There will likely be more Canadians leaving the workforce than entering it over the next few decades as the country’s senior population grows, according to new data from Statistics Canada. Experts say this will not only exacerbate existing labour shortages, but could result in higher wages for employees.
As of November 2023, there were approximately 2.7 million Canadians aged 15 to 24 who said they were employed, compared to more than 4.4 million people aged 55 and older who had a job. This is based on data from Statistics Canada’s latest labour force survey, which also shows a wide difference in the total population of Canadians 15 to 24 years of age compared to those aged 55 and older, with 4.7 million and 12.4 million people, respectively.
“This means that there are potentially more people prepared to leave the labour force because of retirement than there are entrants to replace these workers,” reads a note prepared by Jane Badets, senior adviser at Environics Analytics, a marketing and analytical services company owned by Bell Canada.
This comes amid new statistics from Environics Analytics that show Canada’s senior population is projected to surpass 11 million by 2043. The data, based on a special analysis for CTV News, paints the senior population as the fastest-growing age group in the country.
LABOUR SHORTAGE LINKED TO AN AGING POPULATION: EXPERTS
Canada is already facing labour shortages across several sectors, largely due to the country’s aging population, said Stephen Tapp, chief economist for the Canadian Chamber of Commerce. Over the next few years, more Canadians born between 1946 and 1964 – also known as the baby boomer generation – will be entering their senior years and likely retiring. Without a boost in the number of young Canadians entering the workforce, existing labour gaps will only become larger, Tapp said.
“(We’re) in a more labour-scarce world,” Tapp told CTVNews.ca in a telephone interview. “Things are getting tighter and more difficult … It will get worse over the next 10 to 15 years.”
Businesses of all sizes and across every industry have complained of labour shortages for months, with experts saying Canada’s aging workforce is among the factors to blame. These shortages could lead to a reduction in labour input as well as economic growth, a recent study shows.
Conducted by the RAND Corporation, a research organization based in the United States, the study published in 2016 and revised in 2022 shows a link between an aging workforce and national economic performance. Looking at U.S. data, researchers discovered that with each 10 per cent increase in the fraction of the population aged 60 and older, per-capita GDP decreased by 5.5 per cent.
“Our estimate implies population aging reduced the growth rate in GDP per capita by 0.3 percentage points per year during 1980 (to) 2010,” the paper reads.
A study published in August by the Fraser Institute, a conservative think tank, came to a similar conclusion. Researchers determined that every 10 per cent increase in the senior population is linked to a slight decrease in the real GDP per capita growth rate.
“This result implies that, in 2021 dollars, Canada’s GDP per capita will be lower by $4,300 (per person) by 2043 under Statistics Canada’s slow-aging population projection scenario and by $11,200 under its fast-aging scenario,” reads a press release issued earlier this year.
A report published by the federal government in 2018 already indicated that Canada was seeing “proportionally fewer young people moving into the workforce to replace the increasing number of older individuals retiring.”
Adding to this is what is expected to be an increase in the number of Canadians who are retiring year-over-year. An analysis of labour force survey data by the left-leaning Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA) revealed 73,000 more people retired in the year ending August 2022 compared to the year prior.
HEALTH CARE, CONSTRUCTION WILL NEED MORE WORKERS
Some sectors can expect to see greater labour shortages than others, Tapp said. Amid a lack of nurses and physicians, Canada’s health-care sector is likely to continue facing labour shortages as demand for services increases with an aging population, said Ted McDonald, a political science professor at the University of New Brunswick.
“Those labour shortages have direct implications for patient outcomes as well as the broader economy,” McDonald told CTVNews.ca in a telephone interview.
Across all industries, the job vacancy rate was 3.9 per cent as of September, but within the health-care and social assistance sector, that rate was 5.6 per cent. Other sectors with job vacancy rates above the four-per-cent mark include construction, and accommodation and food services, at 4.7 and 6.2 per cent, respectively.
Sectors such as transportation are also likely to experience tighter labour market conditions in the years to come, as they have a higher number of older workers, according to a research note produced by Environics Analytics.
The ratio of older to younger workers varies by occupation, according to the latest census data from 2021. Younger workers include employees aged 25 to 34, whereas older workers includes those aged 55 and above. Examples of some of the occupations that have more older than younger workers include bus drivers and other transit operators. In these occupations, the number of older employees is more than four times higher than the number of younger employees.
Alternatively, the employment rate among 25- to 54-year-olds born in Canada from 2010 to 2021 has seen a two-per-cent increase, according to data from Statistics Canada.
