4.8 per cent jump and women a 3.9 per cent increase. There are 141,000 more men than women in this age bracket as of January, compared with a long-run average difference of zero.

“What we’ve seen in the last 10 years is that the growth rate in the male population has steadily been rising faster than the female population in that age group. It seems to be something a little bit more permanent,” Porter said in an interview.

The figures highlight the country’s changing demographic trends due to its liberal immigration policy, which aims to rapidly expand the pool of workers to stave long-term economic decline from an aging populace.

Canada’s population growth accelerated to 3.2 per cent over a one-year period to Oct. 1, faster than any Group of Seven nation, China or India. Almost all of the increase was driven by a surge in international migration, especially among foreign students and temporary workers.

From the late 1970s to around the early 2010s, Canada’s population increasingly skewed female, but the trend has been reversing over the past decade as the male cohort grew faster. In 2022, the gap between men and women was at its narrowest in more than 30 years.

Globally, advanced economies with older populations tend to have more women because they generally live longer. Countries with a higher share of young people, on the other hand, tend to skew male, while government policies can amplify that disparity. Large migrant worker populations have also led to wide sex imbalances in Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. 

“The issue is less economic in the short term than it is social and economic in the long term,” said Armine Yalnizyan, a labour economist and a research fellow at the Atkinson Foundation, an equality-focused charitable group.

“Because it means that we are putting the premium on dealing with labour shortages and economic needs and forgetting that we are humans who need to form families, who get sick, who get old.”