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.
I can’t wait for people who don’t have enough to fund the lavish lifestyles of people who spent their entire lives with too much because it’s not their fault we didn’t pull up our boot straps.
Don’t worry, the most populated province in the country re-elected a government that spends all its time making stupid decisions and then backtracking. Maybe we can get around to building more LTC facilities in 2026
Considering the situation with old-care homes we’ve been hearing these last five years, not even close. Everything from school to medical care, retirement homes and normal homes is a half-century behind in what’s needed. Instead of change we need, we’re constantly fed all the damn feel-good measures that amount to things that should’ve been done decades ago, and no longer fix current issues.
Doesn’t help that an entire political party and their associated generation is allergic to paying for the infrastructure needed to care for their elderly asses. Elder care is first and foremost a funding problem, but no one wants to actually pay for it, elders included… until, that is, they suddenly realize that, fuck, no one else will pay for their mobility aids and home care.
No, because we’re still refusing to tax at the level needed to maintain services. We’ll try anything–anything–except returning marginal tax rates to 1960-something levels and building things directly.
Because doing the right thing would mean the 30-year-plus neoliberal experiment was a failure, and all we did was make rich people richer.
Don’t get me wrong - I’m living comfortably, I own a house (small and shitty but paid off), I have an interesting job, and things are about as good as they could be.
But on the one hand, being in your 50s has always been hard - the kids are close to leaving or have left (empty nest syndrome), our parents - if they’re still alive - are starting to wind down their lives, our bodies no longer are capable of things we used to do, and never will be again. There’s not a lot of “this gets better in the future” to look forward to. We’ve lost a lot of close friends over the years through the normal rigours of life, and it’s almost impossible to make new ones.
So that’s just being 50-something, and has been like that probably since the industrial revolution. It’s hard and it sucks, but I’m not going to whine about it.
What is different is the realization that this may be the best we ever get to, as a species. We’re destroying the planet faster than we can hold summits about it, politics is turning into a bipolar hate-fest across the entire globe, life expectancy is decreasing for the first time in human history, and end-stage capitalism means that our kids will never be able to afford what we have (house, education, etc.). Surveillance capitalism means that every movement they make - and before too long, every thought they think - will be monetized, exploited, and (if necessary) penalized.
In short, what has always been the bright spot in this hard point in our lives - the knowledge that the next generation will be able to do more and live in a brighter world than us - is no longer true. Right now (or maybe a decade ago even) is likely the apex of humanity, and it’s not really that great.
Consider the Homer Simpson conundrum. 35 years ago, Homer was the classic low-class uneducated shlub (Fred Flintstone, Ralph Kramden, Al Bundy, etc.). Now he’s living an impossible dream - being a single-income homeowner and head of a family, without extensive post-secondary education (which is only marginally helpful anyway.)
Are my kids going to see the extinction of polar bears? Will the human population be decimated by floods and wildfires (and war, for that matter)?
I just don’t see anything getting better anymore, and that tends to resonate with my generation - at least the compassionate ones.
Edit: Also, we drink. A lot. The people I know who don’t drink excessively are the ones who stopped drinking entirely, because they were…drinking excessively. Hence the liver failure comment.
They will reap what they sowed. They had housing, cheap education, high paying jobs, and they created a society that gave none of it to future generations. We can’t provide for the aging population? We can’t even provide for the younger generations.
You’re confusing the Boomers, who are currently tipping over the line into seniorhood if they haven’t already (the last of them will turn sixty-five around 2030) with Gen-Xers like me, who had to navigate a somewhat different landscape. We didn’t get the high-paying jobs or the cheap anything—that all went to our parents’ generation instead. So what were we supposed to do, invent a time machine so that we could go back and unsnarl the seeds of the future economy?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
I know I look at the state of healthcare in my province (NB, but I figure it’s the same across the country) and get worried every time I see my parents. Unlike many, they’re lucky to have a good family doctor, but he’s nearing retirement himself, and then what? Their hair keeps getting grayer, the wrinkles add up on their faces, and the outlook for senior care keeps getting bleaker and bleaker. It feels like I’m inevitably going to watch them suffer to their graves.
Both my parents are gone now but the way you’re describing things … we’re next in line for that elderly care.
My worry is, what the hell is going to be left for people who are soon to become elderly?
I’m in northern Ontario which often times feels no different than our Maritime cousins as all our services are going down the tubes.
No matter what anyone says … I’ll always vote NDP … even as they wheel me away to my hallway to leave me to drool for hours, I’ll always vote for humanity no matter what anyone says.
Add comment