As more of Canada’s older employees exit the workforce, transferring their knowledge to younger workers can become a challenge, Tapp said. As a result, providing adequate training will be key, he said. This not only includes properly training new hires, but also offering technical training to older employees who may choose to continue working beyond the age of 65. Some of these workers may need to be trained on how to use new tools or technology to perform old tasks, he said.
“If we have older people staying in the labour force longer, they’re going to need to stay up on their on their skillsets and to be retrained more frequently than they would have been before,” he said.
WAGES WILL SEE AN INCREASE: EXPERT
Although the road ahead may present challenges for employers facing an increasingly tight market, conditions may be beneficial for workers, said Tapp.
With more Canadians expected to leave the workforce than enter it, workplaces may struggle with obtaining and retaining employees. As an incentive when hiring, they may be more likely to offer increased wage rates to fill gaps within their labour force, he said.
“In any kind of market where there’s fewer workers … the market is going to have to pay them more and their wages are going to be increased to entice them to come in,” he said. “It’s good news if you’re looking from a household perspective … The balance of power has really shifted.”
Tapp said he expects to see wages increase more than two per cent each year to account for annual inflation.
Another trend McDonald expects to see emerge is a continued boom in the use of artificial intelligence technology. Struggles to secure labour will likely prompt more businesses to explore ways to automate processes, he said, which may allow them to hire fewer people.
“You look at alternative ways to continue to operate,” McDonald said.
SOME DELAY RETIREMENT TO KEEP WORKING
While Canada’s workforce may be aging, some employees are continuing to work for longer, data shows. In 2022, nearly one million Canadians were working at the age of 65 or older, making up five per cent of the total labour force in Canada that year, Statistics Canada data shows.
Additionally, the average retirement age in Canada has been steadily increasing over the last two decades. In 2022, the average retirement age was 64.6 years. This is approximately four years older than the average age reported in 1998, which was 60.9.
CTVNews.ca heard from a handful of Canadians who said they are considering delaying their retirement in an effort to save more money – Anita Newson is one of them. Living in Halifax, the 60-year-old said she plans to delay her retirement “indefinitely” due to the elevated cost of living.
“I had hoped to pay off some debt and retire this year but that didn’t happen and I am actually further in debt,” she wrote in an email to CTVNews.ca. “I may not ever retire.”
Instead, Newson said she plans to work for as long as her health permits. In response to the rising cost of daily expenses, Newson said she has begun to scale back spending on birthdays and holidays, as well as eating at restaurants and visiting movie theatres.
“It is becoming more frightening thinking about how I will support myself when and if I retire,” she wrote. “I am a renter and rent goes up every year, pensions do not.”
Newson said she only expects her pension to be able to cover her monthly rent payments, leaving her with no choice but to continue working to cover other expenses such as food.
Stewart Turnbull said he finds himself in a similar position. The 56-year-old living in Victoria, B.C., owns a single-family home and works full-time as a customer service manager. Upon retiring, he planned to sell his home and purchase a smaller property farther from the downtown core, he said.
However, when his three-year mortgage agreement went up for renewal in March, the rise in interest rates increased his payments by about $900 per month, he said.
Turnbull and his partner recently put their home up for sale, but they are unsure of whether they will receive enough money to purchase a new home and comfortably retire at 65. Without much money accumulated in savings, Turnbull said he is not convinced his pension will be enough to cover daily expenses if he stopped working.
“We are trying to leverage whatever equity we have in this house into sort of a rescue mission after interest rates totally annihilated any extra money we had on a monthly basis,” he told CTVNews.ca in a telephone interview. “I hoped it would be worth enough that we could possibly retire but I’m not 100 per cent sure that that’s going to happen.”
Stewart Turnbull, 56, planned to sell his home in Victoria, B.C., and use the extra money to retire. But with increasing mortgage payments as a result of high interest rates, and little money saved up, he’s unsure of whether selling his home will leave him with enough money to comfortably retire at 65. Turnbull, left, appears in this image with his partner. (HANDOUT / CTVNews.ca)
Instead, Turnbull is not planning for retirement and anticipates he will have to continue working beyond the age of 65 to continue to afford his daily expenses. He has also made some lifestyle changes over recent months in order to adjust to the elevated cost of living. This includes hanging his clothes to dry in order to lower his electricity bill, and downgrading his cell phone bill so monthly fees are less expensive, he said.
“It has become clear to me that retirement is no longer an option,” he wrote in an email to CTVNews.ca.
National labour force survey results released in August show that many Canadian workers would delay their retirement if given the option to work fewer hours without affecting their pension. Additionally, employees aged 65 and older have been making up a larger proportion of the total working population in Canada over the last few years, data shows.
In 2010, employed seniors made up three per cent of the total workforce, according to Statistics Canada. Fast forward to 2022, and working seniors accounted for five per cent of all Canadians employed that year.
