Ottawa starting to tackle rapidly aging workforce with renewed urgency

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BILL CURRY

Finance Minister Jim Flaherty and the highest levels of the public service are immersed in a flurry of closed-door talks aimed at tackling the rising costs of health care and retirement benefits in the face of a shrinking number of working-age taxpayers available to foot the bill.

Internal government documents obtained by The Globe and Mail show Canada’s aging population is no longer a problem on the horizon, but rather one that will impact the federal government this year. It's a challenge Ottawa is now discussing more openly and with added urgency.

This week Mr. Flaherty kicked off a policy retreat with business and policy leaders in Wakefield, Que., by saying he wanted the discussion to focus on how Canada can position itself now for the longer term – listing “Canada’s rapidly aging workforce” as an issue that shouldn’t be overshadowed by the current focus on wildly fluctuating stock markets.

“The need to address current challenges must not keep us from tackling the key questions that affect our future prosperity,” he said.

The Finance Minister has offered few hints as to how he will approach forthcoming negotiations with the provinces over health-transfer arrangements, which need to be renewed. Provinces – and ultimately Ottawa – face rising health costs as older Canadians will make greater use of the system.

Documents obtained by The Globe show Mr. Flaherty has been receiving regular briefings on “transfer renewal” from his deputy minister for months, but offer no sense as to Ottawa's negotiating position.

Canada, currently the 27th oldest country in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, is on track to become the 11th oldest within 20 years. It’s a challenge that will spark debate over Canada’s retirement age, fertility rates and immigration, while risking generational tension between a growing population of older voters and a shrinking pool of younger taxpayers.

Last November, Canada’s most senior public servant, Privy Council Clerk Wayne Wouters, invited deputy ministers from across the government for a meeting on demographics in Ottawa’s Langevin Block. There they reviewed a draft report on the impacts of Canada’s aging population. Unlike past warnings on the topic, this report did not paint it as a problem looming in the distance.

“The oldest baby boomers start to turn 65 in 2011, meaning the dependency ratio will start to increase significantly in a matter of months,” states the draft report, which was obtained in redacted form by The Globe under Access to Information.

Prepared by officials at Human Resources and Skills Development Canada and Finance Canada, the report is full of alarming statistics. It also lays out several measures the government could take to limit the impact, including incentives to boost fertility rates, bring in younger immigrants and encourage Canadians to work longer.

“A Canada where seniors outnumber children is uncharted territory,” the report states.

When asked about the report, Alyson Queen, press secretary to Human Resources Minister Diane Finley, listed recent government measures to encourage older Canadians to stay in the workforce.

“Our Government has done more to support older workers than any before,” she said in an e-mail.

Monte Solberg, who preceded Ms. Finley as Human Resources minister and retired from politics in October, 2008, said incentives for older workers were among the easiest options – politically speaking – available to the Conservatives in the face of an aging population.

Now, he says, the government will have to consider the hard ones, like raising the retirement age – a move so controversial he says it would likely require a Royal Commission to build public support.

Even more pressing are the upcoming negotiations on health-care transfers to the provinces, which currently grow at six per cent a year under the Canada Health Transfer Program that expires in fiscal 2013-14.

“It’s a very real problem,” said Mr. Solberg in an interview. “It’s easily the largest unfunded liability that we have, without question, because we have this wave coming at us [and] there’s no extra money that’s set aside to address it.”

By the numbers

25

Percentage of Canadians by 2036 who will be over the age of 65

5:1

Ratio of workers to seniors in Newfoundland in 2010

1:1

Ratio of workers to seniors in Newfoundland by 2050

12

Percentage of Quebec’s population that is seniors

24

Percentage of Quebec’s population that will be seniors in 30 years

Source: Canada’s Changing Demographics: The Impacts of Population Aging, a draft internal HRSDC report marked secret and dated Oct. 27, 2010, that was circulated in advance of a Nov. 3 meeting of the Coordinating Committee of Deputy Ministers.

