What’s the future have in store for baby boomers?

A few years ago, I was visiting a local school and while engaged in conversation with a group of teens, one looked me right in the face and said, “you’re old.” I was a bit shocked at his bold rudeness, but then I’m a boomer. The gray hair is there.

The experts at Stats Canada have been warning us about the big blip I belong to for decades now. Folks born between 1946 and 1965 constitute about 24 per cent of our nation’s population.

If more than one in five working adults is now nearing retirement, we’re looking at a challenging demographic shift in the coming decade.

The boomer bulge is hardly news.

A while ago the only way to fix this country’s aging population was deemed to be immigration, yet now the sociologists are talking about maintaining the knowledge base of older workers.

Maybe we won’t be retiring at 65 after all.

Last month, a release from Stats Canada noted that concerns have been raised about the challenge that baby boomers pose to the sustainability of Canada’s economy and social programs.

One likes to think that, compared to previous generations, we’re generally living longer and healthier and therefore capable of working into our senior years. Certainly maintaining knowledgebased employment comes with far less physical strain than factory work, so older folks may well want to continue participating in the labour force. We’ve got the computer thing down.

But for many boomers, the pandemic has proved kind of exhausting and as a result, priorities may have changed for many and retirement could look more attractive.

Those who call themselves experts worry that a mass retirement of baby boomers will tax health care and housing. Of course, both of those areas are already a broad concern for Canadian society and not just for those of advancing years.

There is already a labour shortage. You can see the ‘Help Wanted’ signs in store windows as much as the ‘Please Mask’ signs.

We know from two years of Covid-19 that long-term care is vastly underfunded, and the shortage of health care staff is very real. I am rooting for the residents of Shelburne County who are protesting a plan to privatize Roseway Manor and turn it into a for-profit entity.

The facility has been operated for more than 40 years by the towns of Shelburne and Lockeport and the Municipality of Shelburne. Could Grand View Manor in Berwick be put out to tender next? Hope not.

We are still helping to care for a family member who is over

90. The sheer number of seniors over-85 in this country is increasing too, so all levels of government must address the existing needs of the growing elderly population.

I often find myself thinking of my late aunt, who used to grin and say, “getting old is not for sissies.” She was right.

In another decade, all members of the baby boom generation, many of whom are women, will turn 65. We grew up during an era of vast social change: feminism, hippie culture, the Cold War and Vietnam War, along with the birth control pill. Yet we know there are likely vast changes ahead.

There are those who say the answer to a population decline is an incentive for young parents to add to the census numbers. Of course, Quebec has had an incentive for parents popping babies and creating bigger families since 1988. Third children were a definite bonus.

But I hear young adults in their 20s and 30s balking at the notion. They look at climate change and war. They question incentivizing childbirth. There is a choice today that the pill affords. Concern about what kind of world as yet unborn children will face is pretty legitimate. What do you think?