But according to Tapp, this could be due to the growing number of seniors in Canada as opposed to a shift in retirement patterns.
WHAT ROLE DOES IMMIGRATION PLAY?
In order to fill existing gaps within the country’s workforce throughout the years, the federal government appears to be relying on immigration, McDonald said.
Over the last decade, the share of new and recent immigrant workers grew the most quickly in accommodation and food services, as well as transportation and warehousing, according to 2021 Statistics Canada census data. Other sectors that saw relatively high levels of immigrant workers include manufacturing and health services.
NEW YORK (AP) — The U.S. syphilis epidemic slowed dramatically last year, gonorrhea cases fell and chlamydia cases remained below prepandemic levels, according to federal data released Tuesday.
The numbers represented some good news about sexually transmitted diseases, which experienced some alarming increases in past years due to declining condom use, inadequate sex education, and reduced testing and treatment when the COVID-19 pandemic hit.
Last year, cases of the most infectious stages of syphilis fell 10% from the year before — the first substantial decline in more than two decades. Gonorrhea cases dropped 7%, marking a second straight year of decline and bringing the number below what it was in 2019.
“I’m encouraged, and it’s been a long time since I felt that way” about the nation’s epidemic of sexually transmitted infections, said the CDC’s Dr. Jonathan Mermin. “Something is working.”
More than 2.4 million cases of syphilis, gonorrhea and chlamydia were diagnosed and reported last year — 1.6 million cases of chlamydia, 600,000 of gonorrhea, and more than 209,000 of syphilis.
Syphilis is a particular concern. For centuries, it was a common but feared infection that could deform the body and end in death. New cases plummeted in the U.S. starting in the 1940s when infection-fighting antibiotics became widely available, and they trended down for a half century after that. By 2002, however, cases began rising again, with men who have sex with other men being disproportionately affected.
The new report found cases of syphilis in their early, most infectious stages dropped 13% among gay and bisexual men. It was the first such drop since the agency began reporting data for that group in the mid-2000s.
However, there was a 12% increase in the rate of cases of unknown- or later-stage syphilis — a reflection of people infected years ago.
Cases of syphilis in newborns, passed on from infected mothers, also rose. There were nearly 4,000 cases, including 279 stillbirths and infant deaths.
“This means pregnant women are not being tested often enough,” said Dr. Jeffrey Klausner, a professor of medicine at the University of Southern California.
What caused some of the STD trends to improve? Several experts say one contributor is the growing use of an antibiotic as a “morning-after pill.” Studies have shown that taking doxycycline within 72 hours of unprotected sex cuts the risk of developing syphilis, gonorrhea and chlamydia.
In June, the CDC started recommending doxycycline as a morning-after pill, specifically for gay and bisexual men and transgender women who recently had an STD diagnosis. But health departments and organizations in some cities had been giving the pills to people for a couple years.
Some experts believe that the 2022 mpox outbreak — which mainly hit gay and bisexual men — may have had a lingering effect on sexual behavior in 2023, or at least on people’s willingness to get tested when strange sores appeared.
Another factor may have been an increase in the number of health workers testing people for infections, doing contact tracing and connecting people to treatment. Congress gave $1.2 billion to expand the workforce over five years, including $600 million to states, cities and territories that get STD prevention funding from CDC.
Last year had the “most activity with that funding throughout the U.S.,” said David Harvey, executive director of the National Coalition of STD Directors.
However, Congress ended the funds early as a part of last year’s debt ceiling deal, cutting off $400 million. Some people already have lost their jobs, said a spokeswoman for Harvey’s organization.
Still, Harvey said he had reasons for optimism, including the growing use of doxycycline and a push for at-home STD test kits.
Also, there are reasons to think the next presidential administration could get behind STD prevention. In 2019, then-President Donald Trump announced a campaign to “eliminate” the U.S. HIV epidemic by 2030. (Federal health officials later clarified that the actual goal was a huge reduction in new infections — fewer than 3,000 a year.)
There were nearly 32,000 new HIV infections in 2022, the CDC estimates. But a boost in public health funding for HIV could also also help bring down other sexually transmitted infections, experts said.
“When the government puts in resources, puts in money, we see declines in STDs,” Klausner said.
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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
WASHINGTON (AP) — Scientists can’t know precisely when a volcano is about to erupt, but they can sometimes pick up telltale signs.
That happened two years ago with the world’s largest active volcano. About two months before Mauna Loa spewed rivers of glowing orange molten lava, geologists detected small earthquakes nearby and other signs, and they warned residents on Hawaii‘s Big Island.
