Canada's Insolvent Seniors

In recent postings, I've been hitting on the world's pension problems fairly heavily, probably because, like all Baby Boomers, I'm getting close to "my time". I found this study entitled "The Current State of Canadian Family Finances 2011 - 2012" on the website of the Vanier Institute of the Family, a Canadian institution whose mission it is "to create awareness of, and provide leadership on, the importance and strengths of families in Canada and the challenges they face in their structural, demographic, economic, cultural and social diversity.".

In this report, the 13th annual of its type, the author, Roger Sauve, studies the impact of Baby Boomers on Canada, the Canadian economy and how they/we are impacting the ability of the next generation to work. As well, the study examines how household debt has risen and how family net worth has declined. For this posting, I'm going to focus on the impact of the Boomers and the issues that they are facing.

As we have seen with recent data releases from Statistics Canada, the job picture in Canada is not really improving, particularly for young Canadians between the ages of 15 to 24. During the post-Great Recession downturn, this age group saw 229,500 jobs disappear, more than half of all jobs lost during the downturn. Since the worst of the recession in July 2009 (the official "end"), youth unemployment has improved very slightly with the addition of only 1300 net jobs. Let's compare these statistics to those for Canadians 55 years of age and older. During the period of time when younger Canadians saw 229,500 jobs disappear, employment among those 55 and older rose by 83,100! As well, while young Canadians have only seen a net addition of 1300 jobs since the end of the Great Recession, older Canadians saw employment rise by 350,000, representing more than half of all the net jobs created since the bottom of the recession. (more)