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KENNEY: SKILLED CANADIAN IMMIGRANTS WITH JOBS OFFERS JUMP TO FRONT OF QUEUE

Source: MuchmorCanada.
As more than a million people wait in the immigration queue, Canada’s Immigration Minister Jason Kenney has said that applicants with experience in key occupations and those with job offers from Canadian employers will go to the front of the line.

Currently, about 30% of Canadian immigrants are economic migrants selected on the basis of their necessary skills or an arranged employment offer. Kenney recently confirmed that while immigration levels won’t jump drastically, immigration had a role to play in off-setting the country’s ageing population and skills shortages. Today, about 70% of Canada’s 34.1 million population is of working age – a figure expected drop to 60% within 25 years.

Kenney said federal government would continue to recognise the importance of the Provincial Nominee Program (PNP) to help provinces and territories obtain the skilled migrants they need to fill labour shortages. Under the scheme, provinces can choose to sponsor migrants whose skills, education and work experience will have an immediate economic impact.

The top three provincial nominees are the booming oil and gas provinces of Manitoba, Alberta and Saskatchewan. Last year, Canada accepted 38,428 provincial/territory nominees, including more than 8,600 temporary foreign workers who later became permanent residents.

Canada will accept a record of 40,000 provincial nominee immigrants in 2011 – five times more than Canada’s PNP intake for 2005. The Citizenship and Immigration Department is currently conducting a series of nation-wide consulations about immigration levels and the type of migrants it should accept into the country.

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Job growth surpasses recession losses

Carol Christian

Today staff
In June, Alberta crossed a line: it officially regained all the jobs lost in the recession — 73,600 — and then some.
Alberta has regained 76,800 jobs or 104.3% of the jobs lost during the recession.
Job growth doesn't end there as Alberta had the strongest employment growth in Canada for July and the unemployment rate fell to 5.5%.
"This is just another indication that Alberta is in a period of solid economic growth," said Terry Jorden, Alberta Employment and Immigration spokesman.
In Fort McMurray, the unemployment rate had a small change to 5.7% for July from 5.4% the month before. It wasn't the number of employed people that changed. It's more people joined the labour force. In July, this area had 84,800 people eligible for work. Of those, 80,000 were employed and 4,800 were unemployed resulting in the unemployment rate of 5.7%.
Jorden explained that when the surveys are done by Statistics Canada, the large sampling of population becomes quite small when it gets down to individual regions.
When statistics on employment or unemployment jump one way or another from one month to another, Employment and Immigration Minister Thomas Lukaszuk says, "I neither dance the happy dance, neither do I get overly depressed because that's what unemployment numbers do, but now we're starting to develop a trend."
For the last three months, Alberta has seen significant drops in unemployment and a significant increase in job creation, and more importantly, in full-time employment which, he added, is really good.
"Definitively, Canada is leading the world in economic recovery and without any shadow of a doubt, Alberta is leading Canada. That is a good news story."

But Lukaszuk was also cautionary about the numbers saying the dropping unemployment rate breeds another problem: "having an unemployment rate of 5.5% gets you very close to what we consider to be full employment which is somewhere between 4% and 5% and that means we are going to start to feel acute shortages of workers in a variety of sectors of our economy and that will affect us all."

carol.christian@fortmcmurraytoday.com

Are Newer Immigrants to Canada Healthier?

Kalen Smith | August 10, 2011 | 0 Comments

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A recent study suggests that long-time residents of Canada may not be as healthy as new immigrants. This study was conducted by the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Services. It compiled data from 1996-2007 on immigrants who came to Canada from different parts of the world. The research focused primarily on residents in Ontario. More than a quarter of a million people come to Canada every year. Immigrants have been coming to Canada for decades.

The findings suggested that people who have been living in the area for a long period of time were at higher risk of contracting cardiovascular diseases. Maria Chiu said these findings are nothing new. She argues that doctors have known for years that the health of their immigrant patients has deteriorated after they moved to Canada. What health experts did not know was how changes in patients’ health was affected by their ethnicity. This was a question that was specifically addressed in the study.