Now a study of the volcano’s lava confirms their timeline for when the molten rock below was on the move.
“Volcanoes are tricky because we don’t get to watch directly what’s happening inside – we have to look for other signs,” said Erik Klemetti Gonzalez, a volcano expert at Denison University, who was not involved in the study.
Upswelling ground and increased earthquake activity near the volcano resulted from magma rising from lower levels of Earth’s crust to fill chambers beneath the volcano, said Kendra Lynn, a research geologist at the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory and co-author of a new study in Nature Communications.
When pressure was high enough, the magma broke through brittle surface rock and became lava – and the eruption began in late November 2022. Later, researchers collected samples of volcanic rock for analysis.
The chemical makeup of certain crystals within the lava indicated that around 70 days before the eruption, large quantities of molten rock had moved from around 1.9 miles (3 kilometers) to 3 miles (5 kilometers) under the summit to a mile (2 kilometers) or less beneath, the study found. This matched the timeline the geologists had observed with other signs.
The last time Mauna Loa erupted was in 1984. Most of the U.S. volcanoes that scientists consider to be active are found in Hawaii, Alaska and the West Coast.
Worldwide, around 585 volcanoes are considered active.
Scientists can’t predict eruptions, but they can make a “forecast,” said Ben Andrews, who heads the global volcano program at the Smithsonian Institution and who was not involved in the study.
Andrews compared volcano forecasts to weather forecasts – informed “probabilities” that an event will occur. And better data about the past behavior of specific volcanos can help researchers finetune forecasts of future activity, experts say.
(asterisk)We can look for similar patterns in the future and expect that there’s a higher probability of conditions for an eruption happening,” said Klemetti Gonzalez.
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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
Waymo on Tuesday opened its robotaxi service to anyone who wants a ride around Los Angeles, marking another milestone in the evolution of self-driving car technology since the company began as a secret project at Google 15 years ago.
The expansion comes eight months after Waymo began offering rides in Los Angeles to a limited group of passengers chosen from a waiting list that had ballooned to more than 300,000 people. Now, anyone with the Waymo One smartphone app will be able to request a ride around an 80-square-mile (129-square-kilometer) territory spanning the second largest U.S. city.
After Waymo received approval from California regulators to charge for rides 15 months ago, the company initially chose to launch its operations in San Francisco before offering a limited service in Los Angeles.
Before deciding to compete against conventional ride-hailing pioneers Uber and Lyft in California, Waymo unleashed its robotaxis in Phoenix in 2020 and has been steadily extending the reach of its service in that Arizona city ever since.
Driverless rides are proving to be more than just a novelty. Waymo says it now transports more than 50,000 weekly passengers in its robotaxis, a volume of business numbers that helped the company recently raise $5.6 billion from its corporate parent Alphabet and a list of other investors that included venture capital firm Andreesen Horowitz and financial management firm T. Rowe Price.
“Our service has matured quickly and our riders are embracing the many benefits of fully autonomous driving,” Waymo co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana said in a blog post.
Despite its inroads, Waymo is still believed to be losing money. Although Alphabet doesn’t disclose Waymo’s financial results, the robotaxi is a major part of an “Other Bets” division that had suffered an operating loss of $3.3 billion through the first nine months of this year, down from a setback of $4.2 billion at the same time last year.
But Waymo has come a long way since Google began working on self-driving cars in 2009 as part of project “Chauffeur.” Since its 2016 spinoff from Google, Waymo has established itself as the clear leader in a robotaxi industry that’s getting more congested.
Electric auto pioneer Tesla is aiming to launch a rival “Cybercab” service by 2026, although its CEO Elon Musk said he hopes the company can get the required regulatory clearances to operate in Texas and California by next year.
Tesla’s projected timeline for competing against Waymo has been met with skepticism because Musk has made unfulfilled promises about the company’s self-driving car technology for nearly a decade.
Meanwhile, Waymo’s robotaxis have driven more than 20 million fully autonomous miles and provided more than 2 million rides to passengers without encountering a serious accident that resulted in its operations being sidelined.
That safety record is a stark contrast to one of its early rivals, Cruise, a robotaxi service owned by General Motors. Cruise’s California license was suspended last year after one of its driverless cars in San Francisco dragged a jaywalking pedestrian who had been struck by a different car driven by a human.
Cruise is now trying to rebound by joining forces with Uber to make some of its services available next year in U.S. cities that still haven’t been announced. But Waymo also has forged a similar alliance with Uber to dispatch its robotaxi in Atlanta and Austin, Texas next year.
Another robotaxi service, Amazon’s Zoox, is hoping to begin offering driverless rides to the general public in Las Vegas at some point next year before also launching in San Francisco.