The Institute for Clinical Evaluative Services wants answers to the new question it faces. One mystery is why these factors are so heavily influenced by ethnicity. Chinese immigrants who had been living in Canada for many years were much more likely to contract cardiovascular diseases than Chinese immigrants who just arrived to the country. The effect was also noticed in other ethnic groups, although not as strongly in South Asians.

The study compared residents who had been living in Ontario for 15 years with those who had been moved to Canada within the past 15 years. The study involved over 160,000 participants. Of those subjects, about 150,000 were white. The remaining 9,000 subjects were evenly distributed between Chinese, South Asian and black subjects.

The study also concluded that individuals with other risk factors such as diabetes or obesity were more likely to experience a high likelihood of developing heart disease.

Researchers argued that new clinical practices continue to reduce the mortality rates of citizens who develop coronary diseases or diabetes. However, they are perplexed by the higher incidences of the diseases.

Although the study is concerning to many people, researchers hope to have some answers in the future. They believe that better understanding the correlation between the length of time someone lives in Canada and their likelihood of developing health problems will help them implement better health policies in the future. Vincent Bowman is the research director of the Heart and Stroke Foundation in Ontario. He is optimistic that answers will be found. He says: “Having a better understanding of how length of time living in Canada impacts cardiovascular risk factors will help us to develop tailored prevention strategies to ensure the long-term heart health of all Canadians.”

The study by the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Services sheds some more light on a mystery that has baffled Canadian physicians and epidemiologists for years. Now, they are also asking themselves why certain ethnic groups experience a more dramatic change in their health over time. Hopefully, additional studies will explain this phenomenon in more detail.

Making immigration work well

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A global poll by Ipsos shows Canadians are way ahead of their international counterparts when asked about their views on immigration, with almost twice the respondents agreeing it has had a good impact on their country. But even at that, only 40 per cent said immigration was good. And 56 per cent said they believe immigration is too much of a burden on social services. Canadians should get to know their neighbours a little better.

Chances are immigrants are living not far from most of us. At 20 per cent, the immigrant population is at a 75-year high in the country.

It is a fallacy, a misperception perhaps drawn from sensational crime headlines in cities and cultural tension in other western nations, that immigrants are a burden. Good research has underscored repeatedly the success story of immigration for Canada. University of Toronto immigration expert Jeffrey Reitz notes that, statistically, newcomers use fewer social services than other Canadians.

With a declining birth rate over the decades, Canada's population would have slipped without immigration and the economy would have suffered. Since the mid-1990s, immigration has become the primary driver of population growth. Since 1998, Manitoba's homegrown provincial nominee program has staunched a worrisome net out-migration. More than 10,000 immigrants funnel into the province each year now.

While much of Canada sees immigrants leaving for Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal, Manitoba's program retains 80 per cent and more of its nominees, who are selected for their ability to adjust to local labour-market demands, connections to the community and employability. A 2008 survey of 100 of the program's immigrants revealed that 85 per cent find work almost as soon as they hit the ground, rising to 88 per cent after three to five years.

Manitoba immigrants "make it" here, integrating in the community, improving their family incomes. While the average income of about $50,000 was $10,000 lower than the Manitoba average, fewer immigrants lived on less than $30,000. In fact, the picture of the survey conducted for the Manitoba government showed that the lower average income did not hold the nominee immigrants back from getting ahead and putting down roots in the community: Some 76 per cent owned their own homes and 73 per cent said they had no difficulties meeting monthly expenses.

Immigrants tend to earn less than native-born Canadians with similar education levels, but that difference disappears with successive generations. This reflects the age-old immigrant story in this country. Manitoba's particular success -- immigrants here are employed at higher rates than in Canada generally -- is derived from a keen understanding of what the economy needs and the tailoring of settlement programs to ensure that language and skill training supports the determination of newcomers.

The fact that those selected to land in Manitoba are not heading to Canada's mega-metropolises shows this province has made the wise decision to pursue higher immigration levels, which has been very good to Manitoba. Investing in people pays off.

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition August 10, 2011 A10

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